The Journal of Hindu Studies Advance Access published June 26, 2011

The Journal of Hindu Studies 2011;1–25 doi:10.1093/jhindu/hir022

Father, Son and Holy Text: Rabindranath

Tagore and the Upanis. ads
Brian A. Hatcher*
Tufts University
*Corresponding author: Brian.Hatcher@tufts.edu

Abstract: The intellectual and spiritual world of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–

1941) was infused with the spirit of the ancient Upanis.ads. His love for the
Upanis.ads was shaped in large part by his father, Debendranath Tagore, who
had been an influential figure in re-invigorating the Vedantic theology of the
Br@hmo Sam@j, a reformist movement founded by Rammohan Roy in 1828.

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While the trajectory of Br@hmo-inspired Ved@ntic thought from Rammohan to
Rabindranath is well-known, the particular story of Rabindranath’s response to
his father’s Upanis.adic legacy merits greater attention for the window it pro-
vides into the existential factors shaping the religious views of modern India’s
greatest poet. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth, this
essay offers an interpretation of the father-son dynamic that lies at the heart of
Rabindranath’s Upanis.adic vision.

?kars.an.a-gun. e prema eka kare tole

Śakti śudhu be~dhe r@khe śikale śikale.
Rabindranath Tagore, Lekhana

Once upon a time in ancient India, a Vedic Brahmin named Uśan set out to offer
sacrifice before renouncing his worldly life. According to the rites of this particu-
lar sacrifice, Uśan was required to give away all his possessions in one final act of
supreme charity. As was customary, Uśan’s copious gifts were to be given to the
many priests officiating at the sacrifice as their ritual fee. This included all of
Uśan’s cattle.
Throughout the sacrifice, Uśan’s son, Naciketas, sat nearby watching as events
unfolded. Much of the ritual detail was surely lost on the young boy, but when his
father’s cattle were brought forward Naciketas understood all too well that they
were destined for the priests milling about the sacrificial arena. Naciketas looked
at the frail and emaciated cows and thought to himself that they did not

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2 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

amount to much. What kind of heavenly reward would his father get by offering
these? Without further thought, Naciketas piped up and said to his father,
‘To whom will you give me, father?’
Uśan was within earshot of the boy, but he chose to ignore the question. Such a
precocious lad, he no doubt thought. But Naciketas was not put off. He asked again,
‘To whom will you give me?’ And when Uśan once again ignored him, Naciketas
asked a third time. This was too much for Uśan, who barked at the boy: ‘I’ll give
you to death!’ (mr.tyave tv@ dad@mi).
So begins one of ancient India’s greatest mythic and spiritual narratives, a story
found in the Kat. ha Upanis.ad, composed sometime during the last centuries before
the Common Era.1 The Kat.ha Upanis.ad is one of ten or so canonical Upanis.ads and
is understood by many—both practicing Hindus and scholars alike—to represent
one of the most concise and compelling accounts of late Vedic religious values. In
the Kat.ha Upanis.ad, we learn of the need for transcending sacrificial ritual (viewed
as a ‘lower knowledge’ in Mun. d. aka Upanis.ad 1.5) in favor of the knowledge that
leads to liberation; in the Kat.ha for the first time we are introduced to the tech-

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niques of yoga; and we are led toward knowledge of the innermost Self (@tman)
hidden in the very depth of all beings (jantor nihito guh@y@m; Kat.ha 2.20).
The story will be familiar to most readers. How Naciketas’s father gives him over
to Yama, Lord of Death, in a fit of anger. How Naciketas arrived at Yama’s home
while the Lord of Death was away on business; how, as a result, Naciketas spent
three days in Yama’s house without receiving the proper ritual greetings due to a
Brahmin guest; and finally how Yama, when he returned to find Naciketas waiting
for him, proceeded to grant the young boy three wishes—three ‘boons’ (vara)—to
help allay what ought to have been the Brahmin’s anger at having been slighted by
his host.2
Of course, Yama did not know—as Uśan clearly did—that Naciketas was nothing
if not precocious. Yama was not going to get away with granting three simple
wishes of the kind most ordinary mortals might request—health, long life, and
happiness. Naciketas would ask much more of Yama. And what he got the Lord of
Death to reveal would become in turn the gift of the Kat. ha Upanis.ad—deep wisdom
regarding our fate after death, knowledge of a path more spiritually efficacious
than sacrifice, and the ability to discriminate between what is merely pleasing
(preyas) and what is ultimately good (śreyas).
If the Kat.ha Upanis.ad is, as Swami Chinmayananda (2008) has noted, a ‘dialogue
with death’, we should keep in mind that the first dialogue to be found in the text
takes place between father and son, Uśan and Naciketas. Recognizing this,
Yohanan Grinshpon (2003) in fact chooses to discuss the Kat. ha Upanis.ad under
the evocative heading: ‘The Case of the Good Boy and the Angry Father’. In
Grinshpon’s opinion, far from being mere narrative ornament, the conversation
between Uśan and Naciketas is in fact essential to the text. It leads us directly into
what Grinshpon (2003, p. 81) calls the ‘heated, dialogical space wherein knowledge
is transmitted and shared’. Grinshpon situates his interpretation of the Naciketas
 Brian A. Hatcher 3

story in relation to several other compelling conversations that can found dis-
persed throughout the Upanis.ads: Maitreya’s direct questioning of her husband
Y@jñavalkya regarding the ultimate path to deathlessness; Satyak@ma’s confronta-
tion with his once wayward mother concerning his true origins; or the comeup-
pance of the prideful student Śvetaketu at the hands of his father Udd@laka.3 These
narratives share with the story of Naciketas not just the format of direct dialogue,
but also characters who are also somehow ‘marginal’—women, bastards, and
smart-aleck children. As Grinshpon (2003, p. 81) sees it, these are figures whose
ultimate awakening is ‘forcefully embedded in contexts of inferiority and crisis’.
Grinshpon’s is but one creative interpretation of the significance of the
Upanis.ads, but nonetheless he provides us with two provocative ideas to carry
forward: the power of dialogue and the relationship between existential crisis and
transformative knowledge. With respect to the first point, Grinshpon offers a
welcome reminder that the Upanis.ads merit our attention even (if not exclusively)
as works of literature. Put differently, the Upanis.ads can be read as much more
than sourcebooks for the birth of ‘Hindu metaphysics’; they offer more than ‘phil-

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osophy’ narrowly construed. Indeed, if the Upanis.ads succeed in promoting new
ways of seeing ourselves and the world, they do so as works of literature. And at
the center of a great deal of Upanis.adic wisdom stand a series of transformative
dialogues. It is the dialogic context of the Upanis.adic teachings, their dramatic
mise en scène, which makes them the powerful works they are. Fittingly, these
dialogues promote the ultimate pedagogic purpose of the texts.4 As the examples
of Naciketas and Uśan or Maitreya and Y@jñavalkya reveal, it is often through
direct dialogue that truth is discovered.
A second theme highlighted by Grinshpon is that in the Upanis.ads transforma-
tive knowledge arises out of moments of profound crisis in particular lives. This is
precisely what makes the marginal characters so interesting. They tend to be the
ones who ask tough questions, questions that emerge from positions of vulner-
ability or weakness. The new awareness such characters gain is what catalyzes
fundamental transformations in their identity. At the level of metaphysics, the
quintessential question of the Upanis.ads is ‘Who are you—really?’ The classic an-
swers, enshrined in the ‘great sayings’ (mah@v@kya) so beloved of the philosophers,
are such affirmations as ‘I am Brahman’ (aham. brahm@smi) or ‘You are that’ (tat tvam
asi). These are, of course, the foundations upon which classical Hindu philosophers
like Śaṅkara or R@m@nuja are able to construct their classical philosophical sys-
tems. But long before that point, these statements emerge out of moments of crisis
just as they point toward profound personal and spiritual transformations.

