Rabindranath Tagore and World Literature

Pushpa Raj Acharya

https://doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v28i01.39577
Abstract
Courses on world literature in English translations indicate to a new popular
trend in the discipline of comparative literature in North American
universities. Some scholars like David Damrosch promote the practice as a
new way of doing comparative literature, but others like Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak think that an encyclopedic survey of world literatures in
English translations confirms the logic of globalization. Whether the world
literature courses and anthologies in English translation inspire enthusiasm
or invite reservation, the question "What is world literature?" has come to
the fore as one of the central concerns of the discipline. In 1907, eighty
years after German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany coined
the term Weltliteratur, Rabindranath Tagore in India expressed his views on
“comparative literature” translating it as vishwa sahitya, “world literature.”
My paper is a reading of Tagore’s lecture on world literature. Tagore
envisions world literature as a creative transgression that activates a
persistent human struggle for a bonding between aesthetics and alterity.
Members of National Council of Education in Calcutta invited poet
Rabindranath Tagore to give a lecture on comparative literature on February
9, 1907. The Council, established in 1905 as a part of the on-going Indian
nationalist movement, aimed at providing an alternative modern education
to Indians to oppose the British education, which mainly produced clerks or
lawyers—Thomas Babington Macaulay's "interpreters"—for colonial
administration. "As a director of Bengali studies at the Council,
Rabindranath was asked to deliver a series of extension lectures on
Comparative Literature, a discipline yet to take root in the West and almost
unheard of at the time in India" (Das and Chaudhuri 376). The lecture
entitled as “VishwaSahitya” was first published in the 1907January-
February issue of Bangadarshan journal and was later collected with
Tagore's four other essays in Sahitya, published in October of the same year.
Tagore chooses to translate “comparative literature” as vishwasahitya
(or bishshoshahitto) instead of tulanatmaksahityain his lecture:
"Comparative Literature is the English title you have given to the subject I
have been asked t o d i s c u s s . I n B e n g a l i , I s h a l l c a l l i t Wo r l d
L i t e r a t u r e [vishwasahitya]" ("World Literature" 148). Tagore gives no
explanation why he translates the English term "comparative literature" into
Bengali as vishwasahitya, which combines two words from Sanskrit
vishwa—"world"— and sahitya—"literature." Tagore's curious move in
calling "comparative literature" vishwasahitya demands an inquiry into his
understanding of comparative literature and world literature.

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This paper is an exploration of his notion of vishwasahitya. Like
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tagore envisions world literature, I argue, as
a continual process of unfinished creation with an ideal of synthesis. Tagore
interprets world literature as a humanist project generated at a moment when
aesthetics transgresses rationality and when humans create a bond with
alterity. The aesthetic bonding, in which the self opens to the other, and
vice-versa, engenders the possibility of crossing the borders of space, time,
nation, and culture. In this act of transgression, world literature circulates
like the "wasteful spending"—Tagore’s metaphor for both beauty and
expression— yet, the singularity, or the potential universalize-ability, of
each work survives without being dissolved in the vast corpus. Tagore
insists that humanism and time measure the value of world literature and
implies that multiplicities of languages make the collectivity of world
literature possible. In his translation of "comparative literature" into
vishwasahitya, the categories of "world literature" and "comparative
literature" exist as a destabilized bind.
Translators and editors of Tagore’s essays Sisir Kumar Das and
Sukanta Chaudhuri provide an explanation that Tagore could have been
"influenced by Goethe's term Weltliteratur" (376). In more recent
publications, Bhavya Tiwari and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have tried to
explain Tagore’s leap in translation. Tiwari, who draws a conclusion similar
to the one Buddhadev Bose produced in 1959, argues that India provides a
model for doing comparative and world literature because of its linguistic
diversity and proposes that Tagore perhaps indicates to "Comparative World
Literature." She interprets the translation as Tagore's rejection of European
style comparative literature. However, Tagore’s essay does not explicitly
mention the development in the field or "European style" comparative
literature.
A rather insightful reading of the essay comes from Spivak in her
dialogue with David Damrosch in 2011. Spivak recognizes a few
transgressive moments in Tagore that emerge from his "unexplained but
declared translation of the English phrase 'comparative literature,' which he
cites, in English, in his essay, is 'bishshoshahitto, world literature,' he says,
without any explanation at all" ("Comparative Literature/World Literature"
471). The other transgressive moment is "the repeated metaphor of
bajeykhoroch, or 'wasteful spending,'" as well as "the intimations of
singularity"1 ("Comparative Literature/World Literature" 471). This paper
follows three transgressive moments that Spivak has pointed out.In the
sections that follow, I will analyze his notion of aesthetic bonding as an
opening to the alterity, explain the metaphor of the "wasteful spending,"
discuss the concept of singularity and the metaphor of the earth, while also
reading Spivak's Death of a Discipline.
In Tagore's Bengali speech, "comparative literature" remains un-
translated, first because it sounds clumsy once rendered into Bengali, 2 or
even into Hindi and Nepali, but at the same time it implies that there

