Rabindranath: Manusher Dharma, Manusher Bigyan by Ashish Lahiri [Paperback]

Tagore is the direct and authentic negation of C.P.Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ hypothesis. Here is a Bengali poet born into a non-European, liberal, Upanishadic culture, brought up in a colonial environment away from the great happenings in metropolitan science, without any formal training in science, and yet writing such understandingly on modern physics and cosmology, and meeting people like Heisenberg and Einstein in their own terms! He was on intimate terms with J.C.Bose, P.C.Ray, M.N.Saha, S,N,Bose, P.C.Mahalanabish and many other eminent Indian scientists. Science for him was not a wall, but a launching pad. He succeeded in arriving at a uniquely individualistic synthesis: modern science was for him an inalienable part, not only of the religion of Man, but also of his aesthetics! In this he stands apart not only from his contemporaries but perhaps in the whole history of ideas indeed.