Rabindranath Tagore On Literature: Translation of Tagore's Essays on the Aesthetics of Literature

The present volume comprises complete translations of two important collections of Tagore’s essays on literature: Sāhityer Pathe and Sāhityer Svarūp. Tagore’s literary essays, however, are certainly not confined to the essays included in these two collections. He has innumerable literary essays written on different occasions in different periods of his long literary career, and a careful survey of all the critical writings of Tagore can show the graph of Tagore’s gradual development as a critical theorist. This is quite natural, because opinion, unlike dogma, has a growth, and, since these two books belong to the final phase of his career (Sāhityer Pathe was published in 1936 and Sāhityer Svarūp was posthumously published in 1943), they may be regarded as the final observations of Tagore on literature and literary criticism.
Tagore was intimately acquainted with both the Western critical ideas and the Indian aesthetic tradition. One can discover an interesting affinity between Tagore and Coleridge in respect of their views about the nature of poetry. There are interesting affinities, parallels, resonances and reverberations between Tagore’s critical observations and some critical observations of Arnold, Eliot, Woolf, Bakhtin and the New Critics as well. However, a close scrutiny would reveal that the Western views are confined mainly to surface-level similarities, and that Tagore’s ideas about literature have their roots deep in the Indian poetics and particularly in the philosophy of the Upanishad, in the belief that the world is created out of joy.
The book will fulfill a long-standing need of the Tagore scholars who cannot read Tagore in the original, but who are interested, nevertheless, in Tagore’s views on literature and literary criticism. It is expected to give a succinct idea of Tagore’s aesthetics and his dominant position as a literary critic.