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are things which can and cannot be translated. For example, as Tagore
writes:
The word sahitya [literature] comes from sahit [together]. Hence,
if we take into account its etymological sense, we find in the word
sahitya the idea of a union. It is not simply a union of idea and
idea, language and language, book and book: nothing except
sahitya or literature can establish deeply intimate ties between one
person and another, between past and present, between far and
near. The people of a country deficient in literature have no vital
bonds to join them: they remain isolated. ("Bengali" 179)
The translation of sahitya to "literature" is merely functional as it
does not retain the sense of togetherness. There is a problem in its
translation even between English and German: "Upon this uncertain ground
hardly secured by our method of inquiry, the English word 'literature' is not
yet useful. Nor are all its romance homonyms, securely placed in German
Literature, for historical reasons that we cannot consider here (Spivak,
"Stakes" 457). Edward W. Said retains the German Weltliteratur in his
translation of Erich Auerbach.
Through this transgression, Tagore destabilizes the categories:
comparative literature and world literature. Lately, Damrosch and others'
idea that world literature and comparative literature have "somewhat uneasy
coexistence," echoes the voice of the "anxiogenic" discipline of comparative
literature that has been trying to define its object and methods—the self of
the discipline.
However, Said's comments on Goethe and Auerbach helpinterpret
Tagore's unstable double-bind of world literature and comparative literature,
the vision and the practice. Said reads Goethe's Weltliteratur as an idealized
"vision" that gives way to the discipline of comparative literature, that is,
Weltliteratur as the underlying idea and comparative literature as a do-able
field:
For many modern scholars—including myself—Goethe's grandly
utopian vision is considered to be the foundation of what was to
become the field of comparative literature, whose underlying and
perhaps unrealizable rationale was this vast synthesis of the
world's literary production transcending borders and languages,
but not in any way effacing the individuality and historical
concreteness of its constituent parts. (95)
The vision is messianic—that is, something "yet to" come—and has a desire to
preserve the individuality, historicity, and distinction of the parts in the
universalizing synthesis of literary production. However, Said continues,
Auerbach in his 1951 essay "Philology and Weltliteratur " shows "autumnal"
gloominess at the loss of the institutions and expertise in Europe after the
Second World War and at the emergence of non-European languages and
literatures, making Goethe's project untenable. While Auerbach's Euro-centrism
holds true, he has a faith in Weltliteratur because it emphasizes "the

