Becoming Words of Witness: The Motif of Call and Response in Muhammad Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

This dissertation is a thematic exploration of the motif of call and response as it is articulated across the works of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). By taking this call-response structure as my overarching hermeneutic, I seek to demonstrate how Iqbal and Tagore envision human becoming as a fundamentally artistic exercise which is dynamically interwoven with the divine artistry. The human person is, in other words, called on to become an active participant in the divine creativity unfolding through the cosmos, and to go on crafting her own world in modes that reflect as well as instantiate the primordial creativity. What emerges from my study is that both figures, through their distinctive philosophical-theological vocabularies, elaborate a vision of the human person as homo viator in a world that is itself perpetually pulsating with the new. Across the three substantive chapters, the God-self-world triad will be employed to respectively highlight certain cosmological, anthropological, and communitarian dimensions of the call-response dynamism. We will repeatedly encounter the paradox that while human response is enabled by God’s sovereign call, the fulfilment of this primordial outreach is somehow dependent on the proper exercise of human creativity. In Chapter 1, I outline the metaphysical canopies of their conceptions of human creativity, by drawing out, in their cosmological visions, the primordial call-response structure that sets forth the God-world relation as a dynamic entanglement. I end with a sketch of how the human self becomes a vital locus of this continuous creativity, as focalised for Iqbal in the person of the vicegerent (khalīfa) and for Tagore in the person of the karma-yogin. In Chapter 2, I continue exploring this thematic of the human locus by attending specifically to the motifs of love, artistic creativity, and prayer, as living sites where the call-response structure that characterises the divine-human entanglement is enacted and elaborated. The modalities of vision and voice become especially crucial as the human self is, on these three sites, called on to see and to hear the divine. Indeed, this conception of the pilgrim self, whose identity is not a fixed finality but an unfolding work of art, undergirds their distinctive critiques of the mechanising and utilitarian logics of imperial modernity. Thus, in Chapter 3, I turn to what we might term the choral response, by exploring how the Iqbalian and the Tagorean conceptions of the divine call are refracted through their respective socio-political prisms, wherein the ‘political’ does not connote a remorseless calculus of transactional exchange but serves as another collaborative site for creative and artistic unfolding. In the end, the true ‘politician’, in the polis which is a habitation of the divine, is the khalīfa or the karma-yogin in whose worldly existence – shaped by love, art, and prayer – a vertical openness to the one divine root and a horizontal openness to manifold social routes are integrally intertwined.