Shantih Shantih Shantih: Western Discordance Resolved by East in Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) has become a gloomy representation of his religious faith, spiritual emptiness and devastation in the Western culture. The last chapter of the poem “What the Thunder Said” contains Hindu religious words like datta, dhayadhvam, damyata and shantih. This paper attempts to focus on how the Hindu religious ideas in the poem are working in the context of Eastern or Western domain. Hence this paper quests for the answer of the following question: is it a way of salvation that Eliot provides for the Waste land or a temporal escape to avoid the disruption? Do these words end up solving the discordance of the west? What is the position of Eliot as one of the empty men in the Waste land? The paper seeks for the authorial intention behind the universal dimension which rather favours a pessimistic understanding of the poem.

Keywords

• modernism
• buddhism
• hinduism