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unity of human history" and it allows the possibility of "understanding
inimical and perhaps even hostile Others despite the bellicosity of modern
cultures and nationalisms, and the optimism with which one could enter into
the inner life of a distant author or historical epoch even with a healthy
awareness of one's limitation of perspective and insufficiency" (Said 96). In
other words, world literature opens the possibility of opening to others—
those in a distance in space, in time, and in the inner depths of life. Tagore
engages with this concept of the self and the other in literary expression and
the unity of human history.
Aesthetic Bonding and Alterity
For Tagore, world literature stands for a bond of aesthetics that
makes possible the exchange between the self and the other. In this
exchange, the aesthetic bond opens the self to the other and other to the self.
One keeps traveling between home and the world, in the traffic between me
and the rest, inner and outer, or nation and world.
Humans, Tagore argues, have an innate tendency to form bonds:
"Whatever faculties we have within us exist for the sole purpose of forming
bonds [yoga] with others," and such bonds give meaning to one's existence
and the things that exist. The bonds are three in kind: "the bonds of reason
[buddhi], of necessity [prayojan], and of joy [ananda]" ("World Literature"
138). Unlike the other bonds in which the self remains fragmented, the bond
of joy or aesthetics creates the feeling of being-at-home, where "we are
relieved to let go of our whole selves without restraint" and feel "exclusively
our own selves" ("World Literature" 139-40).With the feeling of being with
the self, there comes a moment of realization of aesthetics.
Therefore, Tagore asks, "What is this bond of joy? It is nothing but
knowing others as our own, and ourselves as other [porkeapnarkoriyajana,
apnakeporerkoriyajana]" ("World Literature"139). The ethics of alterity
emerges from the radical othering of the self—seeing the other in the self
and, in reverse, seeing the self in the other. It creates a union, which is
distinct from uniformity, because the "bond of beauty or joy erases all
distances" (Tagore, "World Literature" 139). One does not ask why one
loves the self but instead experiences joy in loving it: "When we feel the
same sense of being about someone else, there is no need to ask why I like
that person" (Tagore, "World Literature" 139). Tagore brings into play two
Sanskrit words to elaborate on the relationship between the self and its
bonding with the other: atman, "soul" and its derivative atmiya, "dear": The
other outside becomes atmiya to the self because it "makes my atman [soul]
true even outside of me" ("World Literature"139). This, Tagore explains, is
a desire, in which the self realizes its own being more comprehensibly. The
Yajnavalkya-Gargi debate in the Upanishad, which Tagore alludes to,
focuses on the question of the alterity of atman.
So, the aesthetic bond helps one see the self in the other and the other
in the self--an ability to "apprehend" oneself from outside "in other human
being": "It is natural that through sight, hearing, and though,

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through the play of imagination and the attachments of the heart, one should
be able to recoup oneself roundly in humanity" (Tagore, "World Literature"
139- 40). The radical process of alterization involves the extension of the
self to the other and transformation of the other into the self. It is also the
relationship of the totality—humanity—with the singularity—individuals.
Humans know themselves when they stand among others, although some
obstacles like self-interest and vanity—the impediments to the forging of
aesthetic bond—can hinder the process of knowing. One has to struggle
against the impediments "with heightened self-awareness," and "the fuller
the awareness, the deeper its joy" (Tagore, "World Literature" 140). If
"knowledge is this union of reason with the universe, and [if] it is in this
union that our rationality finds joy," the human soul finds the true joy in
"particular humanness" in a communion with "all humanity" where "our
own enhanced selves that we then discover" (Tagore, "World Literature"
141) . The process and the mode of aesthetic expression have the inward and
the outward move—the self extended to the world and the world expanded
to the self.
Here is Tagore's analogy, where he explains a Baul song—a song
from an esoteric mystical tradition in Bengal:
It is as if the beloved object were an object within the lover's
heart. Someone has drawn it out of doors, so the lover is longing
to fetch it back inside again. There is opposite situation as well.
When the heart fails to perceive its desires and passions, in the
external world, it tries hard to fashion their image with its own
hands out of various ingredients. In this way, the heart's longing
to make the world its own and itself the world's is constantly at
work. To express oneself in the outside world is part of this
process. ("World Literature" 144)
Tagore uses "as if," which refers to the self's potential of realizing the others
in literature. In this "as if" or the aesthetic imagination, the desire to bring
the external and the other to the self materializes because the other is the self
outside the door. The self-expression takes two courses: of work and of
literature, which are parallel but complementary. But the work is an offshoot
of the desire to express because work fulfills intentions, and the actions are
just expressions of those intentions. In contrast, literature is pure expression
where the self and the other meet in the constant ebb and flow.
The "Wasteful Expenses"
Tagore explains literature in general and world literature in specific as
"wasteful expenses." In fact, he defines beauty as the "wasteful expense."To
rationality, it looks like the wasteful expense, and so it fails to comprehend
what goes beyond and circulates around. However, for aesthetics, beauty
emerges from the wasteful expenses, the abundance of resources, the
excessiveness of expression, and the wasteful spending of common language
and form. Tagore provides a series of examples of this "literary."

