Anthropocentrism in Rabindranath Tagore’s Play ‘The Post Office’: A Critical Examination

This essay aims to offer an ecocritical interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s play The Post Office. In order to shed light on the function and productivity of Tagore’s environmental imagination, which he cultivated in his play The Post Office, the paper aims to establish the thesis that an examination of the relationship between ecological and aesthetic processes tends to reveal ecological concerns that the writer’s unconscious mind has been hushing up. In this play, Tagore achieves a regressive metamorphosis or transformation of the protagonist (Amal) into an almost pre-cultural or natural state, erasing all distinctions between human and nonhuman beings through his imaginative production. In order to challenge the long-standing hierarchical worldview of anthropocentrism (human-centricity), the paper examines how Tagore foresaw the need for dialogues to be pursued over the discourses of human claims to superiority over nonhuman nature and animals.