Letting Tagore speak from the margins

In May 2011, we celebrated the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore
(1861–1941).5 The poet will surely be remembered and extolled in countless ways
over the entire year, but this time of increased visibility for Asia’s first Nobel
4 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

laureate should offer us more than just an occasion to praise the man, his work,
and his legacy. It hopefully also provides us with good reasons to scrutinize Tagore
from new and even unexpected vantage points. As one effort in that direction,
I would like to use the present article to push past the familiar Tagore to explore a
less familiar aspect of his poetic and philosophic legacy. In a sense, I would like to
situate Tagore in the margins. Because, if Grinshpon is correct, new questions and
new answers are often generated by marginal figures, by individuals immersed in
contexts of ‘inferiority and crisis’.
There are of course, some dangers here. To begin with, one might ask what
reason there is for connecting Grinshpon’s literary interpretation of the Upanis.ads
with the life and legacy of a modern Indian intellectual like Tagore. Would any
connections or parallels we might identify be anything more than speculative
fancy? Secondly, it would be fair to ask in what possible ways a figure like
Tagore could be called ‘marginal’. After all, he was born into a prominent and
(at times) highly prosperous urban, high-caste family; his circumstances were, by
contemporary standards, immensely comfortable and the cultural atmosphere he

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breathed was highly rarified and refined. If the Tagores were marginal we might
say they were so only in the way all elites are, not least the high-born genteel folk
(abhij@t bhadralok) of colonial Calcutta. And would that sort of marginality, pre-
dicated on socioeconomic superiority, be of interest to us? It would not. And surely
for some the privileged quality of Tagore’s lifeworld undercuts the force of his
meditations on freedom, truth, and understanding. I am sympathetic to such a
view, but it misses the point of the present exercise. I hope, in fact, to explore
another dimension of marginality, one that in Tagore’s case becomes visible
thanks to Grinshpon’s reflections on the transmission of Upanishadic wisdom.
It should come as no great revelation to point out that Rabindranath Tagore was
deeply influenced by the Upanis.ads. Their imagery, their vitality, and their reli-
gious vision were like the very air he breathed. This is not to rule out other
important sources of inspiration for Tagore, such as Bengali Vais.n. avism or the
spirituality of the B@uls.6 But it is to say that such influences notwithstanding,
there remains in Tagore a powerful measure of debt to the Upanis.ads. Their
humble narratives, their concrete materializations of abstract truths, and their
diverse and striking spiritual utterances all reverberate throughout his writing.
Tagore is by no means unique among modern Indian intellectuals in this regard;
his recourse to the Upanis.ads is echoed to some degree in the work of several of
his contemporaries, from Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghosh to Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan. Indeed, each of these figures represents one vital link between the
early modern reinterpretation of the Upanis.ads set in motion by Rammohan Roy
and the proliferation of modern Ved@ntic movements within Hinduism worldwide.
This modern trajectory of the Upanis.ads, or the Ved@nta, is of immense import-
ance for the intellectual history of modern South Asia and the Hindu tradition.7
However, that is not the line of inquiry I want to pursue here.8 Instead of situating
Tagore and the Upanis.ads within the general domain of modern Hindu thought, I
 Brian A. Hatcher 5

want to zero in on the particularity of Tagore’s relationship to the Upanis.ads. The

goal is to ask how and why he read the Upanis.ad as he did. What factors shaped his
appropriation of, response to, and repurposing of these texts?
For this purpose, Grinshpon provides us with a useful heuristic device. As a kind
of thought experiment prompted by Grinshpon’s reading of the Kat.ha Upanis.ad,
I would like to develop a parallel between Naciketas and Rabindranath. The central
element for developing this parallel lies in the theme of dialogue between father
and son. We know that in Naciketas’s case it is his father Uśan who sets in motion
the crucial events that will transform his son’s vision of reality. In Tagore’s case I
would like to propose that it is again the father who plays a decisive role. In this
reading, it is Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) who appears in the role of Uśan; it
is Debendranath who deliberately drives his boy toward a series of discoveries in
relation to the holy texts he himself held dear, the Upanis.ads. In both cases, it is
the power and the precariousness of the father–son relationship that precipitates
the breakthrough to new knowledge; but in both cases the impelling force of the
father is not enough to account for the discoveries made by the son. It is here that

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the significance of marginality lies—in the unformed and fragile, yet also potent
character of the child’s perspective—and not in the question of socioeconomic
empowerment.

Father, son, and holy text

Commenting on Kat. ha Upanis.ad, Govindagopal Mukherjee reminds us that the first
boon requested by Naciketas from Yama is to have his father’s wrath appeased.
Naciketas knows that even though his father was wrong to have given him to
Yama, without his father’s blessing there can be no successful end to his spiritual
search. Mukherjee uses the fact of Naciketas’s initial request to hone in on the
special characteristics of the father–son relationship in ancient India. As
Mukherjee (1960) puts it, the father places a kind of burden on the son to profit
from what he passes on:

The son does not only inherit the material properties and earthly belongings of
his father after he passes away, but the whole spiritual inheritance accrues to
him. He must enrich the inheritance, so he has to take the torch entrusted and
handed over to him further in regions left unexplored by his predecessor and
continue his march from the place where his father fell, who charges him to
complete the journey which he could not finish.

For Mukherjee, the key element in the relationship between Uśan and Naciketas is
that of ‘entrusting’ (sampratti or samprad@na). He refers to the Br.had@ran. yaka
Upanis.ad, in which we read, ‘When [a father] who has this knowledge departs
this world, he enters into his son with [all] these faculties (pr@n.a). Whatever wrong
he may have done, his son frees him from it all’.9 As this passage suggests, in the
6 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

Upanis.adic context, it was understood that the act of entrusting from father to son
carried two important meanings. On the one hand, we have the father who passes
on to the son his very vital force, or pr@n.a; on the other, we have the son, who by
receiving his father’s bequest, redeems him from his sins.
We may recall here that for Rabindranath the essence of the Upanis.ads lay not
in mere acts of intellect (manas), but in the vital force (pr@n.a). The Upanis.ads
were in some sense synonymous with pr@n.a itself. One of Rabindranath’s favorite
passages was a line in praise of pr@n.a taken from the Kat.ha Upanis.ad (2.3.2): yat
kiñca yadidam. sarvam. pr@n.a ejati nih. sr.tam—‘All that there is comes out of life and
vibrates in it’.10 And how did Rabindranath come to this vital truth? From his
father, of course. It was Debendranath who entrusted his own faith in the
Upanis.ads to Rabindranath beginning when his son was just a young boy. It is
worth recalling that Debendranath modeled his life on the wisdom of Upanis.adic
sages. Not only did he come to be revered by his contemporaries as a ‘Great
Seer’ (mahars.i), but more importantly for our purposes, having heard what the
brahmav@dins taught, he also sought to transmit that same wisdom to his son.

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The lasting imprint of the father’s holy texts on the boy is nowhere more
apparent than in the Bengali sermons or homilies that Rabindranath used to de-
liver for morning worship at his @śram-school in Ś@ntiniketan (which he had
founded in 1901). In fact, the immediate environs for these discourses was a
grove of chatim (Sanskrit, saptaparn. a) trees that had been the focal point of
Debendranath’s own spiritual attachment to the locale, an attachment that
dated from a time long before his son established his school there (Dutta and
Robinson 1996). Debendranath had already been struck by the calmness and sanc-
tity of the vicinity some two years before Rabindranath was born. He eventually
acquired property there and liked to visit the site for the purposes of contempla-
tion. Rabindranath was first introduced to this sacred place in 1872 when he
stopped there with his father on their way to the Himalayas in the boy’s first
momentous journey beyond Calcutta. While today Ś@ntiniketan is synonymous
with Rabindranath, it bears remembering that the place—and its on-going mission
to rekindle and pass on the spiritual ideal of the Upanis.ads—was in a very real
sense entrusted to Rabindranath by his father.
Over time, an entire liturgical calendar and extended habitus of worship would
develop at Ś@ntiniketan under Rabindranath’s hand. This too would center on the
grove of chatim trees so dear to Debendranath. And one date in particular would
become central: the 7th of Pous. (roughly 22 or 23 December). This was the date in
1843 when Debendranath had formally consecrated his life to worship the ‘One
true God’ by taking initiation into the Br@hmo Sam@j.11 From this date forward,
Debendranath became the driving force and spiritual leader behind a revived
Br@hmo Sam@j, the reformist association originally founded by Rammohan Roy
in 1828 (but which had become moribund after Rammohan’s death in England in
1833).
 Brian A. Hatcher 7

All of these factors meant that the date of 7 Pous. had powerful resonances for
Rabindranath. At the personal level, it marked a connection to the core of his
father’s spiritual quest; and at an institutional level, it became the calendrical
marker of Br@hmo identity throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth
century. Needless to say, on the personal and the institutional level, the further
consolidating forces were the texts of the Upanis.ads. When we read Rabindranath’s
sermons in the sacred grove at Ś@ntiniketan, then, we cannot help but find in them
a self-conscious attempt to honor his father’s spiritual bequest. At the same time,
these sermons represent Rabindranath’s attempt to build upon the legacy
entrusted to him by his father. In the life and work of Rabindranath, especially
at Ś@ntiniketan, the life force—the pr@n.a—of Debendranath continued to vibrate.
This vital force animated Rabindranath’s poetic attempts to repurpose his father’s
beloved texts, outfitting them to new ends.
One of the most pregnant Upanis.adic texts for Rabindranath was drawn from
the same Kat.ha Upanis.ad as the Naciketas story. It comes from a moment near the
end of Yama’s instruction of Naciketas when the boy is exhorted to act upon the