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First, a mother's play with her child has this quality. "The mother
cannot help caring for the infant in her arms. But that is not all: mother's
love seeks expression surpassing the demands of care and without apparent
cause" (Tagore, "World Literature"143). The mother fulfills the necessity of
care and love, but, without obvious reasons, she plays with child, sings,
decorates it— love expresses itself in extravagance of beauty: "It wells up
from within in various kinds of play, endearments, and words. Decking the
child in many colors and ornaments, such love cannot help spreading wealth
through extravagance and sweetness through beauty, quite without need"
(Tagore, "World Literature" 143). So, the mother's songs, lullabies, other
adornment shave a higher value, and they are "wasteful expenses" of beauty.
The extravagance is quite without a need, but mother's expression as such is
the quality of her love.
The second example is the barbarian army's expression of violence.
Tagore explains that if Western warfare aims at minimum damage and gives
high importance to strategies that lead to victory, the barbarian army
"manifests its inner violence in external guise by putting on warpaint,
sounding drums and war cries, and dancing a wild war dance. It is as though
its belligerence is not complete without all this" ("World Literature"144).
The expressions like the painting of body or face and beating of drums are
the manifestations of the violence inside. It is more expressive than
utilitarian because "[w]hen a barbarian army marches to battle, victory over
the enemy is not its sole concern" (Tagore, "World Literature"144).In the
extravagance of expression, the inner violence comes out into different
forms. "Violence secures its practical goal through battle, and slakes its
desire for self-expression through such superfluous claptrap" (Tagore,
"World Literature" 144). But "the superfluous claptrap" is the "literary,"—
the inner that is expressed outside.
Then, Tagore provides another example—this time from the war in
the colonial context in which a less sophisticated group fought the British:
The band of dervishes who attacked the British army in Egypt did
not lay down their lives just to win a battle. They died to the last
man to express the fiery zeal of their hearts. Those who fight only
to win will never act in such an uncalled-for manner. The human
heart expresses itself even at the cost of suicide: can one imagine
a greater waste [bajeykhoroch]? ("World Literature" 144,
emphasis added)
Tagore refers to the Mahdists opposition to the British in the 1880s and 90s.
In a discussion with Damrosch on world literature, Spivak claims: Tagore"
calls it 'literary' because of this wasteful spending of their lives," and she
compares it "to the Ghost Dance of the Sioux against the U.S. cavalry at
Wounded Knee. He defines that worldliness beyond, beneath, above, and
short of not only merely rational choice but also the verbal text"
("Comparative Literature/World Literature" 472). The question one faces is
how to judge the suicidal action of the dervishes. Rationally, the

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choice they have made is the "wasteful expense" of lives, but on the other
level, they express what Tagore names as the "fiery zeal of heart" to resist
the oppression of Sudan by the successive Ottoman, Egyptian, and British
empires.
Like Immanuel Kant who places "the possibility of judgment in the
aesthetic," Tagore calls for judging this moment as "literary" (Spivak
"Comparative Literature/World Literature" 472).To save more lives and fight
strategically would be the rational choice for the teleological judgment. But the
dervishes choose to "spend" their lives for the expression of their "zeal."
The same judgment makes a devotee distinct from a clever
worshipper. For the clever one, worship has a teleological purpose—the
attainment of salvation. For the devotee, the devotion is incomplete without
worship, and hence there is no mathematical calculation of profit and loss:
The clever thinks, "My worship will obtain my salvation." The
devout says, "My devotion is imperfect without worship; whether
it profits me or not, worship brings my heart's devotion out into
the world where it finds its full and secure dwelling." In this way,
devotion achieves its own fulfillment by expressing itself in
worship. To the clever, worship is laying out money at interest; to
the devout, it is idle expense [bhoktimanerpoojaekebareibaje-
khoroch]. For when the heart expresses itself, it cares nothing for
loss. (Tagore, "World Literature" 144)
The clever worshipper makes a rational choice, the devout an aesthetic one.
What appears to be the "wasteful expenses" is the expression of heart and,
thus, "literary." Tagore sees such an expression in the decorations that
people do for festivities. One does not care for loss in the bond of joy
because to lose here is to win.
This provides an opportunity to rethink the disciplinary concerns of
the humanities and especially those of literature departments. The social
sciences and the hard sciences are different from the humanities in terms of
their distinct goals and directions. Literary studies aims at the rearrangement
of desires through reading. Spivak, who emphasizes the necessity of taking
the methods of area studies on the one hand and the critical edge of cultural
and racial studies to revitalize the way of doing the comparative literature on
the other, makes the disciplinary distinctions in Death of a Discipline:
If we want to compete with the hard "science"(s) and the social
sciences at their hardest as "human science," we have already lost,
as one loses institutional competition. In the arena of the
humanities as the uncoercive rearrangement of desire, he who
wins loses. If this sounds vague, what we learn (to imagine what
we know) rather than know in the humanities remains vague,
unverifiable, iterable. You don't put it aside in order to be literary
critical. (101)
Research and pedagogy in the humanities concentrate on the training of the
imagination and the rearrangement of desires. The strategies such as reading

