ABSTRACT
If the Upanishads had formed Rabindranath’s mind, Rabindranath in turn had edited the Upanishads to suit his modern science-honed perception of reality. His encounters with both Heisenberg and Einstein testify to that. Tagore does not dismiss the difference between ‘scientific truth’ and what he hypothetically calls the ‘universal truth.’ He agrees that there are two kinds of truth: one scientific, the other universal; scientific truth ‘can only be reached through the process of logic,’ but that very logic is only ‘human’; hence scientific truth is dependent on human beings. Thus, science, human-dependent as it is, cannot lead us to an objective understanding of reality. His position may be characterized as ‘cosmic scepticism.’ Yet, he was emphatic in positing that modern culture must imbibe theoretical science as an inalienable part of its aesthetics. In the essay Āmār Jagat (My World, 1914), he says the mind is not merely a mirror that reflects reality, but a component (upakarana) of that reality. Here he records a mock debate between a poet and his scientist friend. This chapter represents a water-shed in Tagore’s ideas so far as the problems of subjectivity of art and the so-called objectivity of reductionist science are concerned. The two major components of Tagore’s mind vis-à-vis science are: ‘making playthings of facts’ fished out by scientists and deriving ‘pleasure,’ even ‘thrill,’ from the ‘analytical view of objective reality.’ As an example of Tagore’s cosmic scepticism sublimated into high poetry, one might consider the famous song Vānī mor nāhi, composed nearly at the end of his life (1939).
