Sadhana

In eight lectures, most of them given at Harvard in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore explains the outlook of the ancient Indian Upanishads for Western listeners: the relationship of the individual soul to the universe, soul consciousness, the problem of evil, the problem of the self, and the realisation of the infinite in love, in action and in beauty. He begins by contrasting a civilisation born in the cities, behind walls, with the forest hermitages of ancient India, where people sought harmony with nature rather than mastery over it.

Sadhana means spiritual practice or striving. Written in Tagore's own English and published in the year he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the lectures are clear and poetic and offer a gentle introduction to Indian philosophy. They fit naturally beside his Gitanjali and William James's Varieties of Religious Experience.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the youngest son of a great Bengali family of reformers and artists. He wrote poems, stories, novels, plays and some two thousand songs, and his songs became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

He founded a school in the countryside at Santiniketan, which grew into a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali. In 1919 he returned his British knighthood in protest at the massacre at Amritsar. The Home and the World and The Post Office show his range.