Abstract
In 1907, Rabindranath Tagore delivered a lecture on world literature to an audience in Calcutta, the then capital of British India. Amid powerful and intersecting forces—colonialism and nationalism, industrial modernity and mass poverty—Tagore’s position on literature was neither disengaged nor defensive, insofar as he related it to the human condition and the capacity for world-making. Far from staking a representational claim to world literature on behalf of Indian or Bengali literature, I argue in this article, Tagore reconceptualized the idea from its earlier canonical formulation by Goethe. He departed from dominant nineteenth-century philosophies that conceived the world as a spatial—and thereby stable—category, and instead recast it as the radical act of opening up to the outside and the other. Crucially, not poets and writers, but people in general constitute the subject of Tagore’s reformulated conception of world literature. Theirs was not a deferred entry into the republic of letters based on acquired knowledge; rather, as I argue, Tagore’s provocative claim was that literary excess already structured human subjectivity in an integral way. World literature, moreover, was identifiable by its world-making capacity to render ordinary lives possible through fiction, offering a vision of freedom. Speaking through historical and political urgency, Tagore’s words may thus have something to say about the fraught place of literature in our own crisis-ridden times.
Alt Text Acknowledgement
1
Recommended Citation
Choudhuri, Dr Salmoli.
"A World Without Literature? Tagore’s Words for His Times and Ours."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
27.3
(2025):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.5292>
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