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wisdom imparted by Yama. The by-now rather famous words, in Sanskrit, are
uttis.t.hata j@grata pr@pya var@n nibodhata. For Rabindranath, these words were rich
with meaning, as they have been for commentators over the centuries. His essay
Manus.yatva (‘Humanity’) commences with this passage. In that context,
Rabindranath provides one possible translation of the Sanskrit: ‘Get up, wake
up, find your proper teachers and acquire awareness’.12 For Tagore, these were
among the most potent of words. As he put it in one of his morning sermons at
Ś@ntiniketan, these words constituted a veritable ‘mantra of awakening’ (j@garan. a
mantra).13 No doubt because he found in them such mantra-like power, Tagore
used these words—and the central trope of awakening—over and over again for a
variety of purposes.14 He seems never to have been interested in the passage in
relation to the text of the Kat.ha Upanis.ad in the way a philologist might be. He was,
after all, not a scholar but a poet. We might say that he frequently repurposed
these pregnant words to meet what Grinshpon (2003, p. 5) might call his ‘exist-
ential’ needs.15
One of the most existentially compelling cases of repurposing occurs in Tagore’s
allusion to this text on the occasion of the 7 Pous. festival of 1908, just three years
after Debendranath’s death. On that occasion, Tagore spoke to the @śram residents
about the day his father took formal initiation (daks.@) into the Br@hmo Sam@j. In
this passage, we begin to sense the lasting significance of 7 Pous., a day that is for
Rabindranath synonymous both with his father and with the spiritual need for
awakening.

This day, 7 Pous., belongs to someone whose consciousness was suddenly awa-
kened (jege ut.hechilo) from its comfortable couch of pleasure; this is
Debendranath’s day. And he has given to us this very day for our benefit,
just as someone might give a jewel to another . . . He himself did not even
8 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

know just what this day might hold; that was something only his inner-
controller, the dispenser of his fate, could know.16

The image of his father’s lassitude up to the day of his awakening point is by no
means insignificant. Before discovering God, Debendranath’s life was the very
image of lazy indolence and spiritual anomie. In fact, it was apparently out of a
fear that Debendranath was morally, if not spiritually, adrift that his father
Dwarkanath arranged for his son to assume a position of responsibility in the
Union Bank (which Dwarkanath had founded in 1829 along with European and
Indian investors). Clearly, Dwarkanath thought the cure for his son’s lack of moral
direction would come through greater involvement in the work of the world.17
However, it was not to be the bank that got Debendranath up from his ‘couch of
pleasure’.
The other point to note about this passage is that Rabindranath is careful to
remind the @śram inmates that his father’s initiation did not mean a comfortable
transition into a life of peace and tranquility. Rather, his awakening and subse-

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quent decision to commit to the Br@hmo faith amounted to a kind of baptism by
fire (agnidaks.@). In time, his father’s personal life would be completely remade; he
would find himself forced to pull away from friends, relations, and wealth.
Rabindranath would like his audience to realize that far from living a life of
quiet meditation epitomized by the downcast gaze of the yoga, Debendranath
lived with his eyes wide open. Henceforth, in the words of Rabindranath, his
father would have to live day and night as if he were wide awake (ratridin j@grata
th@kte habe). His days of slumber were over.
The point for Rabindranath was not simply to honor the past spiritual achieve-
ments of his father, but to challenge his audience (and no doubt himself) to make
ready to accept what his father had (in Govindagopal Mukherjee’s terms) entrusted
to them—the chance to become awake themselves. Here was a call to rise up and
muster the strength to embrace the truth themselves. Nothing spoke of this need
for awakening more powerfully than the words of the Kat.ha Upanis.ad. These form
the scriptural pretext for yet another morning sermon he composed in the fall of
1908, not long before the anniversary of his father’s initiation. The sermon shows
the poet’s gift for reframing the original text of the Upanis.ad:

Along with the sun, the lord comes in the morning to wake us and chase away
the deep slumber of the night. But how will we break through the twilight
delusion of the evening? How can we lead our minds from the work and worries
of the day into calm and clear peace? Our consciousness is caught in the densest
webs of finitude . . . How can we liberate ourselves and awaken to the infinite?
Hey—get up, wake up!

All day long we are tied up in one difficulty after another by our work and our
worries. If we don’t alert our consciousness, if we don’t hear the mantra of
 Brian A. Hatcher 9

awakening—‘get up, wake up’—sounding within every little aspect of our daily
lives, we become insensate. We fall prey to the idea that all the outer raiments
of our world are the truth and that there is nothing beyond; we lose faith in the
completely liberated pure eternal truth . . . Therefore, all day long, amid the
endless cacophony of daily events, let the words ‘hey, get up, wake up’ resound
like the sound of an ektara in the depths of your mind.18

These are Rabindranath’s words, but we can hear echoed in them his father’s own
awakening. There is, in fact, something awesome—that is, in the original sense of
being filled with an overwhelming sense of power—in this carrying forward by the
son of the father’s spiritual quest. But at the same time, the poetic conceits and
imagery clearly belong to the son. We can see Rabindranath actively retooling his
father’s experience and the underlying message of uttis..thata j@grata.

Between father and son

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It is the awesome quality of the inheritance—the fiery legacy of the father’s spir-
itual awakening—that reminds us of Grinshpon’s assertion that in ancient India
the wisdom of the Upanis.ads oftentimes emerged from moments of crisis experi-
enced by marginal figures. Now, in view of the critical concerns we confronted
earlier, it bears repeating that there is some risk in drawing our analogy too
tightly. Obviously, the Tagores lived in colonial Bengal, not ancient India, and
we have already seen the problems that arise when attempting to construe
Rabindranath’s life as somehow ‘marginal’. Yet we have also established the
powerful Upanis.adic framework behind Rabindranath’s spiritual formation and
it is worth just pressing once more on the issue of marginality. For while one
could say he led a somewhat charmed existence, we would be remiss if we did not
recognize the pain and dis-ease he faced at the most existential level. There is a
context of marginality here that can serve to illuminate for us the force of the new
questions he posed and the new answers he developed.
We might begin with the recognition that the Tagores were not simply
Brahmins. They belonged to the socially stigmatized class of Pirali Brahmins,
who had lost the prerogatives and prestige of Brahmin status by virtue of a
breach of caste rules committed by a distant ancestor. In relation to orthodox
Brahmin communities in Bengal, the Tagores lived ‘at the edge of the Hindu pale’,
as Dutta and Robison (1996, p. 17) so nicely put it.19 What is more, the Tagores
had—since the time of Debendranath’s father Dwarkanath—allied themselves with
the marginal (which is to say effectively unorthodox) reforms of Rammohan Roy
and the Br@hmo Sam@j. The Br@hmo rejection of the purported errors of polythe-
ism, idolatry, and other popular Hindu customs served to put the Tagores at odds
with their contemporaries.20 Finally, this was a precociously artistic and creative
family—a veritable ‘celebration of eccentricity’ (Dutta and Robinson 1996, p. 37).
One may view such aestheticism as a marker of elitism, but this is not to gainsay
10 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

the element of eccentricity. The Tagores as a family were people who moved at a
tangent to—if not in tension with—prevailing social norms and practices.
That speaks to the marginality of the Tagore family overall. But what about
Rabindranath himself? While he was not a social outcast on the order of a
Satyak@ma, do we not recognize in him the traits of a misfit? His life-story is
well-known and need not be rehearsed in detail here, but its basic features are
revealing.21 From his earliest years (the youngest child of thirteen surviving sib-
lings, no less) Rabindranath rarely sat comfortably in the world. In his autobiog-
raphy, he provides telling insights into his childhood and youth. He allows us to
see him as the scion of an aristocratic family, who came of age cloistered for the
most part in an expansive family mansion. There he fell prey to the whims of
countless servants and, in turn, sought solace in private flights of fancy. Those rare
times when his peripatetic father was home he remained aloof. As pater familias
and Mahars.i, Debendranath was treated by all with a kind of cautious regard. How
much more august must he have appeared to the youngest of his sons? And when
Rabindranath was sent off to school it became clear that he would find it a chal-

