Tagore’s Dark Vision of Humanity

Abstract

Tagore struggled against his dark vision of humanity to assert that the earth was a place of hierophanies and human life had a divine purpose. He failed. He called, with skepticism, for peace, equality and the restoration of earth’s loveliness: “I know I am crying in the wilderness, when I raise my voice of warning…” In a war-haunted and hungry Europe and Asia, he was confronted by a strange, cruel, and obstinately tribal world with its “legacy of ruin.” Though he asserted till his death in 1940 that he could never “commit the grievous sin of losing faith in man,” he could not turn away from “the crumbling ruins of … civilization….”