Rabindranāth Tagore believed that literature, if not all art, was free play (lilā) and led to joy (ānanda). Derived from the Upanishads and introduced to him by his deeply religious father, Debendranāth, these notions would later be fused with his own reading of Indian and Western texts. A phrase in the Mundaka upanishad (2:2:7), one that Tagore recalled on countless occasions, describes the infinite as the immortal manifested in joyous form: ānandarupamamritam yadvibhāti.

Play connects freedom with the joy we experience in what is functionally a surplus. Humans need the face for physical functions, but it is also the theatre of emotions. ‘Muscles are essential, and they have plenty of work. But we are enchanted only when the play of their movements expresses the body's music.’ Tagore said this in the 1924 address ‘Srishti’ (Creation) delivered at Calcutta University. Freedom, play, and joy are invoked in the same address: ‘This release from the fetters of fact into the world of abiding joy is no small freedom. Human beings composed songs and painted pictures to remind themselves of this freedom.’ He defended the idea of poetry as play with unperturbed humour in 1915, in reply to the social scientist Rādhākamal Mukhopādhyāy's attack on his literary thought and practice as indifferent to social reality and uncaring of human suffering. Radhakamal seemed annoyed that Tagore used words such as play (khelā), holiday (chhuti), and joy (ānanda) far too often in his writings. ‘If that is so’, answered Tagore in ‘Kabir kaiphiyat’ (The Poet's Defence), ‘one is to understand that I am possessed by some truth.’

Tagore also employed the word rasa in talking of art, though not always in the sense one finds in classical Sanskrit aesthetics. Rasa for him was not simply the eight affective ‘essences’, such as compassion or fury, mentioned in Bharata's manual Natyashāstra, and the ninth added to it by Abhinavagupta. For Tagore, any mixture of these or even a new rasa may lead to ānanda. Rasa in poetry is at its most intense when it pleases the ears and satisfies our intellect and emotions through its bhāva, that is, its feeling and idea. Tagore wrote something similar (without mentioning bhāva) to the younger poet Sudhindranāth Datta in July 1928.