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from the margin and activating the agency of the marginalized reflect the
goal of humanities: "The ethico-political task of the humanities has always
been rearrangement of desires. It must be repeated that the task of the
rearrangement of desires engages the imagination of teacher and student—in
a pedagogic situation" (Spivak, Other Asias 3). To disrupt what has been
oppressive and dominant and to rearrange the inner in a new order, one must
quest for the new methods of reading, teaching, and learning: "It is a
persistent effort at training the imagination, a task at which we have failed
through the progressive rationalization of education all over the world"
(Spivak, Other Asias 2). She proposes that one must look for more dialogue,
critique, and engagement with imagination and desire in the discourses of
humanities. One of the major purposes behind such proposal is to critique
the dominant through reading: "so must the new Comparative Literature
persistently and repeatedly undermine and undo the definitive tendency of
the dominant to appropriate the emergent" (Spivak, Death of a Discipline
100). Here again one needs to return to aesthetics—only the literary, the
"wasteful spending"—has the potential for transgression.
Aesthetics lies in the exchange between what the world gives and
what one returns, without caring for profit or loss. The ethics of aesthetics is
to return to the other and to the world. For Tagore, this exchange defines
beauty: "One's heart is a willing captive to whatever in the universe displays
this quality, which is also its own: it does not then raise a single question.
This thriftless excess in the world constitutes beauty [jogotermodhyeeibe-
hisabibajekhorcheyrsoundarya]" ("World Literature" 144). The "wasteful
spending" is the expression of beauty even in nature. "Reason, that is forever
old, shakes its head and asks, 'Why such a waste of needless effort
[bajeykhorchey] all over the world?' The heart, that is forever young,
answers, 'Only to beguile me: I see no other reason'" (Tagore, "World
Literature" 145). Aesthetics takes beauty rather than necessity as the criteria
for judgment, while rational thinking takes the law of necessity as its
foundation:
The heart knows that all through the world there is one heart that
continually expresses itself. Otherwise why should there be so
much beauty and music, so many gestures, shadows, and hints,
and such adornments throughout creation? The heart is not
blandished by the trafficker's thrift; that is why in water, earth,
and sky, there is such superfluous effort to hide necessity at every
step. (Tagore, "World Literature" 145)
Thriftiness belongs to reason, abundance to heart. Thus, there is the
distinction between what one expresses through work and through literature.
In work, one saves and produces more, whereas in literature, one
spends more (form, language, or imagination) to produce more. So are the
two kinds of expressions: kaaj, "work," and bhav, "idea" or "feeling"—the
latter involves rasa or "aesthetic enjoyment." As literature is an unmediated
expression of idea and feeling different from work, it has the possibility of

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transgression: "In work lies our faculty of self-preservation; in rasa, our
faculty for self-expression. Self-preservation is necessary, but self-
expression surpasses necessity" (Tagore, "World Literature" 146).One is the
law of necessity; the other is the transgression of necessity for an exchange
between the world and the self. While necessity tries to save, expression
tries to give more and return more. "Necessity impedes expression and
expression impedes necessity: we have already seen that in the instance of
warfare. Self-interest [swartha] dislikes extravagance [bajekhorchey],
whereas joy declares itself in prodigality" (Tagore, "World Literature" 146).
Necessity and expression are together but run in the parallel courses. Human
beings live in the world of necessity (work) yet create the world free of
necessity (literature). In this transgression of the law of necessity, there
arises beauty and heroism, the better and greater image of humanity, and a
higher bond of aesthetics between humans.
In the age of globalization and economic austerity, Tagore's metaphor
of bajeykhoroch, "wasteful expenses," is a brazen reminder of the value of
humanities and art. Spivak rightly recognizes the context of revisiting this
metaphor:
In globalization, where all impulses of judgment, including
'ethical waivers' claimed by government officials are managerial,
this is an impulse worth subverting and sabotaging for a
worldliness in the literary rather than restraining the future
anterior—something (else) will have happened—by diagnosing
and systematizing items to see how they qualify for our rubric.
("Comparative Literature/ World Literature" 472)
The "wasteful expenses" is the confrontational metaphor in the age of
economic austerity on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, there is something
more. To quote Spivak again:
The world is in bad shape with the loss of emphasis on the
humanities. This message of Tagore—that what goes across is not
immediately profitable or evaluable does not give us greater
numbers, etc., that it is “value-added” in an incommensurable
sense with no guarantees—this lesson is hard to learn, in the face
of the will to institutional power, through knowledge
management. ("Comparative Literature/World Literature" 472)
Indeed, in literature, humanity becomes the core, while, in work, it remains
fragmented. In the world ravaged by exploitations, violence, war, hatred,
and controlled by capital, Tagore shows hope in aesthetics. The "wasteful
expenses"—aesthetics—give humanity some hope, if there is any.

