The Book
Seventy years after his death, Tagore's genius still provides ample scope for critical analyses of his writings, especially in the English language and outside the subcontinent.
A collection of thirteen essays, The Poet and His World: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore enhances critical literature on Tagore. Looking at different aspects of Tagore's life and philosophy, the chapters in this volume are sequenced from the more general to the specific. They analyse the poet’s life and relationships, his moral, educational, political and dramaturgical philosophy, and finally provide textual analysis of select individual works like the novels Gora and The Home and the World, and a short story, “The Laboratory”.
Eminent scholars like Sukanta Chaudhuri, Martin Kämpchen, William Radice, Bharati Ray, Kathleen M. O‘Connell, Uma Das Gupta, to name a few, have contributed to this volume. Brought out on the 150th birth anniversary of the poet, this book will be an unputdownable read for students and scholars of literature and culture studies.
The Author(s)
Mohammad A. Quayum is Professor of English at the International Islamic University Malaysia, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University, Australia.
Table of Contents
1. Rabindranath Tagore and Hermann Keyserling: A Difficult Friendship
Martin Kampchen
2. Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet and the People
Sukanta Chaudhuri
3. A Herald of Religious Unity: Rabindranath Tagore’s Literary Representation of Muslims
Mohammad A. Quayum
4. Never Not an Educator: Rabindranath Tagore as a Poet-Teacher
William Radice
5. Tagore and Education: Creativity, Mutuality and Survival
Kathleen M. O’Connell
6. Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University and Its Ideal of International Cooperation: A Case Study of
China and India, 1921–1941
Uma Das Gupta
7. Empire and Nation: Rabindranath Tagore’s Political Ideology in His Travel Writings
Mohammad A. Quayum
8. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalist Thought: A Retrospect
Narasingha P. Sil
9. The Author as Actor: Rabindranath Tagore as a Performer in His Plays
Abhijit Sen
10. A Blueprint for Reinventing Tagorean Performance
Ananda Lal
11. At the Margins of Family Life: Abjection and Purification in Rabindranath Tagore’s Binodini
Lalita Pandit Hogan
12. Rabindranath Tagore’s Political Imagination in The Home and the World: A Textual and Contextual Reading
Mohammad A. Quayum
13. “New Woman” in Rabindranath Tagore’s Short Stories: An Interrogation of “The Laboratory”
Bharati Ray
Glossary
Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index