The Cage, the Card, and the Void: Tracing Camusian Absurdism in Tagore

Albert Camus and Rabindranath Tagore are usually put in different sides of the literary world. Camus is the thinker of the Absurd, gazing at the silence of the universe; Tagore is the poet of the cosmos, singing to the God in nature. However, under the spiritual reputation of Tagore is a keen, satirical edge that challenges the same meaningless structures that Camus discovered. This paper will discuss how the works of Tagore later to be known as Parrot talk (Totakahini), The Land of Cards (Tasher Desh), Red Oleanders (Raktakarabi), Chapter Four (Char Adhyay) and The wife letter (Strir Patra) reiterate the Camusian themes of bureaucratic absurdity, mechanical life and existential rebellion. Where Camus promotes rebellion with the use of consciousness, Tagore promotes rebellion with the use of creative freedom and human association. Through the analysis of these readings in light of existing literature, we discover that Tagore recognized the absurdity of human systems way before the terminology came to be popular. It is not only a philosophical research but a story of two men attempting to find meaning in suffering as a response to the emptiness, which provides a distinct Eastern humanism