Towards a Tagorean Utopia: From Rural Reconstruction to Transition Towns

Christine Marsh

Published by Literature Compass, Special Issue: Rabindranath Tagore's Global Vision, Volume 12, Issue 5,
pages 194–205, May 2015.

Abstract
Rabindranath Tagore was ‘a poet who was an indefatigable man of action’ (Uma Das Gupta, A
Biography ix). Over eighty years ago Tagore saw the world environment collapsing due to ‘an
epidemic of voracity that has infected the total area of civilization’ (‘City and Village’ 310). His
practical activities involved a progressive school and university, integrated with research and
assistance concerned with village revival and rebuilding the local economy and community. It is
timely to re-examine what Tagore tried to achieve. Information about these initiatives, together with a
study of Tagore’s insights as expressed in his essays: those written in English and those translated
from Bengali, can yield an understanding of the form of local and global community he envisaged, and
tried to bring into being. That vision is compatible with the aims and development of the Transition
Movement, which is motivated by a recognition that the capitalist machine is running out of control, to
the detriment of planet and people. This reading of Tagore reveals that, in effect, he advocated a
withdrawal from the capitalist system, ‘back to the future’, not to a rustic existence bound by rigid
cultural constraints, but to local cooperative farming and industry, progressive education and renewed
culture and creativity.

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement, was one of the most popular guest speakers at
the week-long Tagore Festival held in May 2011 at Dartington Hall in Devon, to celebrate the 150 th
anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth. Hopkins lives in Totnes, the town neighbouring the
village of Dartington, and it was there he established the first ‘Transition Town’, which was
launched – or ‘unleashed’ – in 2006. The main driver for Transition is the dual concern over climate
change and peak oil,1 whence the need for a planned transition away from reliance on fossil fuels
for transportation and industrial production, and to meet local energy needs.
Transition has grown rapidly since 2006 to become a transnational grassroots social movement.
Variants of the model have been developed in some two thousand places in over forty countries
around the world, and it continues to grow and excite interest. 2 The spread of Transition owes much
to personal contacts and multi-media sharing of experiences and guidelines, including an extensive
online communications network (Transition Network). In the video of Hopkins’ talk at the Tagore
Festival, he begins by remarking that he understands that other speakers at the event are very
knowledgeable about Tagore. He then says: ‘I confess that I know very little about Tagore but I
think that he would approve of what Transition is doing’ (‘Transition as Cookery’).
Tagore would certainly have approved, and he might well have recognised Transition as a
manifestation of the ‘new dawn’ for humanity which – in his last public address in 1941 – he
predicted would come ‘after the cataclysm is over’ (‘Crisis in Civilization’ 359). Tagore expected
the new dawn to come ‘from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises’, and in a sense it has.
Transition Town Totnes owes some of its success as a pioneer to Totnes being seen nationally as ‘a
unique cultural centre’, due in part to the ‘radical experiment in rural regeneration involving the
arts, heritage and culture’ set up by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst in 1925 at Dartington (Hopkins,
Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level 98). The Dartington experiment was inspired by the
work carried out by Leonard Elmhirst when he worked for Tagore in India to set up Sriniketan, the
Department for Rural Reconstruction at Tagore’s university, Visva-Bharati.
The connection between Transition and Tagore’s ‘life’s work’ 3 goes deeper than this
circumstantial link. Both initiatives are directed towards relocalisation and self-help. Transition can
be understood as a resumption of Tagore’s commitment to rebuilding communities and cooperative
local economies, to counter the dehumanising effects of modern competitive individualism,
centralised government and ‘the greed of profit’ (‘An Eastern University’ 200-1). Tagore’s goal of
reviving village India was seen as idealistic by the urban intelligentsia who had their sights set on
gaining national independence. The goal of Transition seems even more utopian in today’s

