Keywords
Postcolonialism
Existentialism
Voice
Freedom
Comparative Literature
How to Cite
Abstract
This comparative study examines the dialectical relationship between voice and silence in two modernist poems separated by geography, power, and purpose, yet bound together by a shared preoccupation with human agency at the edge of collapse. Rabindranath Tagore’s "Where the Mind is Without Fear" (composed circa 1900, first published in Bengali as Prarthona in 1901, translated from Gitanjali in 1912) articulates colonial India’s aspirational vision of liberation grounded in fearlessness. T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Poetry, June 1915) maps the psychological paralysis of metropolitan modernity with surgical unease. Reading these texts through a dialectical postcolonial-existentialist framework draws on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s interrogation of subaltern voice and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology of freedom to reveal how both poets stage the crisis of authentic speech from opposite ends of the imperial world. Tagore’s prayer envisions fearlessness as the enabling condition for collective liberation; Prufrock’s interior monologue lays bare the terror of freedom itself. The unspoken functions in each case as both wound and weapon. Together, these texts suggest that modernism does not speak in one voice.
References
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