Devotion in Dialogue: Tagore’s Gitanjali and Meerabai’s Translated Poems in Comparative Perspective

This paper offers a comparative analysis of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali (with attention to the 1912 English self-translation of the 1910 Bengali text) and selected English translations of Meerabai’s bhakti poems. It examines devotional vision, poetic voice, gendered subjectivity, figurative language, musicality, and translation strategies shaping modern reception. Using a qualitative comparative textual approach grounded in bhakti aesthetics and reader-response, the study argues that while both corpora orient devotionally toward union with the Divine, Tagore’s lyric persona tends toward interiorized, universalist mysticism articulated through supple modernist free verse, whereas Mira’s voice is embodied, ecstatic, and vocative—marked by performative repetition and the social defiance of a woman-saint’s love. The paper closes by identifying convergences (love-as-surrender, paradox of distance and intimacy, nature as theology) and divergences (authorial self, gender, form, and translational mediation), and proposes directions for further study.