Singularity and the Metaphor of the Earth

In his concluding paragraph, Tagore makes several points about
world literature. First, he denies defining what corpus makes world literature
and suggests that one needs to carve the path with one's own goals. Second,
he refers to the singularity of each work and writer in the total synthesis of

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world literature and proposes that each work deserves to be seen as a
singular in its relationship with the whole. Third, he uses the metaphor of the
earth to refer to world literature and calls for freeing our perspectives from
narrow provincialism of seeing literature as belonging to a national culture.
Finally, he returns to the sense of the yet-to come moment for world
literature—he says this is the vision, and time has come for it.
I quote Tagore's entire paragraph with some modification in
translation:3
Do not so much as imagine that I would guide your way through
world literature. We must all cut our paths through it as best we
can. I simply wished to say that just as the [earth] is not my
ploughland added to yours and to someone else's—to see the
[earth] in this light is to take a rustic view—so also, literature is
not my writing added to yours and to someone else's. We usually
regard literature in this rustic light. It is time we pledged that our
goal is to view universal humanity in [world] literature by freeing
ourselves from rustic uncatholicity [narrow-mindedness]; that we
shall recognize a totality in each particular author's work, and that
in this totality we shall perceive the interrelations among all
human efforts at expression [and now is the time]. ("World
Literature" 150)
Tagore denies setting a route to world literature and provides no path as he
says that it depends on individual goal. There can be no level playing field
for determining world literature as this is an individual path one cuts
through. Perhaps, the market can be one of the playgrounds determining
what travels and what cannot, but Tagore focuses on human creativity
However, he provides a method, which is to recognize a totality in
each particular author's work. It is, in other words, to "singularize" an author
or a work. Spivak's definition is helpful: " 'singularity' doesn't necessarily
imply single texts. It simply implies that what is singular in any text is
universalizable. We must be in this search of this –ability" ("Comparative
Literature/World Literature" 478).Recognizing this "totality in each
particular author's work" is a way of singularizing it. For Tagore, the task of
a comparativistis to read the world literature by singularizing each work or
author or to see the universaliz-ablity in a singular text.
Then, comes the metaphor of the earth. Tiwari offers a reading in the
postcolonial context, especially in the context of the British decision to divide
Bengal into two parts: the Muslim dominated East and the Hindu dominated
West. Tiwari argues that Tagore evokes "the organic connectedness that exists
beyond geographical—or religious or linguistic—boundaries when it comes to
literatures and other art forms. Furthermore, by saying that 'literature is not the
mere total of works composed by different hands,' Tagore is underscoring the
mobility and dynamic nature of 'Vishwa Sahitya'" (44). There is indeed a sense
of organic connectedness, but there is more.

