May 7 is Rabindranath Tagore’s 160th birthday

of lessons, but he found it in the living personality of man. In other words, Tagore’s religion was based on the divinisation of man and humanisation of god.

While explaining the meaning of humanisation of god, he said ‘Humanisation of god does not merely mean that god is god of humanity but it also means that it is the god in every human being.’ Maanush ii ishwar/Ishwar ii maanush (Man is god and vice versa), was his spiritual refrain or dictum in life. Tagore told his Irish friend and poet William Butler Yeats that his Gitanjali (song offerings) was a eucharistic offering (Nirmalya) to the god that’s within every human and is immanent. The Upanishadic concept of Devam antarnihitam (god resides within) guided his life, not the outer or external manifestations of god and religion.

It’s interesting to note that Tagore’s first and original manuscript of Gitanjali and its 103 lyrihis spirituality was inclined towards transcendental Agape (a Greco-Christian term referring to unconditional love, ‘the highest form of love, charity’ and ‘the love of god for man and of man for god’). In this age of religious supremacy, obduracy and sectarian conflicts, Tagore’s superlatively sacred views on god and religion can be of immense help.

And when it comes to his perceptions of nation and nationalism, Tagore believed that nation is an accident of birth. Like Albert Einstein, Tagore also believed that nationalism was the measles of mankind and a rather sophisticated form of primitive tribalism and troglodytism. “My love doesn’t end with the man-made boundaries of ‘your and my country’. It goes beyond that to encompass the whole mankind,” Tagore wrote to one of his British friends. He believed that one’s not an Indian or British. One happens to be an Indian or British.