Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on world literature, Viśvasāhitya (1907), is important not just because of the political and historical circumstances of its production, but because it advocates a method of ‘doing’ world literature that potentially frees us from the conundrums besetting the methods used so far if scholars writing on the essay were to read it for what it actually says. In this paper, the Bengali text of this essay is closely interrogated to arrive at the surprising conclusion that the idea of world literature that he arrives at in this essay, in complete contrast to Goethe’s, is not an addition of the national literatures of the world – that, he says, is a very provincial way of looking at the question. Instead, he posits here a philosophical notion related to an understanding of the self and the other which is predicated upon his inheritance of, and interest in, both Upanishadic high theory as well as popular folk culture. His concept (or anti-concept) was premised upon his advice to find the world in the self, and was one that may, perhaps, be mined for its emphasis on particularity and attention to the individual as it exists in relation to the whole.