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urbanised and globalised world. For all the diversity, creativity and liveliness of thriving Transition
initiatives, there are others which have stagnated or given up, sometimes disastrously (Hart). There
is also criticism of the Transition model, including the view that Transition needs ‘a more radical
vision’ and ‘a more focused, detailed action plan’ (Trainer 11).
A study was undertaken at the University of Reading on the ‘Failure and Success of Transition
Initiatives (TIs)’ and the ‘international replication of the Transition Movement’ (Feola and Nunes).
A major part of the work was an attitude survey of TIs in different countries. The researchers found
that the participants’ own success criteria divided into two broad sets, one focused on conviviality
and ‘fun’, or sense of community, the other on external impact (23). Similarly, at the talk Hopkins
gave at the Dartington Tagore Festival of 2013,4 he observed that those involved in Transition get as
much satisfaction simply from getting to know their neighbours and working together, as from
seeing progress towards the aims. The importance of the social function in the Transition
Movement supports my suggestion of a parallel between the Transition Movement and Tagore’s
work over fifty years on reviving local community economies in India. To describe what he hoped
each village community would achieve, Tagore used the phrase ‘life in its completeness’, with a
particular emphasis on joy and celebration and creativity.
There is some uncertainty about whether Tagore’s work should be judged a success or failure.
There were three main phases to his endeavours. The first was while he was managing the family
estates in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, in the 1890s, the second was the national programme of
community building he put forward in 1903-8, the third was Sriniketan, a department of his Visva-
Bharati university, in the 1920s. There are Tagore scholars and enthusiasts, particularly those from
Bangladesh, who believe there is an enduring legacy (Rahman 366). However, historian Uma Das
Gupta who has specialised in this aspect of Tagore’s work, has described Tagore as ‘exhausted and
weak’ and clearly in despair in the 1930s. She relates how Tagore’s son had reorganized Sriniketan
‘as a business’, with profit-making dairy units and cottage industries, to the detriment of Tagore’s
aim of building village self-reliance (‘Sriniketan Programme’ 376).
Tagore never wrote a full and coherent account of his activities concerning education and rural
reconstruction, and much of his thinking ‘has to be pieced together from occasional comments’
(Das Gupta 364). When these comments are combined with other relevant material taken in context,
we begin to understand Tagore’s humanistic philosophy and his hopes for future world change –
and the interesting parallel with today’s Transition Movement emerges.
Das Gupta’s interest in Tagore as the ‘indefatigable man of action’ (ix) was initiated by her
discovery in the 1970s of a substantial collection of records from the offices of Sriniketan,
providing evidence of the impressive scope and achievements by the team of managers, researchers
and students in the 1920s. Tagore’s correspondence with Elmhirst (Dutta & Robinson, Purabi), and
Elmhirst’s two books on their work together: Pioneer in Education and Poet and Plowman, show
how committed Tagore was to the ideals behind this work. In the memoirs of Tagore’s son
Rathindranath, there are insights into Tagore’s active engagement in rural reconstruction in the
1890s (On the Edges of Time 22-37). The short stories which Tagore wrote over that decade
illustrate his deep understanding of the complex effects of ‘society in transition’ on urban as well as
rural people (Radice 6). We also have Tagore’s essays derived from addresses he gave from 1904 to
1908 to the Calcutta intelligentsia and political leaders, which provide solid evidence of the
direction he hoped they would take: not pinning their hopes on independence and centralised
government but embarking on a programme of grassroots initiatives to revive Indian village
society.5
There is a third set of texts which take Tagore’s hopes for human society to a deeper level. These
are the five books of ‘English essays’: Sadhana published in 1913, Personality and Nationalism in
1917, Creative Unity in 1922, and The Religion of Man in 1931, the texts of lectures he gave to
western audiences between 1912 and 1930. Only one of the forty-two essays relates directly to rural
reconstruction. In ‘An Eastern University’ he sets out his plans for Visva-Bharati, which would
combine an Indian and Asian intellectual centre with a technically proficient, not-for-profit, peasant
life:

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 Our centre of culture should not only be the centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her
economic life also. It must co-operate with the villages round it, cultivate land, breed cattle, spin
cloths, press oil from oil-seeds; it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using the
best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence should depend upon the success of its
industrial activities carried out on the co-operative principle, which will unite the teachers and students
and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active bond of necessity. This will give us also a
practical industrial training, whose motive force is not the greed of profit (Creative Unity 200-1).
As we have noted, by the end of his life Tagore was in despair due to the failure of these plans, and
his disillusionment went further than disappointment over the compromises made at Sriniketan.