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lenge to conform to the drudgery and routine.22
As a fourteen-year-old, Rabindranath exercised his poetic skills under the
pseudonym of Bh@nu Singh—a gesture of self-distancing and an arch literary
prank that must be of interest in this context.23 And, of course, Rabindranath
came of age during the heydays of the British Raj. Therefore, any sense he may
have had of personal and familial marginality would surely have been com-
pounded by imperialist accusations of inferiority, both as a Bengali and an
Indian. One response to this predicament was precisely to accentuate the need
for eccentricity, personal rebellion, and courage (Hatcher 2011). Such eccentricity
would make him in later life almost notorious, since there were times when he
appeared to embrace a cause like Indian nationalism only to turn away at the very
moment when people hoped to enlist him in their ranks. In the end, he was a
fundamentally lonely figure, as Uma Dasgupta (2004) has noted, a major public
figure with few real friends. This loneliness, this dis-ease, mark the sort of
‘marginality’ that pointed him toward crisis and, beyond crisis, to greatness.
Rabindranath’s respect for the lonely rebel is plain to see from the eulogistic
accounts he gave of three of his major Bengali predecessors: Rammohan Roy,
Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, and his own father, Debendranath.24 A single comment
on Vidyasagar is telling in this respect: ‘A society in which one man is pretty much
the same as the next man and one time is pretty much like some other time, is
basically dead to ultimate value’.25 That Rabindranath was inspired to write about
his own father in the same vein as he had written about two of the most revered—
and idiosyncratic—figures in nineteenth-century Bengal, suggests something about
the force of his father’s personality. Couple this with the central role played by
Upanis.adic wisdom in the father–son relationship and it is difficult not to harken
back to the story of Uśan and Naciketas.
 Brian A. Hatcher 11

Thinking of Debendranath’s relationship to his son, Niharranjan Ray has

written:

Despite all his saintliness, the father was sufficiently worldy-wise never to
forget his parental duties to his youngest son. He was a strict disciplinarian
and saw to it that the young boy went through faithfully all the scores of his
rigid routine. Among other things, he read with his son selected pieces of
Sanskrit, Bengali and English literature, gave him lessons in astronomy, litera-
ture and Sanskrit grammar, and made the boy sing for him devotional songs in
Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit. But what left the deepest and most abiding im-
pression on the boy’s sensibilities was the father’s chanting, every morning, of
the most pregnant verses of the Upanishads.26

Ray’s language effectively captures the tension inherent in the father–son rela-
tionship, especially as it centers on the transmission or ‘entrusting’ (to use
Mukherjee’s term) of wisdom. The emphasis on the father’s ‘discipline’ is clear;
there are things the father ‘makes’ the son do.27 Importantly, the imposition of this

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discipline and the demands of the father can be said to include the transmission
from father to son of Sanskrit learning and, above all, the Upanis.ads. We can feel
the force of the father’s personality in those morning sessions chanting the
Upanishads.28 Indeed, in his autobiography, Rabindranath remarks on how he
had to rise very early in the Himalayas to recite the Upanis.ads with his father.
Then, after lunch, his father would insist on more lessons. The boy apparently
often found it difficult to keep awake in the afternoon and would occasionally be
excused by his father.29 Just as Naciketas’s questions to Yama emerge from a
dramatic flare up with his father, so too might we say that Rabindranath’s even-
tual repurposing of the Upanis.ads was prompted and shaped by his father.
As we have seen, Debendranath’s life had been profoundly changed on 7 Pous.,
when he formally adopted the Br@hmo faith. But this momentous day had deeper
roots that are crucial to lay bare here, because what brought Debendranath to this
point in his life was a chance encounter with a passage from the Upanis.ads. It was
this piece of wisdom that forced Debendranath to decide whether he would con-
tinue in the path chosen for him by his father Dwarkanath. The story is
well-known and again we are fortunate to have Debendranath’s own account of
it from his autobiography.30 For this reason, I will not recount the events in detail.
Suffice it to say that, as we have seen, up to this time Debendranath had been
working at the Union Bank. But almost by chance he stumbled on a stray page
containing the words of the opening verse of the `ś@ Upanis.ad: aś@v@syam idam.
sarvam. yatkiñca jagaty@m. jagat / tena tyaktena bhuñjatha m@ gr.dh@ kasysvit dhanam:
‘This whole world is pervaded by the Lord, every moving thing that moves within
it. Abandoning it, you may enjoy it, but do not covet the wealth of others’.
The advent of this passage was Debendranath’s road to Damascus. He came to
see the omnipresence and supremacy of God and to appreciate the need to restrain
12 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

one’s worldly appetites in service of higher goals. Henceforth his life would be
oriented toward God. As he would later put it, this God is not an empty (ś+nya)
concept like Brahman, but the highest reality (vastu); he is our father (pit@), pre-
sent right here, both with us and within us.31 How was it, Debendranath would ask,
that we could think of God as distant? Why did people not realize that all one
needed was the keen desire to see God and he would reveal himself to us?
The essential thing, as he saw it, was that we should not forget God.32 Such was
the force of Debendranath’s Upanis.adic awakening; such was the making of the
Mahars.i.33
As I have said, this moment in Debendranath’s life would become a kind of
defining myth both for Br@hmos and for the Tagore family—not least the youngest
son, Rabindranath. Debendranath’s resolution of his own spiritual crisis through
the disruptive incursion of the `ś@ Upanis.ad set in motion a series of developments
that were definitive for his own life and the future of Br@hmo-inspired reform in
Bengal. In 1839, he would establish the Tattvabodhina Sabh@, a society dedicated to
propagating the truth of Upanis.adic monotheism; in time the Sabh@ would merge

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with, and reinvigorate, the Br@hmo Sam@j. In 1843, the Sabh@ began publishing the
Tattvabodhina Patrik@, which became one of the most influential Bengali journals of
its day.34 Over the succeeding decades, Debendranath would be at the very center
of elite, reformist religious life in Calcutta. Rabindranath, who was born in 1861,
came of age during the period when his father’s spiritual vision and public persona
had fully matured. The father’s enormous influence and earnest dedication to the
Br@hmo movement would have had a forceful impact on the boy. In this respect, it
is not enough simply to call attention to Debendranath’s habit of chanting from
the Upanis.ads nor to highlight the father’s long sojourns in the Himalayas. The
father was the Mahars.i and the full force of his spiritual persona left its imprint on
the boy.35
In this respect, there is no point avoiding what had to have been the somewhat
darker side of Debendranath’s influence on the young Rabindranath. As Dutta and
Robinson (1996, p. 56) point out, the father’s influence was in many ways an
inhibiting one. To begin with, as one of Rabindranath’s prominent biographers
points out, ‘in those days the gap between the old and the young was wide and
quite unbridgeable’.36 As we have already seen, Rabindranath spent much of his
time with the servants, who lorded their power over him quite directly.37 Can we
doubt that a young boy who commented wittily on the tyranny of the family’s
servants—and who chafed at the confining regimes of early school life—would
have at times experienced his father’s lofty religious conviction and rigorous
spiritual discipline as a kind of benign tyranny?38
The transmission of a legacy, even a spiritual legacy, places a kind of burden on
the child. Likewise, a profound spiritual vision enacted upon a boy in the form of a
daily discipline can itself become a form of oppression. While I would not wish to
exaggerate this point, we should not avoid it out of fear of tarnishing our image of
the father–son relationship. Whether one follows Freud or not, the dynamic is a
 Brian A. Hatcher 13

real one and it may well be that addressing it directly can aid us in thinking more
concretely about the way the son built upon the gifts and the responsibilities
transmitted to him by the father.
As a rule, Rabindranath writes respectfully and even reverentially of his father.
This of course makes it hard to recover some of the ambivalence in their relation-
ship. That said, there is a passage in Rabindranath’s autobiography that is fasci-
nating in this regard. For this one brief moment we are allowed to hear the boy
speak with complete candor (though we know, of course, that the passage was
crafted by the mature writer at a much later date). I cite here the English trans-
lation, My Reminiscences, if only for its evocative language:

My father hardly ever stayed at home, he was constantly roaming about. His
rooms on the third story used to remain shut up. I would pass my hands
through the venetian shutters, and thus opening the latch get the door open,
and spend the afternoon lying motionless on his sofa at the south end. First of
all it was a room always closed, and then there was the stolen entry, this gave it

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a deep flavour of mystery.

I would interrupt Rabindranath at this point to suggest how much there is to

ponder. We have an absent father and a forbidden room; we witness the inquisitive
young hands groping for cracks in the shutters through which to gain access;
whether intentionally or not, Rabindranath evokes a powerful tension between
the father’s energetic spiritual wanderings and the young boy’s almost deliberate
indolence. The passage recounts an innocent, but nonetheless willful violation of
paternal authority.
But there is more. Rabindranath goes on to remark that this particular room was
supplied with running water, itself a kind of marvel and luscious treat for the boy.
And this provided the opportunity for some further mischief on the part of the
young burglar:

Turning on the shower-tap I would indulge to my heart’s content in an un-

timely bath, – not so much for the comfort of it, as to give rein to my desire to
do just as I fancied. The alternation of the joy of liberty, and the fear of being
caught, made that shower of municipal water send arrows of delight thrilling
into me.39

This is rather powerful stuff! In this brief passage, Rabindranath confesses to a

secret crime based in nothing other than pure selfish will (icch@, in the original).
And though he does not say it explicitly, we infer that this ‘stolen entry’, if de-
tected, would not have gone unpunished. This of course must have made it all the
more thrilling. Again, one scarcely needs Freud to catch the frisson of sexual ex-
citement here. The English translation captures this nicely, picturing the boy
being pierced by ‘arrows of delight’ as the forbidden water runs freely over his
14 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

naked body. Yet we need not go this far in order to establish the point I wish to
emphasize. What we have here is a young, precocious, and willful boy acting out
vis-à-vis a lofty, if distant father. Is there no echo here of Naciketas?
Naciketas’s question to his father had been, ‘To whom will you give me?’ That is
perhaps just another way of asking, ‘What part may I play in all this religious
work of yours, father?’ In Rabindranath’s case, a question is also posed to the
father, though never so directly as in Naciketas’s case. That question would be
something like, ‘What am I to do with these Upanis.ads you have entrusted me
with, father?’

