Creative Unity

Tagore wrote these essays between 1916 and 1922, in the years when his international reputation was at its height and the world was struggling to make sense of the war that had just ended. The pieces range from "The Poet's Religion" and "An Indian Folk Religion" to "Woman and Home" and "An Eastern University" — the last describing the founding ideals of Visva-Bharati, the school he established at Santiniketan. Throughout, Tagore returns to the conviction that creativity, not power, is the principle by which a civilisation should be judged.