The Crisis in Civilization

Given that Tagore’s last essay was written in 1941, it can seem that the ‘Crisis in Civilization’ of
the title is the Second World War, but reading it reveals Tagore’s ‘agony of disenchantment’ with
the British, who ‘professed the highest civilized values’ while amassing wealth at the expense of the
Indian masses, completely denying their ‘basic needs of living’ (355). Tagore goes on to complain
that ‘[t]his helpless country has been denied mastery over the machine’, unlike Japan which has
used ‘that mastery for a rapid expansion of her economy’ (355). After a survey of the contemporary
state of other countries, Tagore speaks of the War:
Meanwhile, the spectre of a new barbarity strides over Europe, teeth bare and claws unconcealed in an
orgy of terror. From one end of the Continent to the other the fumes of oppression pollute the
atmosphere. The spirit of violence dormant perhaps in the psychology of the West has roused itself
and is ready to desecrate the spirit of Man (358).
Tagore closes his address with his hopes for a ‘turning in history after the cataclysm is over’, and a
quotation from the ‘ancient sages’: ‘By unrighteousness man prospers, gains what seems desirable,
defeats enemies, but perishes at the root’ (359).
As we know, the Transition Movement was prompted by an ecological crisis: climate change
coupled with peak oil, rather than a social crisis – although Hopkins has pointed out that the UK
Government’s austerity measures following the 2008 economic crisis could be responded to by
building a no-growth economy at a grassroots level (Power of Just Doing Stuff 58-9). Despite the
overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change having been caused by consumption of fossil
fuels since the industrial revolution, there are still some who deny this connection. However, what
has been called ‘the other CO2 problem’, the acidification of the oceans, clearly locates the onset of
the crisis at around 1800. Studies have determined that ocean acidification remained within a
narrow range during the 24 million years up to around 1800, from which point it began to increase
markedly. It is now predicted that acidification will increase to well over 200% of pre-industrial
levels by 2100 (Turley). The abstract of the article in which these predictions appear tells us that:
[t]he world’s oceans [...] have taken up around 50% of the total carbon dioxide (CO 2) released to the
atmosphere via fossil fuel emissions and other human activities in the last 200 years. Whilst this has
slowed the progress of climate change, CO2 ultimately results in acidification of the marine
environment. [...] Acidification has only recently emerged as a serious issue and it has the potential to
affect a wide range of marine biogeochemical and ecological processes [... and] is another argument,
alongside that of climate change, for the mitigation of anthropogenic CO 2 emissions.
The year 1800 is close to the date of the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793, which severely
disrupted the village society of Bengal by establishing an urban middle class living off estates they
never visited (Guha xv), the Tagore family being exceptional in this respect. In 1793 in Britain the
Board of Agriculture was established, followed by the first General Enclosures Act in 1801, a major
milestone in the long period during which peasant cultivators lost their access to common land
(Tate 130). Eric Hobsbawn describes ‘Britain in 1750’ as a system of mainly rural industries and
manufactures, with smallholders in their cottages and village artisans trading in small market towns
scattered throughout the countryside (15). This was not unlike Bengal before its textile and other
craft industries were destroyed. Hobsbawn asks, ‘without the wisdom of hindsight, would we have
predicted the imminent Industrial Revolution?’ and answers, ‘Almost certainly not’ (18). He goes
on to explain that the willingness of the British government to wage war and colonize on behalf of

