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Tagore and Gandhi: The Way of the Artist and the Way of the Ascetic

Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi were the most world-famous Indians of their time. Their relationship was one of great mutual respect, but it was also troubled by clashes of two very disparate sensitivities and spiritual frames. The subject has been noticed and explored by authors dealing with either of the two grand men. The present paper aims, however, at showing that not only were Tagore and Gandhi as different as they were, but also that the various ways of the spirit came close to be concentrated in the two of them, making each one of its two poles: Gandhi stood for the spirit manifesting itself as renunciation, constant negation, the Apollonian  even Thanatotic  logos sustained by a strictly religious mind, while Tagore incarnated the spirit operating as the all-embracing force of eternal affirmation, the Dionysian eros upheld by an unchecked artistic imagination. The opposition is mythically paradigmatic: one can sense in it another enactment of the irreconcilable strife between the will to create and explode towards proliferation, and the will to annihilate and implode into nullity. It is the via positiva versus via negativa. At the deepest level, their ends perfectly overlap.

Tagore; Gandhi; art; asceticism; affirmation; negation.

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