Creative Unity

If Nationalism was the polemic and Personality was the sermon, Creative Unity is the thinking through. Eleven essays, gathered in 1922, in which Tagore tries to set down what an Asian humanism might look like — a vision of human life that neither retreats into tradition nor surrenders to the West's exhausting machineries. The book is held together by a single obsession: how does a person stay whole in the modern world?

Tagore moves with extraordinary range. He writes about the religion of the forest, the spiritual logic underlying Sanskrit drama, the political theology of the Indian Folk Religion, the difference between Eastern and Western universities, the place of women in cultural life, the relation between freedom and discipline. He quotes Keats and the Upanishads in the same paragraph. He defends India's traditional emphasis on the inner life without idealising the social conditions it has tolerated. He praises Europe's scientific imagination while refusing to grant it the last word on what a human being is for.

The final essay — "An Eastern University" — is the longest and the most concrete: Tagore's argument for Visva-Bharati, the international university he founded at Santiniketan, where scholars from across Asia could meet without the mediation of Western institutions. Reading Creative Unity is reading the prose of a person who has stopped being defensive about being Indian and has begun, with great calmness, to imagine what a different modernity might offer the world.