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British manufacturers led to Britain pioneering national industrialization, so that for some time
Britain was the one ‘workshop of the world’ (33).
Tagore wrote graphically about the changes which had taken place in his country. In one essay
he refers to the early ‘Kshatriya or Warrior Age’ passing away, and the ‘Vaishya or Merchant Age’
being ushered in; a reference obviously to the advent of the East India Company. He tells how India
was once famous throughout the world for her immense wealth, but the new arrivals excelled at ‘the
art of pilfering’. ‘By and by’, he says, ‘the foreign merchants superimposed the royal throne on their
seat of trade’, at a propitious time when the Mogul empire was in decline, and ‘was finally
dismembered and destroyed by British hands’ (‘Soviet System’ 419).
One of the problems which Transition struggles against is the view that major problems have to
be dealt with at national and international / intergovernmental levels. In one of his best known
articles, Tagore contrasted that attitude with the traditions of his own country:
In England the people are free to enjoy their comforts and pleasures and pursue their own interests;
they are not burdened with communal duties, since such cares rest with the State. In India [...] social
duties were specifically assigned to the members of society [... and] what we understand by the word
dharma permeated the whole social fabric. Every man had to acquire the discipline of self-control;
every man had to accept the sanctified code of obligations (‘Society and State’ 51).
Tagore was well aware that ‘the sanctified code of obligations’, together with ‘rigid lines of
regulations’ brought in to deal with India’s ‘problem of race conflict’, had become consolidated and
distorted into an oppressive caste, class and sectarian system, and he saw the spiritual ideal of a
‘deeper unity’ as the ‘highest truth’ (‘Race Conflict’ 361). It was a major aim of his rural
reconstruction and education work to make this ideal a reality by breaking down all divisions in
favour of new forms of cooperation and collaboration.
Transition encounters class issues of another kind. Because the movement is a response to
environmental concerns, some left-leaning activists and critics are inclined to dismiss the activities
as a middle class indulgence. There are Transition initiatives based in deprived urban areas, where
savings on fuel bills are welcome regardless of the benefit to the planet of reducing CO 2 emissions,
and where there is a real need for free or cheap, nutritious, locally grown food, and other benefits
from meeting needs locally. And yet it is true that many Transition initiatives depend on people
with time and energy available to spend on activities other than the struggle to earn money and care
for their families. Drawing parallels with Tagore’s aims and activities can help to show that
relocalisation is about social revolution, not mere environmentalism, reformism or charity.
In her Biography Das Gupta notes that Tagore is known ‘primarily as a poet and littérateur’,
whereas not many people are aware of ‘the vital significance of his efforts in the field of education
and rural reconstruction’. These efforts spanned fifty years, from 1891 through to his death in 1941.
Das Gupta sets out in her Preface some of the concerns behind Tagore’s actions, such as ‘racial
humiliation and the search for self-esteem’, which led to his advocating a ‘constructive swadeshi’.
Das Gupta says that Tagore’s work was significant ‘for his country’s future’, and that Tagore ‘had
the confidence to know that the awakening of India had to be part of the awakening of the world’
(ix-xi).
It must be acknowledged, however, that Tagore’s visionary hopes for India and for the world
have not been realised. Binoy Bhattacharjee, speaking on ‘Rabindranath’s Ideals of Rural
Reconstruction’ at a seminar in 1986 on ‘Rabindranath Tagore and the Challenges of Today’,
reported that experiments had then been carried out ‘for more than six decades’, but there is no
‘ideal Sriniketan village’, and that ‘even a searching eye cannot find any difference between a
Sriniketan village and any ordinary village in West Bengal, either in physical appearance or socio-
economic status’. He added that Tagore himself had felt this (188). During the plenary discussion,
the view was expressed that ‘after independence our models of rural development had ceased to be
indigenous’, that ‘the ideas of Tagore and Gandhi were no longer taken notice of’ and India’s
‘community development model came from the U.S.A.’ (Chaudhuri 321).