Ś@ntiniketan and the Upanis. adic legacy

To some degree, Rabindranath answered his own question by pursuing his great
educational experiment at Ś@ntiniketan. The @śram-school and many of its deepest
spiritual and cultural associations were entrusted to him by Debendranath. It was

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Debendranath who had originally been drawn to quiet precincts outside Bolpur;
for him it was a place profoundly associated with meditation and retreat. As we
have seen, it was here that Debendranath broke journey with his son when the two
of them left on their first journey together, their long sojourn to the Himalayas.
This was the place where Rabindranath first began to draw ‘nearer’ to his hitherto
aloof and distant father.40 For Rabindranath, his father, the Upanis.ads, and
Ś@ntiniketan were in a sense synonymous.
But Rabindranath’s commitment to Ś@ntiniketan was not merely a dead inher-
itance; it was also for him a living project. If it was at Ś@ntiniketan that father and
son were first drawn together, so too it was here that Rabindranath would set
himself apart from his father. In ways never envisioned by Debendranath,
Rabindranath saw that Ś@ntiniketan could not simply be a sanctuary for withdraw-
al; it also needed to become an epicenter from which to sponsor constructive
change in the world. The father’s retreat became the son’s laboratory. This dual
dynamic—between spiritual realization and energetic engagement—shapes the
message delivered by Rabindranath in so many of his morning addresses to the
@śram inmates (@śramav@sa). On one occasion, for instance, Tagore actively worked
to retool his father’s holy texts toward a new understanding of the ancient notion
of action (karma). In an address entitled simply ‘Action’, Rabindranath reminded
his listeners that for India’s ‘sectaries of religious knowledge’ (jñ@nisamprad@y)
salvation was typically defined as complete escape from action. He went on to
say that even though the logic of renunciation constituted a fundamental teaching
of the Upanis.ads, it need not be the only teaching. He chose a passage from
Taittiraya Upanis.ad and began his own modern-day commentary:

yato v@ im@ni bh+t@ni j@yante, yena j@t@ni javanti,

yat prayantyabhisam.viśanti, tadvijijñasasva, tadbrahma.41
 Brian A. Hatcher 15

Know that it is Brahman from which all beings are born and by which they live;
It is Brahman into which they merge when they go from here.

After reciting this verse Rabindranath wondered aloud: If Brahman forms the basis
of all activity in the universe, does this mean that Brahman is bound by the web of
its own activity? To this question he answers no, because the same Upanis.ad goes
on to say that Brahman is also pure bliss (@nanda):

@nand@dhyeva khalvim@ni bh+tani j@yante, @nandena j@t@ni javanti,

@nandam. prayantyabhisam.viśanti.42

It is bliss from which all beings are born and it is by bliss that they live;
It is bliss into which they merge when they go from here.

For Tagore this pair of verses from Taittiraya Upanis.ad suggested that work is in fact
of two kinds. On the one hand, there is the kind of work that is occasioned by our

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awareness of need or want. This is what we might think of as ordinary worldly
work. On the other hand, there is another kind of work that is not driven by need,
but flows from sheer bliss. These two kinds of work are thus diametrically opposed
to one another. While the former kind of work binds us inexorably to the world,
Tagore argued that we are in fact ‘free within the action we perform out of bliss’.43
From here Rabindranath went on to weave together further citations not only
from his father’s beloved `ś@ Upanis.ad, but also from the Bhagavad-gat@, two texts
that are concerned to reconcile the paths of work and liberation. The message
works to overturn the Upanis.ads apparent fear of action as confining and their
praise for renunciation as liberative. In a subsequent sermon in fact, Rabindranath
would argue outright that anyone who does nothing, who is focused only on
himself, is no better than a prisoner. Liberation (mukti), he concluded, consists
of reorienting our action from a focus on ourselves to a focus on what is ultimately
real.44
Now there is nothing especially new in Rabindranath’s attempt to bring the
ethic of worldly work into harmony with the higher teaching of the Upanis.ads
regarding salvation. In fact, his interpretation here is clearly indebted to earlier
attempts by Br@hmo thinkers to rescue the Upanis.ads from what they took to be a
restrictive and unproductive ethic of renunciation (sam.ny@sa). Both Rammohan
Roy and Debendranath Tagore had been pioneers in this kind of retooling of the
Upanis.ads; both sought in these texts sanction for the idea of the ‘godly house-
holder’ (brahmanis..tha gr.hastha).45 Their vision of spiritual practice made worship of
God directly conformable to the demands and desires of what we might call bour-
geois (or bhadralok) life in early colonial Calcutta.
But between the first half of the nineteenth century, when this Br@hmo-inspired
vision was first fleshed out, and the beginning of the twentieth century, when
Rabindranath established Ś@ntiniketan, the intellectual and political climate had
16 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

changed radically. British imperialism had swung into high gear; Indian hopes of
participating directly and equally in colonial public life and government service
were largely dashed; and as a result of both developments, new appeals to the
language of cultural nationalism and independence were beginning to be more
openly made. Put simply, in Rabindranath’s lifetime the harsher realities of colo-
nial hegemony really began to be apparent. Running up to the Swadeshi agitation
of 1905, the quest was no longer simply for spiritual answers but for spiritual
answers that spoke to political aspirations. This context is important to bear in
mind, since Rabindranath’s published sermons from Ś@ntiniketan largely date
from around 1908–1909, right in the aftermath of the tumultuous Swadeshi agita-
tion. They need to be read, at least in part, as the attempt to articulate a legitimate
Indian identity and mode of action appropriate for a time of colonial oppression.46
Rabindranath’s reading of the Upanis.ads had to be, as a result, very different from
that of his father—no matter how much he drew upon his father’s legacy. Clearly
the Ś@ntiniketan sermons are imbued with the sanctity of @śram worship; they do
seem to breathe the very pr@n.a of his father’s beloved Upanis.ads. But we do well to

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read them as offering more than a restatement of his father’s faith.
The Ś@ntiniketan sermons reveal one context in which that single, evocative
passage from the Kat.ha Upanis.ad, uttis.t.hata j@grata pr@pya var@n nibodhata, took on
its fullest meaning for Rabindranath. As it had been for Vivekananda, this passage
was for Rabindranath a clarion call to awakening; this was the mantra to imbue
students with a sense of agency and urgency. But it was also a conveniently pliable
maxim thanks to the root metaphor of awakening. Throughout the Ś@ntiniketan
sermons the metaphor comes into play in a variety of senses. As such we are able
to see the poet at work, actively repurposing the Upanis.adic message as something
relevant and richly coded.47
Sometimes for Rabindranath, awakening means coming to one’s senses in order
to engage energetically with the world; it means beginning to act with śakti. In a
sermon entitled ‘The Present Age’, Rabindranath tells the residents of Ś@ntiniketan
that they are fortunate to live in an unprecedented era of communication and
connectivity, an age just beginning to wake up to potentialities never before
imagined:

All around the world the spirit of humanity is awakening. Just as a tree sheds its
dry leaves to make way for fresh blossoms, so too humanity has felt the winds
of powerful change and is suddenly anxious to make itself anew.48

Sometimes awakening is less about energy and life than about the overcoming of
previous error.49 In this respect, awakening means coming to a more profound
understanding of reality; it speaks of liberation from darkness, superstition, leth-
argy, and forgetfulness. Waking up is the key to resolving our deepest doubts. As
he says, doubt produces pain. Yet we have to be thankful for this kind of pain
because it reminds us that we are not yet satisfied; we have not found God.
 Brian A. Hatcher 17

To overcome such doubt we must wake up from our forgetfulness. ‘Let a deeper
more profound pain strike me that shakes me from my insensateness’, he prays
aloud. Doubt is like slumber is like death, but to awaken is to see the world
illuminated anew:

We live from cradle to grave as if the lord of the universe has no place in this
world. We fail to see him in the marvelous light that wakes us at dawn. Just as
we are lulled to sleep by the unblinking celestial lights, we fail to experience His
form as it stretches from horizon to horizon as if in a magnificent
bedchamber.50

