ABSTRACT
Though Tagore’s critique of Einstein’s notion of the human-independent reality of physical laws is well known, his contestation of the ‘scientific’ analysis of language is less so. After Suniti Kumar Chatterji’s magnum opus The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (1926) appeared, Tagore and Chatterji spent several months together in Indonesia. Their friendship was soon enlivened by articulate disagreement. Tagore’s 1938 description of the Bangla language, which contests the historical science of language as implemented by Chatterji, is best construed as a methodological reprise and a philosophical upscaling of his critique of Einstein. Such a construal becomes especially appropriate for readers of this volume, who need to deal with the fact that, in the course of the Chomsky revolution, mainstream linguistics – against whose foundations Tagore’s critique is directed – has forged intimate bonds with the methodology of physics itself.
