ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by examining the literary techniques of realism as practiced and commented on by Rabindranath Tagore. In his fictional and non-fictional prose, no less than his poetry, Tagore offers a critique of the simple identification of ‘the real’ with the things of the world. This may be seen in his short essay ‘Bastab’ [The Real], first published in the journal Sabuj Patra in 1914 and later reprinted as the opening chapter of the volume Sahityer Pathe, 1936, where he appears to argue that ‘the real’ is an ideological construction, not a given of human perception. My reading will start by drawing examples from Tagore’s prose writings in order to investigate a literary debate on ‘realism,’ rather than a metaphysical questioning of ‘the nature of reality.’ In the concluding section, I turn to the disagreements between Einstein and Tagore in their conversations of July 1930. These disagreements, I argue, inhere in a difference of philosophical ground: first of all in different understandings of the term ‘human,’ second, in divergent conceptions of consciousness, and finally, on the impossibility of reconciling the physical with the metaphysical.
