
The Vedantic Relationality of Rabindranath Tagore
Harmonizing the One and Its Many
Ankur Barua(Author)
Lexington Books (Publisher)
Published on 25. October 2018
Book
Hardback
252 pages
978-1-4985-8622-1 (ISBN)
Description
This book is a thematic study of the poet-thinker Rabindranath Tagore's conceptual project of harmonizing the one and its many. Tagore's writings, in Bengali and in English, on religious and social themes are held together by the leitmotif of a "harmony" which operates across several existential, religious, and social polarities - the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, and the individual and the universal. Tagore creatively appropriated materials from diverse sources such as the classical Hindu Vedantic systems, the folk piety of Bengal, and others, to configure a dialectic which shapes his writings on both religious and social themes. On the one hand, each individual is irreducibly distinct from everyone else, and, on the other hand, each individual gains their spiritual depth precisely by being placed within the dynamic matrices of an interrelated whole. Thus, we find Tagore rejecting certain monastic forms of Hindu world-renunciation and also certain ecstatic dimensions of devotional worship - the former because they efface individuality and the latter because they can generate self-absorbed styles of living. Again, Tagore is as sharply opposed to Bengali imitativeness of English modes of being in the world as he is to Bengali forms of insularity - the former because it dilutes the concrete richness of indigenous lifeforms and the latter because it confines individuals to parochial enclosures. Tagore's life-long endeavor was to configure a "third way" by rejecting both the blank homogeneity of an undifferentiated one and the particularistic insularities of a multitude without a deeper center of coherence.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
568 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4985-8622-1 (9781498586221)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
10/2018
1st Edition
Lexington Books
€98.99
Available for download

E-Book
10/2018
1st Edition
Bloomsbury eBooks US
€98.99
Available for download
Person
Ankur Barua is Lecturer of Hindu studies at the University of Cambridge.
Content
Chapter 1: The Harmony of the One and its Many
Chapter 2: Embodying Relationality in a Fragmented World
Chapter 3: Tagore's Religiosity and the Prisms of Vedantic Thought
Chapter 4: Vedantic Relationality Across Asymmetrical Realms
Chapter 2: Embodying Relationality in a Fragmented World
Chapter 3: Tagore's Religiosity and the Prisms of Vedantic Thought
Chapter 4: Vedantic Relationality Across Asymmetrical Realms