Rural Reconstruction at Dartington

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If Tagore’s visionary hopes had reached the world, one might have looked for their practical
manifestation at Dartington in Devon, where in 1925 Leonard Elmhirst established an ambitious
rural reconstruction programme inspired by, and modelled on, his work with Tagore in the 1920s to
set up Sriniketan. He purchased an ancient estate of 820 acres with some ruined buildings and run
down farms. Aided by the injection of large sums of money from his wife, the heiress Dorothy
Straight, Elmhirst established the Dartington Hall Trust as a research institution and self-contained
village, based on a new form of ownership of the land, buildings, equipment and stock (Young,
Cox). In her history of farming in England, Marjorie Hessell Tiltman sums up Dartington as ‘an
attempt to strike at the very root of agricultural decay, by a return to the self-contained rural
community, where handicrafts flourish and the younger members do not find life so dull that they
are anxious to escape to the towns’ (297-302). She considers that ‘[t]he implications of such a
scheme are political, economic, and social, and to prove its soundness and fundamental workability
many, many years would—or will—be needed’ (299). The Dartington experiment was designed to
respond to the fall in rural job prospects, which was already evident in the 1920s, by establishing
rural industries, expanding education and reviving local culture. It achieved great things for some
years but, one by one, its enterprises succumbed to competition, its progressive school closed, and
recently the Dartington Arts College was moved away.
One can draw a useful parallel between Tagore’s and Elmhirst’s rural reconstruction projects if
we see their aim as to reconstruct medieval estates in modern forms: Tagore’s ‘constructive
swadeshi’ and Emhirst’s ‘Land Trust’. The latter was ‘responsible through sound management for
promoting the economic exploitation of rural resources, without damage to soil or permanent assets,
and with due regard for social welfare and amenity’ (Bonham-Carter 110), which were Tagore’s
aims too. Theirs were brave attempts to change the course of society in the face of the storm of
progress initiated by the Industrial Revolution.
The nationalism movement in India was part of that storm. Tagore condemned nationalism as ‘a
great menace’ (Nationalism 111). He had faith in an awakening to:
the absurdity of to-day’s civilization, which is based upon nationalism, that is to say, on economics
and politics and its consequent militarism. Men have been losing their freedom and their humanity in
order to fit themselves for vast mechanical organizations. So the next civilization, it is hoped, will be
based not merely upon economical and political competition and exploitation but upon world-wide
social co-operation; upon spiritual ideals of reciprocity, and not upon economic ideals of efficiency.
(Personality 182-3).
From his involvement from 1905 to 1907 with the Swadeshi campaign against the Partition of
Bengal, Tagore had seen the dangers and hopelessness of politics:
Our endeavours after political agitation seemed to me unreal to the core and pitifully feeble in their
utter helplessness. [...] I said to myself that we must seek for our own inheritance and with it buy our
true place in the world’ (Tagore, in Pearson 2).
Tagore did not see Independence as a useful precursor to reviving India’s village society. Gandhi,
as is well known, drew the peasant masses into the campaign for ‘Parliamentary Swaraj’, but his
grassroots model was different from Tagore’s, due to their different personalities and aspirations. In
The Discovery of India, Nehru says of Tagore and Gandhi, ‘the two outstanding and dominating
figures of India in this first half of the twentieth century’, that ‘[n]o two persons could be so
different from one another’. Tagore represents ‘the cultural tradition of India, the tradition of
accepting life in the fullness thereof and going though it with song and dance’. Gandhi is ‘more a
man of the people, almost the embodiment of the Indian peasant, represented the other ancient
tradition of India, that of renunciation and asceticism’ (Nehru 318-9).
Gandhi elucidates his moralistic utopian vision in Hind Swaraj, and shows how he had to settle
for a compromise:
[T]o-day my corporate activity is undoubtedly devoted to the attainment of Parliamentary Swaraj in
accordance with the wishes of the people of India. I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals,
though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction. Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of
a high and pure civilization. At best they are a necessary evil. Neither adds one inch to the moral
stature of a nation. Nor am I aiming at a permanent destruction of law courts, much as I regard it as a

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 consummation devoutly to be wished for. Still less am I trying to destroy all machinery and mills. It
requires a higher simplicity and renunciation than the people are to-day prepared for (1).
We can liken Gandhi’s model to the grassroots responses to the current ecological crisis which
preach a strict anti-materialism, whereas Transition resembles Tagore’s vision of ‘life in its
completeness’ in the way it emphasises joy and conviviality, going through life ‘with song and
dance’.

Towards a Tagorean Utopia

In the country of “Found-Everything,”

Palaces rise not high;
The gates are open wide,
No sentinels standing by.
[...]
No rush or hurry in streets,
No din in marts, no noise.
Here build thy peaceful hut,
O, poet! take thy choice!
[...]