While all of these examples play upon the basic idea of moving from darkness into
daylight, there are times when Rabindranath turns the tables and lets the em-
phasis fall not on illumination and daylight, but on darkness and night. Suddenly it
is darkness that is valued because, unlike the busy world of daylight, nighttime
brings equipoise, peace, and the enfolding comfort of divine protection. For

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Tagore, this nocturnal solace is experienced in terms of the liberative potential
of love (prema). As he would put it in English, ‘I feel thy beauty, dark night, like
that of the loved woman when she has put out the lamp’.51 In the comforting
darkness all our worldly energy (śakti) gives way to love.
Here I think in particular of a sermon Rabindranath delivered at the Pous. fes-
tival in Ś@ntiniketan in 1903, which was subsequently published in the journal
Baṅgadarśan. The title of the essay is, fittingly, ‘Day and Night’ (Din o r@tri).52 The
passage is remarkable on several counts. First, there are the familiar quotations
from the Upanis.ads; second, there are the equally familiar themes of waking and
slumbering; but third, and perhaps most striking, the sermon offers a glimpse of
Rabindranath carrying on a tense and fruitful dialogue with his father. The sermon
is not long. I hope by paraphrasing it here I will be able to capture some of its
essential themes. Rabindranath speaks:

The sun sets; the world goes dark. The sun rises; a new day begins. Ordinarily
we don’t really take much notice of this endless rhythm; but isn’t it rather
marvelous? Can we not feel a kind of pulse here? Is there not some deeper
significance to this law of movement? For instance, we notice the dramatic
transitions from day to night and back to day. And yet, at the same time, we feel
no sense of revolution within such changes; instead, all is characterized by a
kind of peace (ś@nti).

Daylight encourages us to see all things as separate and drives us to each go

about our separate work. It is the time of focused activity in disparate channels.
Then night creeps up and drops its deep blue cloak over everything. All is
plunged into unity. This is why nightime is the time of love. The night does
not simply take things away from us; it doesn’t just leave us an empty space in
18 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

which to rest and dream. Night actually provides a mighty realm in which to
love.

Day is all about energy (śakti), about business, work, and fickle movement. It is
about selfish activity toward our own personal ends. But night is about fixity,
calmness, and love. Night is about making offerings to the self and attaining
bliss (@nanda). This is why night is also the preeminent time for festival cele-
bration (utsava).

Night enfolds us in her arms like a mother. Within her embrace we neither see
nor hear anything else; all is peace and assurance. It is morning who like a
father sends us off to labor in distant places. It is he who saddles us with work.
But evening is a mother who calls us home; she takes us into the inner quarters
and relieves us of our burdens.

Night is ever wakeful (nityaj@grata). Night is a goddess; she is the patron deity
(adhidevat@) of darkness; she is the bestower of bliss.

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@nand@dhyeva khalvim@ni bh+tani j@yante, @nandena j@t@ni javanti,
@nandam. prayantyabhisam.viśanti [quoting Taittiraya Upanis.ad 3.6]

Let this mother embrace me; let her take away the energy and cares of the day;
let her bring relief from all my trifling sorrows. O night, let me be enfolded by
you, calmed by you.

Yatte daks.in.am mukham. tena m@m. p@hi nityam [quoting Śvet@śvatara Upanis.ad
4.21)53

This is a remarkable passage on many levels. On the one hand, Tagore surprises us
by inverting the values of night and day, conjuring night itself as an ever-wakeful
goddess. On the other hand, we can feel in this passage both the father’s legacy
and the son’s concerted attempt to break free to an independent vision.54 Is it this
struggle that drives the poet to cast the father in the role of the daytime task-
master, the one who sends us off to work? Is it his attempt to reimagine his
father’s Upanis.ads that leads him to look to the mother for help?
Notice the final quotation (in my paraphrase), which Rabindranath takes from
the Śvet@śvatara Upanis.ad. It helps to know that in the original text these words are
addressed to the once fearsome Vedic god Rudra, the Howler, the outsider god of
storm and punishment—a figure who occasioned a great deal of anxiety among
Vedic worshippers, who prayed that his anger not fall on them. As readers of the
Śvet@śvatara Upanis.ad will know, one of the things that makes this particular
Upanis.ad interesting is that in it the awesome god Rudra undergoes something
of a makeover; he gets a name change and becomes the ‘kindly’ god, Śiva. For the
composer of this text, the once-frightening god Rudra may now be seen as a
 Brian A. Hatcher 19

gracious savior figure. But the transition between the two divine personalities is
not yet fully complete. Thus in something like an effort at willful optimism the
author of the Upanis.ad prays for Rudra to show him a kindly visage (daks.in.am
mukham). The hope is that this gracious vision will protect him from all manner
of peril.
One cannot help wondering whether Rabindranath has not chosen this passage
because he too hopes to attempt a kind of makeover. He has lived under the
tutelage and discipline of the aloof and awesome father, the Mahars.i. He has
felt the force of his father’s spiritual vision—and been permanently shaped by
it. But does he here seek to gain some distance from the demands of the father?
It seems quite significant that in his attempt to wrestle with this legacy
Rabindranath not only turns day into night, but also turns the bright, active
sky-god Rudra into a dark, compassionate mother figure. Like the poet of old,
Rabindranath turns his attention to his own vision of a protective tutelary
deity. But that deity turns out to be not the stern and diligent father, but the
ever-wakeful and always-loving mother.55 Does Rabindranath, like Naciketas (or

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any dutiful son) harbor a lingering fear that he may not have met all his father’s
expectations? Does he fear the awesome face of the paternal lord? Does
Rabindranath choose this passage from the Śvet@śvatara Upanis.ad because he rec-
ognizes, as Grinshpon has noted, that the transmission of Upanis.adic wisdom is
something awesome, even frightening? Surely Rabindranath was well aware that
one of his favorite passages from the Kat.ha Upanis.ad, a passage in praise of the very
life force he so deeply cherished—yat kiñca yadidam. sarvam. pr@n.a ejati nihsr.tam—
was in fact followed by a stark warning, ‘A mighty terror is He, yea, a thunderbolt
uplifted’.56
By turning from the awesome presence of the father to the nurturing lap of the
mother, Tagore made the Upanis.ads speak to his own needs, which turned upon
the realization of humanity (manus.yatva) through love (prema) and bliss (@nanda).
For all that he revered his father, and took enormous spiritual guidance from him,
at some point he felt the need to turn from the bright, wakeful world of the father
to the enfolding darkness of the loving mother. Whether the mother figure from
‘Day and Night’ owes her appearance to renewed interest in the mother as the
embodiment of national identity (bh@rata m@t@) or whether she might reflect
Rabindranath’s dissatisfaction with the somewhat patriarchal succession of
nineteenth-century Br@hmo thought, she clearly speaks to an attempt to find in
the Upanis.ads both solace and rejuvenation on a more personal level. For in her
presence, there can be no fear. Tagore was confident that @nandam. brahman. o vidv@n
na bibheti kad@cana—‘Whoever knows the bliss of Brahman and the love of
Brahman is never, ever afraid’.57 For him, the Upanis.ads spoke of such assurance
and love, which they taught could be found within ourselves. And, as suggested by
the passage from Lekhan that forms the epigraph for this article, it is only the
attractive power of love that can create unity.
20 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

We thus feel Rabindranath pulling away from his father’s tutelage, even as we
recognize how much his father’s legacy remained vital for him. The sermons at
Ś@ntiniketan are a direct testament of this dynamic relationship. Debendranath’s
quest was not something relegated to the distant past; it remained a vital force
(pr@n.aśakti) that shaped and guided Rabindranath’s understanding of the world,
not least his work in creating a new kind of @śram-community. We could even say
that Debendranath’s Upanis.adic vision contributed to Rabindranath’s understand-
ing of the nation India was called to become.58 But in the sacred environs of
Ś@ntiniketan, Rabindranath also discovered another presiding deity (ś@ntiniketaner
adhidevat@), a deity who spoke to him in new ways. It was this deity that called
upon Rabindranath to awaken his @śram residents, to alert them to new modes of
agency in the world, to impress upon them the uniqueness of their historical
moment. The energy for such work would come not from isolated worship, but
from cooperation and common striving toward shared goals.59
This is the message Rabindranath found in the holy texts entrusted to him by
his father. That the Upanis.ads (and Ved@nta more broadly) have been a vital force

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in the transformation of Hinduism in the modern era is well known. That there are
chains of intellectual transmission, and legacies of shared textual interpretation,
that run from the early translations and commentaries of Rammohan Roy through
the work of Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Radhakrishanan, and other giants of the
modern era is also well known. But what have hitherto been less visible are the
ways such interpretative traditions and spiritual legacies have been shared and
transmitted from person to person. By taking the time to reconstruct the particu-
lar role played by the Upanis.ads in the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore
and his father, we are fortunate to see more directly how the vital force of such
holy texts could form the stuff of personal transformation even as it fueled the
articulation by Rabindranath of a striking new viewpoint on some of India’s most
cherished literature. Like Naciketas, Rabindranath took on the role of precocious
instigator and thereby set in motion new trends during a decisive moment in
South Asian intellectual history.

