Harmonising conceptual polarities: the dialectical interplay of universality and particularity in the worldviews of Tagore and Iqbal

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This project will examine a set of interrelated motifs in the worldviews of two major philosopher-poets of the Indian subcontinent - Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), two of whose Bengali songs are the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), often regarded as the spiritual father of Pakistan. This project is thus situated in the broader field of Islamic-Hindu comparative theology, and will draw on selected texts of both authors as well as relevant historical sources on the socio-cultural and political contexts within which Tagore and Iqbal lived and wrote. The foundational principle of this project, namely, the relation between the universal and the particular, will be explored across three themes: the relation between God and the individual, the relation between the self and its human other, and the relation between the universal truths of science and the particularity of one's finite perspective. Tagore and Iqbal dwell on these motifs in both peotic and philosophical modalities: and I will, over the course of the project, seek to demonstrate how these three guiding themes serve as useful theorectical frameworks with which to understand and conceptualize certain philosophical and theological principles in Islamic and Hindu thought. By foregrounding the dialectic of universality and particularity, and exploring this relation across distinct conceptual interplays, I hope to thus uncover new patterns of Islamic-Hindu comparative discourse.