Abstract

This article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s ethical-aesthetic vision that ushered in a form of planetary humanism, following his critique of European notions of development and progress that considered nature and her resources in purely utilitarian and commercial terms. He considered it to be a form of political cannibalism that fed on the weak for its own sustenance, utilizing scientific knowledge and asserting a kind of technological colonialism that ultimately led to what we confront today as the climate crisis and ecological destabilization. Through a close study of his plays, essays (1890–1925), and select songs, this paper traces Tagore’s understanding of freedom as a shift from the anthropological domain to the cosmological dimensions of existence in terms of a holy communion. It argues that this shift cultivates a creative unity that redefines human freedom—not as domination over nature or others, but as liberation from intrinsically repressive epistemologies and oppressive power structures that sought to destroy the wonder that characterizes the human soul when it confronts elemental forms of nature and the cosmos with a joy that transcends the physical and the material. In doing so, Tagore offers an alternative civilizational discourse that seeks to celebrate life by cherishing the universal through the particular (and vice versa), and through this interconnectedness alone, the consciousness of being human, finds expression.