References
Dasgupta, U., 2004. Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dutta, K., Robinson, A., 1996. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-minded Man. New York: St
Martin’s Press.
Grinshpon, Y., 2003. Crisis and Knowledge: The Upanishadic Experience and Storytelling. Delhi:
Oxford University Press, ch. 4.
Hatcher, B. A., 2011. Better a rebel than a beggar. In: A. Biswas, C. Marsh, K. Kundu (eds).
Tagore: A Timeless Mind. London: Tagore Centre.
Mukherjee, 1960. Studies in the Upanishads. Calcutta: Sanskrit College.
Swami, Chinmayananda, 2008. Kat.ha Upanis.ad: Dialogue with Death. Mumbai: Central
Chinmaya Mission Trust.
 Brian A. Hatcher 21

Notes
1 The Kat.ha Upanis.ad, which belongs to the Black Yajurveda, borrows its opening
story from the Taittiraya Br@hman. a (3.11.8.1–6).
2 For Patrick Olivelle’s summary of the slightly different way the story is told in
Taittiraya Br@hman. a, see Olivelle, P. (ed. & trans.) 1998. The Early Upanisads:
Annotated Text and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press.
3 The stories appear, respectively, at Br.had@ran.yaka 2.4; Ch@ndogya 4.4; and Ch@ndogya
6. For another recent and thoughtful study of Upanis.adic narrative, see Black, B.
2007. The Character of the Self in Ancient India: Priests, Kings, and Women in the Early
Upanis.ads. Albany: State University of New York Press.
4 Grinshpon’s interpretive reading of the Upanis.ads may be usefully paired with
Patrick Olivelle’s recent scholarly translation of the major early Upanis.ads.
Among many of its merits, Olivelle’s translation lets English language readers
recover a sense for the oral context in which these teachings were transmitted.
For example, he flags for readers those cases where ‘deictic’ pronouns such as ‘this
[thing here]’ or ‘that [thing there]’ suggest the active, physical instruction of a

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teacher (see Early Upanisads, p. 8 and passim). Suddenly such seemingly empty
phrases like ‘This verily is that’ take on a new force. We are able to imagine the
hand of a teacher pointing first to his eye and next to the sun, for instance; we are
present for a bona fide teaching moment.
5 An earlier version of this essay, ‘Tagore: Repurposing the Upanis.ads’, was delivered
during a one-day symposium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
entitled ‘Tagore Today’, as part of sesquicentennial celebrations there. I want to
thank Wolfgang Schlör and Rini Bhattacharya–Mehta for inviting me to speak at
this event and also the members of the East Central Illinois Bengali Association for
their customary hospitality and kindness. Because the final version of this article
had to be prepared while I was away from my library, all citations from Tagore’s
Bengali works are taken from a variety of paperback reprints published by
Viśvabh@rati Press, rather than from his collected works (Rabandra-racan@vala, in
15 vols.). However, thanks to the indexes in Vol. 15 of Rabandra-racan@vala, inter-
ested readers should easily be able to locate all the material cited herein. All trans-
lations from Sanskrit and Bengali are my own unless otherwise noted.
6 Edward Dimock recognized all these influences, but called special attention to the
legacy of B@ul thought; see Dimock, E. 1959. ‘Rabindranath Tagore – “The Greatest
of the B@uls of Bengal”.’ Journal of Asian Studies, 19, 33–51.
7 For an overview, see Hatcher, B. A. 2004. ‘Contemporary Hindu thought’. In
Reinhart, R. (ed.) Contemporary Hinduism. New York: ABC-Clio, pp. 179–211. On the
interpretation of Ved@nta among the successors to Rammohan in Bengal, see
Hatcher, B. A.. 2008. Bourgeois Hinduism, or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare
Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press.
8 There are innumerable linkages to explore in this regard, beginning with isolated
readings like Bhabani Charan Mukherji’s Vedanta and Tagore (Delhi: M.D.
Publications, 1994) and broadening out to reflections on the legacy of the
Upanis.ads for such projects as ‘Rational Vedanta’ (see http://www.rational
vedanta.net/).
22 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

9 Br.had@ran. yaka Upanis.ad 1.5.17, in Zaehner, R. C. (trans.) 1966. Hindu Scriptures. New
York: Everyman’s Library.
10 Ray, N. 1967. An Artist in Life: A Commentary on the Life and Works of Rabindranath
Tagore. Trivandrum: University of Kerala, citing Ray’s translation from the Sanskrit.
See also Tagore, R. 1916. Sadhana. London: Macmillan.
11 See Mukhopadhyay, P. 1975. Life of Tagore. Ghosh, S. (trans.). New Delhi: Indian Book
Company.
12 Translating from Tagore’s Bengali rendering in the essay, Manus.yatva, which ap-
peared in the collection Dharma (reprint, Calcutta: Viśvabh@rata Press, 1983), p. 30.
13 See the first address in the Tagore’s collection Ś@ntiniketan (reprint, Calcutta:
Viśvabh@rata Press, 1984), which is entitled Uttis.t.hata J@grata.
14 Here Tagore bears comparison with Swami Vivekananda, since Vivekananda often
invoked these same words; see Hatcher, B. A. 1999. Eclecticism and Modern Hindu
Discourse . New York: Oxford University Press, ch. 3 and passim.
15 There is so much one might explore about the interpretive legacy of this short
passage from Kat.ha Upanis.ad. For instance, notwithstanding the fact that the
Br@hmo movement eschewed the doctrines of Śaṅkara’s school of Advaita

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Ved@nta, figures like Rammohan, Debendranath, and Rabindranath all seem to
have stuck quite closely to Śaṅkara’s understanding of this passage. From
Śaṅkara on down, the plural var@n is not taken in the sense of ‘boons’, but in the
secondary sense (as Śaṅkara puts it) of ‘most excellent teachers who know the
highest reality’ (prakr.s.t@n @c@ry@m.s tattvavidah. ). The various modern interpreters
show no interest in connecting the word var@n to the obvious narrative context in
which Yama has offered Naciketas three boons (var@n). For Rammohan’s Bengali
translation, see R@mmohan-racan@vala (Calcutta: Haraph Publishing, 1973), p. 135; for
his English rendering, see The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy (Allahabad: Panini
Office, 1906), p. 55. Debendranath’s translation into Bengali can be found in Br@hmo
Dharmah. (reprint, Calcutta: S@dharan. a Br@hmo Sam@j, 1975), v. 99. Among modern
Hindu intellectuals, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan is notable for taking var@n in the
sense of ‘boons’; see Radhakrishnan, S. 1953. Principal Upanishads. London: Allen
and Unwin. Among modern scholarly translators, Robert Ernest Hume and
Patrick Olivelle understand var@n as ‘boons’ and ‘wishes’, respectively; see Hume,
R. E. 1931. Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 2nd revised ed. New York: Oxford University
Press, p. 353; Olivelle, Early Upanisads, p. 391.
16 Ś@ntiniketan, pp. 40–2. The address is entitled Daks.@, and is dated 7 Pous. 1315 BS
(¼1908).
17 On this, see Mukhop@dhy@y, P. 1960. Rabandrajavana o Rabandras@hitya-praveśaka,
Vol. 1 (revised ed.). Calcutta: Viśvabh@rata Press.
18 Translating somewhat loosely from Ś@ntiniketan, p. 1. The address is entitled
Uttis.t.hata J@grata and is dated 17 Agrah@yan. a 1315 (¼1908).
19 The opening pages of Mukhopadhyay’s Rabandra-javana, Vol. 1, contain an excellent
sketch of the Tagore ancestry and the origin of their Pirali status.
20 This lent to the family a kind of ‘social aloofness’ as Niharranjan Ray puts it, not
least in such consequential matters as marriage customs (An Artist in Life, p. 32).
Compare the remark by J. T. F. Jordens that Swami Dayananda had worked carefully
not to cut off his followers from the main body of Hindus in India, in part because
 Brian A. Hatcher 23

he feared becoming ‘ineffective outsiders’ like the Br@hmos (Jordens, J. T. F. 1978.