A utopia is someone’s idea of a perfect society. The first poem by Tagore to appear in a British
periodical was ‘The Country of “Found-Everything”’ depicting his utopian ideal of a leisurely and
delightful self-sufficient community, without palaces, merchants or soldiers. Over the centuries
there have been many utopias, ‘ideal commonwealths’, from Plato’s Republic to Morris’s Nowhere
and Robert Owen’s ‘utopian socialism’. Some were purely imaginary, others have been actual
communities, established as models to be followed elsewhere (Berneri 1-8). Every utopia is a
response to some perceived flaw or sickness in established society, to be remedied either by giving
free expression to people’s strength, vitality and joy, or by guiding them towards a code of laws and
moral behaviour (2-3). It was after failing to persuade the Calcutta bhadralok (educated class) to
adopt ‘constructive swadeshi’ as the way forward for their country, that Tagore decided that ‘the
way to discover the true India’ was to ‘make a start with one or two villages’ (‘City and Village’
322).
Imaginary and experimental utopias of the nineteenth century were linked to the creation of the
socialist movement (Berneri 207-8). Earlier utopias were very often authoritarian and austere, and
hardly more appealing than the dystopian satires of the last century such as Orwell’s 1984 (2-4,
313). Despite his talk of love and non-violence, Gandhi’s ‘true civilisation’: the ‘mode of conduct
which points out to man the path of duty [and] observance of morality’ (Gandhi 53-7) is an
authoritarian utopia. Tagore’s is the libertarian form of utopia, founded on his belief in the potential
of human society:
The will, which is free, must seek for the realization of its harmony other wills which are also free, and
in this is the significance of spiritual life. The infinite centre of personality, which radiates its joy by
giving itself out in freedom, must create other centres of freedom to unite with it in harmony. Beauty
is the harmony realized in things which are bound by law. Love is the harmony realized in wills which
are free. (Personality 101)
Transition involves a crucial stage we can liken to creating ‘centres of freedom’ such as Tagore
advocated. Following a period of planning and awareness raising, each Transition Initiative
organises ‘A Great Unleashing’ (Hopkins, Transition Companion 79). In their study of the
Transition Movement, Feola and Nunes refer to the aim of local resilience being achieved ‘through
the “unleashing” of the creativity, motivation and knowledge of communities’ (8). Hopkins found
that ‘the obstacles to resilience and relocalisation lie not, as was hypothesised, in a lack of skills or
an absence of community cohesion, but in issues of governance and the need for increased social
entrepreneurship’ (Localisation and Resilience 4). Tagore engaged with similar challenges, as we
see in many of his addresses available in translation. For example, in 1908 Tagore spoke of reviving

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and improving local governance to enable ‘new programmes of agriculture and production in the
villages’ (‘Presidential Address’ 125-6).
The existence of utopian literature and the record of utopian social experiments is part of
humanity’s shared heritage. It is a resource to help us understand the opportunities and dangers of
responding to a world perceived to be in crisis. The aim of rebuilding community is fundamental to
Tagore’s experiments and to Transition Initiatives. Professor of psychology Merlin Donald writes
of ‘communities of mind’ resourced by forms of cultural memory, from oral mythmaking, through
written and printed literatures to electronic media (254-7, 298-300).
I suggested earlier that the pioneer ‘Transition Town Totnes’ can be seen as Tagore’s new dawn
coming from the East, via Elmhirst’s Dartington which owes its existence to Tagore’s Sriniketan.
Tagore’s and Elmhirst’s experiments may have ‘failed’, but each of them extended for a period of
fifty years. They were overly dependent on charismatic leadership and on Dorothy Elmhirst’s
money, which may be why they were not replicated elsewhere. Transition is able to draw on
information and communications systems as the latest manifestation of cultural memory, hence the
phenomenal growth in recent years. It has spread easily into pre-existing environmental and local
food movements, and those drawn to ‘alternative’ lifestyles. Making a critical connection with
Tagore’s vision and initiatives could give Transition more weight, and take interest in its potential
benefits beyond its obvious constituency.

