ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Rabindranath Tagore's important contribution towards conceptualizing a 'free' India as one that is linguistically unshackled. Roy Harris develops this thesis in one of his – inexplicably – almost unknown works, Sabdo Tattwo (ST) or The Essence of Words published at a time when India was still firmly under colonial dominion. Tagore's ST can be said to succeed to a great extent in undermining the epistemological basis of the colonial enterprise since his 'explanation' for the language structures he observes and describes derives from a quite different 'integrationist' base. Matters of language aesthetics and structural description are thus brought to bear upon the critical and currently febrile issue of 'creativity' in ST. Tagore's observations in ST are extremely valuable in opening the doors of integrationist linguistics to other kinds of linguistic theory today that consider the phenomena of embodiment and feeling as a natural and integral part of 'language'.