Dayananda Sarasvati. Delhi: Oxford University Press).
21 For important biographies of Tagore, see Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore
and Mukhop@dh@y, Rabandra-javana (4 vols), which was abridged in English as
Mukhopadhyay, Life of Tagore. Among other notable English language studies are
Thompson, E. 1926. Tagore: Poet and Dramatist. Oxford: Oxford University Press and
Kripalani, K. 1961. Tagore: A Life. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
22 The original autobiography was published in Bengali as Javansmr.ti (reprint, Calcutta:
Viśvabh@rata Press, 1980) and subsequently translated as My Reminiscences (London:
Macmillan, 1917).
23 See Tagore, R. (Stewart, T. K. and Twitchell, C., trans.) 2003. The Lover of God. Port
Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.
24 These can be found in the Tagore’s collection C@ritra-p+j@, which was first published
in 1907 (reprint, Calcutta: Viśvabh@rati Press, 1984)
25 Tagore, C@ritra-p+j@, p. 56.
26 Ray, An Artist in Life, p. 78.
27 Rabindranath remarks of their time together in the Himalayas, ‘he allowed me to

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wander about the mountains at my will . . .He held up a standard, not a disciplinary
rod’ (My Reminiscences, pp. 97–8); cp. the Bengali where Rabindranath admits there
were many times he did things that opposed his father’s preferences and views
(Javansmr.ti, p. 53).
28 Mukhop@dhy@y says that Debendranath tolerated no laxity when it came to the
discipline of daily recitation of the Upanis.ads (Rabandrajavana, Vol. 1, p. 38). In
Mukhop@dhy@y’s account of the father’s daily lessons in Sanskrit grammar one
feels the intensity of the relationship (Rabandrajivani, Vol. 1, p. 40).
29 Tagore, Javansmr.ti, p. 53.
30 See Mitra, A. and ?med, A. (reprint eds.) 1980. Mahars.i Debendran@th Th.@kurer
?tmajavana. Calcutta: Chariot International. For a more detailed discussion of
these events, see Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, ch. 2.
31 These are the terms employed by Debendranath Tagore in one of his sermons
before the Br@hmo Sam@j when speaking of the Lord who is revealed in `ś@
Upanis.ad, v. 1; see his Br@hmo Sam@jer Vy@khy@na (Calcutta: Brahmo Mission Press,
1970), p. 102.
32 Br@hmo Sam@jer Vy@khy@na, p. 105.
33 See Hatcher Bourgeois Hinduism, p. 41.
34 On the founding of the Tattvabodhina Sabh@ in relation to Debendranath’s awaken-
ing, and for a translation of original discourses delivered before the Sabh@ during
1839–40, see Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, chs. 3 and 8.
35 It may not be too far-fetched to point out that the father not only begat his son,
but also initiated him (informally) into a higher spiritual life. That birth and awa-
kening were synonymous for Rabindranath may be seen from the way he once
referred to his birth as ‘the first opening of my eyes to the light of the sun’
(citing a letter written in 1937 and quoted in Mukhop@dhy@y, Rabandrajavana,
Vol. 1, p. 21.
36 Mukhopadhyay, Life of Tagore, p. 18. See also p. 23, where Mukhopadhyay remarks
that ‘there hardly existed any close tie’ between fathers and children in those days.
24 Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanis.ads

37 Mukhopadhyay, Life of Tagore, pp. 18–19.

38 One clear point of tension developed around the arrangements Debendranath made
for his son’s marriage. Rabindranath was less than enthused about the match his
father made and this was the cause of some serious resentment on the boy’s part;
see Dutta, K. and Robinson, A. (eds) 1997. Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology. London:
St. Martins Press.
39 My Reminiscences, pp. 16–17. For the Bengali original, see Javansmr.ti, p. 9.
40 See Mukhopadhyay, Life of Tagore, p. 24.
41 Taittiraya Upanis.ad 3.1. This particular verse was popular with Rammohan Roy’s
colleague, R@mcandra Vidy@v@gaśa, who commented on it in his sermons before
the Br@hmo Sam@j and in a discourse to members of the Tattvabodhina Sabh@; see
Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, ch. 8.
42 Taittiraya Upanis.ad 3.6.
43 Ś@ntiniketan, sermon entitled Karma, pp. 83–4.
44 See Ś@ntiniketan, sermon entitled Śakti, pp. 85–7.
45 On Rammohan’s ideas in this regard, see Hatcher, B. A. 1996. Idioms of Improvement:
Vidy@s@gar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, ch. 8.

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For Debendranath, see Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, ch. 2.
46 As Uma Dasgupta has pointed out, the Ś@ntiniketan experiment can be seen as an
effort to reject mainstream colonial educational ideology in the hopes of creating ‘a
new Indian personality to show the way out of the conflict of communities’
(Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography, p. x).
47 We might even follow William Radice and call attention to a certain amount of
‘indeterminacy’ in the poet’s imagery; see Radice, W. ‘Indeterminacy in
Rabindrasangit’, in Archiv Orientalni 68/3 (2000).
48 See Ś@ntiniketan, sermon entitled Bartam@n yug (dated 1909). Here Rabindranath’s
usage is reminiscent of Vivekananda’s rendering of the same passage from Kat.ha
Upanis.ad: ‘Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached’ (see The Complete Works
of Swami Vivekananda, Vivekananda, S. [Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1985], vol. 3,
pp. 318). Both Tagore and Vivekananda very likely had in mind a similar passage
from the Buddhist Dhammapada: ‘Arise! Watch. Walk on the right path. He who
follows the right path has joy in this world and in the world beyond’ (Juan Mascaro,
Dhammapada [New York: Penguin, 1973], verse v. 168). For an example of
Rabindranath’s facility in the interpretation of P@li Buddhist texts, see the
sermon in Ś@ntiniketan entitled Brahmavih@ra, pp. 174–79.
49 This is the kind of awakening Rabindranath associated with the advent of
Rammohan Roy, which led to a repudiation of the errors of medieval Hinduism;
see his essay on Rammohan in C@ritra-p+j@.
50 These passages are taken from the second sermon in Ś@ntiniketan entitled, Sam.śaya.
51 Stray Birds, no. 120 in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: Poems, edited by
Sisirkumar Das (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2004), p. 411.
52 See Mukhop@dhy@y, Rabandrajavana, vol. 2, p. 104. The essay appeared the following
month in Baṅgadarśan (M@gh 1310 BS) and was later published in the collection of
essays entitled Dharma.
53 I paraphrase from Tagore’s essay, Din o r@tri, as reprinted in the collection Dharma,
pp. 17–26. This essay should be read alongside the trio of essays in the collection
 Brian A. Hatcher 25

Ś@ntiniketan, entitled, Din, R@tri, and Prabh@te, or ‘Daytime’, ‘Nightime’, and ‘In the
Morning’, respectively (pp. 54–6; 56–8; and 58–9). In these essays Rabindranath
conjures the endless dialectic of day and night, waking and sleeping; of daylight
activity and nighttime rest; of the tension between wearing ourselves out in worldly
activity and finding restoration in the repose of sleep. In Prabh@te, we see in
particular why the morning is so important: it is that ideal time when we are
rejuvenated and our passions are at rest, a time fit for worship and celebration.
54 That the essay is also profoundly about suffering is pointed out by Prabh@tkum@r
Mukhop@dhy@y, who sees in this essay a kind of duh.kher darśan or ‘philosophy of
sorrow’ (as he himself renders it). He connects Rabindranath’s meditation on dark-
ness to the loss of both his wife Mr.n. @lina Deva and his daughter R@n. a during the
previous year (see Rabandrajavana, Vol. 2, p. 104). In this context Mukhop@dhy@y
himself comments how unusual it is for Tagore to have imagined the Lord in
maternal form.
55 In this connection, it is worth noting that after the young Rabindranath returned
from his Himalayan sojourn with Debendranath, he escaped the disciplinary orbit of
the household servants and began instead to ‘occupy a place of importance in the

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largely feminine group that used to sit in his mother’s apartments’ (Mukhopadhyay,
Life of Tagore, p. 25). For Rabindranath’s own account, see My Reminiscences, p. 100.
56 Kat.ha Upanis.ad 2.3.2, quoting the translation of Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads
(Pondicherry: Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1996), p. 238.
57 Tagore quotes this line from the Taittiraya Upanis.ad (2.4.1) in his sermon, P@oy@, in
Ś@ntiniketan, p. 80. Cp. Sadhana, p. 126.
58 See the sermon in Ś@ntiniketan entitled ?śram, dated 7 Pous., 1909 (pp. 229–36). The
key Upanishadic passage in this sermon is Br.had@ran. yaka 4.15: yadaitam anupaśyati
@tm@n@m. devam añjas@ | aś@n@m. bh+tabhavasya na tato vijugupsate.
59 At one point Rabindranath contrasts a kind of mendicant spirituality (associated
with bhiks.@) and a newer, vital form of worship achieved through an awakened
@tma-śakti that is found through shared endeavor; see the sermon in Ś@ntiniketan
entitled, ?śram (esp. p. 236).