The Religion of Man

Seeing the Transition Movement as a continuation of Tagore’s work for world change provides the
context for a new interpretation of Tagore’s five books of ‘English essays’, from Sadhana to The
Religion of Man. Those who are drawn to Tagore’s identity as visva-kavi, world poet and seer, will
find religious wisdom in the books, but if we consider Tagore as visva-kharma, world worker, we
discover there religion as the cultural practices which bind society together.
An appreciation of Tagore’s efforts towards uniting society in practical ways have been hindered
by his reputation as an Eastern Mystic. His quotations from the Upanisads reinforced that
impression, despite Tagore telling his western audiences early on that these ancient writings were
living truths, ‘manifested in the life of to-day’ (Sadhana vii). Tagore did not separate the religious
from the practical. He had the poet’s gift of expressing the principle of creative unity in very few
words, such as these: ‘To give perfect expression to the One, the Infinite, through the harmony of
the many; to the One, the Love, through the sacrifice of self, is the object alike of our individual life
and our society’ (Creative Unity vi).
In two leading essays: ‘The Relation of the Individual to the Universe’ in Sadhana and ‘Man’s
Universe’ in The Religion of Man, Tagore draws his western audience’s attention to a central truth
set out in the Upanisads, ancient texts written by seers living between 1000 and 300 BC. This is the
seemingly paradoxical idea that the individual soul and the universe are one (Foreword to The
Philosophy of the Upanisads 942). In the essays, Tagore expresses this truth as follows:
India intuitively felt that the essential fact of this world has a vital meaning for us; we have to be fully
alive to it and establish a conscious relation with it, not merely impelled by scientific curiosity or
greed of material advantage, but realising it in the spirit of sympathy, with a large feeling of joy and
peace (Sadhana 7).
The idea of the humanity of our God, or the divinity of Man the Eternal, is the main subject of this
book. [... O]n the surface of our being we have the ever-changing phases of the individual self, but in
the depth there dwells the Eternal Spirit of human unity beyond our direct knowledge’ (The Religion
of Man 17).
Tagore scholars identify the world view Tagore was expressing in these books as ‘the integration of
man and nature and God’ (Mukherjee 198). The inclusion of ‘nature’ in this trinity indicates that
‘Tagore is a monist’ who does not see the world as maya (illusion), and in fact ‘denounces the
negative attitude towards the world’ (Raju 532).6 We also see that ‘human unity’ refers to mankind
as an inherently social and cooperative species.

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 In the essays Tagore often insists that he is not a scholar or philosopher. 7 Elsewhere he says he
avoids scholarly terms and arguments: ‘If there is a debate about, say, monism and dualism, I will
not respond’ (Of Myself 22). Tagore did in effect engage in that debate, but without using the
particular terms, in a conversation with Einstein in 1930. Tagore included the transcript as an
appendix to The Religion of Man, evidently expecting that the discussion would help clarify his
religious thought for a western reader (222-5). Tagore begins by explaining that he does not believe
in an isolated, transcendent God. Einstein declares his own belief in the existence of truth and
reality independent of man. Tagore disagrees: ‘[I]f there be any truth absolutely unrelated to
humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing. Tagore closes with the words: ‘My religion is in
the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the Universal human spirit, in my own individual
being’. Tagore’s ‘God’, then, is humanity as a whole, together with our collective experience of
nature.
The Tagore-Einstein conversation has drawn attention to Tagore’s interest in science (Sen 104).
When he was a boy Tagore’s father taught him about the stars, and cosmology became an abiding
interest. He began to study ethnology and anthropology when managing the family estates
(Rathindranath Tagore 41). The five books are full of passages, sometimes entire essays, setting out
Tagore’s ideas on evolution and anthropology. One can find resonances with the cooperative model
of evolution, with less stress on the competitive struggle for life, set out in the works of Tagore’s
friend Patrick Geddes (The Evolution of Sex 303-4 and ‘Towards a Theory of Life’, Life Vol. II
1384-1440). Tagore may well have read The Essence of Christianity by German philosopher and
anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach, on how Protestant Christianity instituted an individualistic faith,
focused on personal salvation, by projecting human ideals onto a transcendent deity. We can find
recent works confirming the general direction of Tagore philosophical anthropology, centred around
his belief in humanity being naturally cooperative and creative, works such as Donald’s A Mind So
Rare, and Rothenberg’s, Survival of the Beautiful.
Tagore’s English essays were originally addresses, to groups of academics or gatherings of his
admirers, or to the general public in packed halls. He is preaching to his audiences, often with
passion but also with sympathy and wit. From his polemics we understand why he dreaded the
dehumanising effects of the machinery of the modern world, but through it all we see his total faith
that this was only a phase, a wrong turning, and we would surely return to ‘social co-operation’ and
the ‘harmony and completeness in humanity’ (Nationalism 130).
The worldwide network of local Transition Initiatives is not the only movement working for
deep and lasting world change. Writer and ‘green entrepreneur’ Paul Hawken set up a database of
more than a million groups addressing a wide range of concerns about the environment and social
justice (191-302). The problems of climate change, peak oil and the economic crisis are the
incentives initiating and motivating the Transition Movement, but as it develops it does seem to be
especially Tagorean in the way its success revolves around positivity, fun, conviviality and sense of
community. The experience of joy was always Tagore’s test of creative unity:
[O]ur soul when detached and imprisoned within the narrow limits of a self loses its significance. For
its very essence is unity. It can only find out its truth by unifying itself with others, and only then it has
its joy. Man was troubled and he lived in a state of fear so long as he had not discovered the
uniformity of law in nature; till then the world was alien to him. The law that he discovered is nothing
but the perception of harmony that prevails between reason which is of the soul of man and the
workings of the world. This is the bond of union through which man is related to the world in which
he lives, and he feels an exceeding joy when he finds this out, for then he realises himself in his
surroundings (Sadhana 27-8).

