New Man, New Woman, and the Religion of Love

Abstract This final body-chapter of the book explores how through introducing the category of love, derived primarily from his late colonial re-reading of the Upanishads from within the Brāhma paradigm, especially in the last three decades of his life, Tagore offers a rich corpus of original musical experiments. The most conspicuous, but not necessarily the subtlest, musical expression of the ontology of love took place in his novel imagination of Romantic love, a European contribution to this culture. This chapter shows how, going beyond several reductive categorizations in dominant nationalism, Tagore creates a holistic musical language comprising music, poetry, dance, and theatre. By underscoring the centrality of the ontology of love for the other spheres of his work as well as his discourse of an alternative, humane nationalism, the chapter locates Tagore’s music and musicology within a broader praxiological context. Finally, it explores how a fluid transaction between the idea of non-institutional religiosity, secular amorous emotion, and the spirit of nature (not as a biological locale but as a paradigmatic sensibility) makes Tagore’s best music in the last three decades of his life an expression of his discourse of creative personality and the equanimity of “One life”.