Rabindranath Tagore and Freudian Thought

Pages:130-135
Reena Grewal and P.P. Khatri (Department of English, Singhania University, Pacheri Bari, Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan)

The most significant psychoanalytically inspired assessments of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, or of his life and works, have come from Rangin Haldar (1924, 1928, 1931), Sarasi Lal Sarkar (1926, 1927, 1928, 1937, 1941), Amal Shankar Roy (1973) and Sitansu Ray (1979, 1996). Although Roy and Ray have cited a few arbitrarily chosen remarks by Tagore on psychoanalysis in their respective works, it is fair to say that these scholars have not seriously attempted to unravel any part of Tagore’s own notion of Freudian thought. Ratul Bandyopadhyay’s book on Tagore (1994) on the other hand, which contains excerpts from several letters and articles by Tagore and others on psychoanalysis in one of its chapters, accounts for only one relatively less important strand of a larger story. In this article, which is archival rather than analytical in nature, I shall seek to narrate that untold story as closely and clearly as possible.