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1
‘The peak oil concept was first formulated by the geophysicist M. King Hubbert (1956) and refers to the point at which the
world reaches the maximum achievable level of oil production, and beyond which production will irreversibly decrease on
an annual basis [...]. It is not that humanity will “run out” of oil, rather that once the point of having used about half of it is
reached, it becomes increasingly difficult to extract, and increasingly costly, both in energetic and financial terms.’
(Hopkins, ‘Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: The Case of Transition Town Totnes’ 24.)
2
As well as Transition towns, Transition initiatives have sprung up in villages and city neighbourhoods, islands, university
campuses and refugee camps. The movement spread initially in the UK, then North America and Europe, latterly in more
deprived regions, in South America, Africa and rural India. Transition has been described as the ‘biggest urban brainwave
of the century’ and ‘the most vital social experiment of our times’. These and other remarks appear on the back cover and in
speaking bubbles scattered liberally through Hopkins’ guide book The Transition Companion.
3
Tagore used the telling phrase ‘what has been my life’s work’ in a letter dated 28 February 1930 to Lord Irwin, the
Viceroy, appealing for a grant for agricultural research (Elmhirst Papers). Tagore had written to Lord Irwin two weeks
earlier, referring to the apparently favourable impression the Viceroy had received of the value of the work, during his visit
to Sriniketan. Tagore explained that they had been struggling ‘almost in isolation’, not understood by ‘either our
countrymen or our Government’, on such funds as Tagore could raise with his own personal efforts. (Dutta & Robinson,
Selected Letters 370-1.
4
I attended Hopkins’ talk ‘What if we just did it?’ at the 2013 Tagore. It was recorded but is not available online.
5
During the colonial period in India, urban and rural divisions and class structures were superimposed upon ancient caste
divisions. These divisions were deepened by education in the English language, and the drive amongst rural as well as urban
families for their sons to gain qualifications for administrative and professional positions (Poromesh Acharya). Tagore’s
ideas on progressive education are better known than his work in rural reconstruction, which is the subject of this article.
6
Tagore’s monism perhaps derives partly from his studies of the Upanisads, about which a western translator has
written:‘[A]ware of the underlying unity of all being [...] those early Indian thinkers elaborated a system of intelligent
monism which has been accepted as most illuminating and inherently true by their descendents throughout the centuries’
(Hume 1-2).
7
Tagore was an artist and activist, not a scholar. He warned readers that they ‘should not expect from [him] fruits gathered
from a wide field of studies or wealth brought by a mind trained in the difficult exploration of knowledge’ (The Religion of
Man 90). We know he read widely and deeply, as Chatterjee tells us in his eightieth birthday tribute, listing the subjects of
35 books on his bookshelf from ‘Farming, philology, history, medicine, astro-physics’ to ‘stall-feeding, jiu-jitsu, printing’
(4). Although Tagore’s personal library has been kept at Santiniketan, there is no index. (Das Gupta, personal
communication).