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I propose to read the earth metaphor in two ways: first, with Spivak's
notion of planetarity, and second, as the relationship between national
literatures and world literature. Spivak recommends that planetary thinking
allows us to recognize that humans, like any other species, live on the earth
"on loan" and to see the self in the other or the other in the self—this politics
of alterity.
The planetary thinking is different from globalization, which refers to
"the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere" because the
globe, now the simulation in computer where nobody lives, makes us think
that humans are in command and control (Spivak, Death of a Discipline 72).
On the contrary, the "planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another
system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan" (Spivak, Death of a Discipline 72). In
other words, thinking of the earth as the planet and allowing the agency of
the other characterize the knowledge that literary studies can teach because
[t]o be human is to be intended toward the other. We provide for
ourselves transcendental figurations of what we think is the origin
of this animating gift: mother, nation, god, nature. These are
names of alterity, some more radical than others. Planet-thought
opens up to embrace an inexhaustible taxonomy of such names,
including but not identical the whole range of human universals:
aboriginal animism as well as the spectral white mythology of
postrational science. (Spivak, Death of a Discipline 73)
Tagore's earth metaphor is a reminder that the earth is not a farmland
plotted, divided, controlled, and possessed by one or other person, group, and
nation. Rather, it is an entirety with all possibilities—the possibilities of seeing
the self in the other and the other in the self—the notion of planetarity.
Tagore evokes the metaphor of the earth to maintain his argument
that there is a constant exchange of the self and the other in world literature.
After all, thinking of the earth, rather than the globe in globalization, allows
one to aim at seeing the other as the other species, yet a co-inhabitant
sharing the momentary life-span on the planet.
At the same time, to return to another interpretation of the earth and
farmland metaphor, Tagore refers to the division of the earth into pieces in
the name of nations—several of his poems and lectures on nationalism stand
together with this stance here. Literature like the earth has seen its plotting
in national boundaries. To think of only national literatures is what Tagore
calls "narrow-minded rusticity." The earth metaphor refers to the possibility
of world literature that one needs to realize and strive for.
The earth allows the multiple voices in exchange; the globe tries to
create a uniform voice for commerce as the capital travels through the global
networks. If the metaphor of the earth stands for the alterity and connectedness,
then the metaphor of the sun stands for continual radiance and creation of the
possible worlds. World literature is the other possible world. The metaphor of
the sun4 that Tagore uses represents the collective humanity that continually
emanates the collective "literary." It is a process of collective

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outward diffusion of the self to establish an exchange with the other and to
create a collective bond of aesthetics. The radiant diffusion that reason
might see needless is world literature that only the aesthetic imagination can
perceive.
Notes
1 Spivak further explains, "Tagore was at every step self-distanced from the
ShinpeiGoto style, embattled Pan-Asianism of the early years of the last
century. His attitude was cosmopolitan and critical toward mere
nationalism—and I think David is right in saying that world literature can
go against mere nationalism—and it combined with his love of what he
perceived to be the possibility of a humane India. He thus had a serious
engagement with India’s nationalist message to the world. Yet, in the
mistranslated name of world literature, he theorizes the imaginative
creative bond that travels across national boundaries as bajeykhoroch,
wasteful spending, a powerful metaphor for what in the imagination goes
above, beyond, beneath, and short of mere rational choice toward
alterity. The uncertain intimacy open to ethical alterity is 'wasteful'"
("Comparative Literature/World Literature" 472).
2 "because 'Comparative Literature' translated as a phrase is ridiculous in
Bengali" (Spivak "The Stakes of a World Literature" 464).
3 Swapan Chakravorty's translation of Tagore I have used throughout my
paper has its merits, but in this particular paragraph Chakravorty
misreads some crucial phrases. While summing up his essay in the
concluding paragraph, Tagore uses the term vishwasahitya "world
literature" which Chakravorty translates into "universal literature" as the
word vishwa can also mean the "universe." However, Tagore's word
prithivi, simply means "the earth," but Chakravorty translates it into
"world." I have modified these phrases and provided some alternatives
in the quoted text. Here is a different translation by Buddhadev Bose for
comparison: "What I am trying to say amounts to this. Just as this earth
is not the sum of patches of land belonging to different people, and to
know the earth as such is sheer rusticity, so literature is not the mere
total of works composed by different hands. Most of us, however, think
of literature in what I have called the manner of the rustic. From this
narrow provincialism we must free ourselves; we must strive to see the
work of each author as a whole, that whole as a part of man's universal
creativity, and that universal spirit in its manifestation through world
literature. Now is the time to do so" (4).
4 Tagore compares world literature with as the radiance of the sun
emanating from the collective humanity: "The mass of matter at the sun's
core is forming itself in many ways, both solid and liquid. We cannot see
the process, but the surrounding of light ceaselessly expresses the sun to
the world. It is thus the sun gifts itself to the world and links itself to all

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else. If we could make humanity the object of such an integral view, we
would see it like the sun. We would see that the mass of matter was
gradually forming itself into layers, and around it, perpetually, a
luminous ring of expression spreading itself joyously in every direction.
Look at literature this ring of light, made of language, encircling
humanity. Here there are storms of light, the wellsprings of radiance,
and collision of radiant vapors" ("World Literature"149).

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