When he was asked, “who is your hero or heroine in life?” Rabindranath wrote in a confession book – “Rammohun Roy”. The term Rabindranath recurrently used for him was Bhratpathik (The Traveller of India). Why was Tagore fascinated with Rammohun?
![Prof Amrit Sen](https://i0.wp.com/scotstagore.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Prof-Amrit-Sen.jpg?resize=300%2C215&ssl=1)
To what extent was Rammohun responsible for shaping the horizon of Rabindranath’s ideas? How did Rabindranath imagine Rammohun in the process of the formation of the Bengali identity vis-a-vis India and the globe?
This paper will seek to address these questions to explore Rabindranath’s construct of Rammohun by reading closely his body of writings on him. I argue that Rammohun was a major inspiration in locating Rabindranath’s negotiation between the various identities – the Bengali, the Indian and the cosmopolitan.
Professor Amrit Sen, Professor of English at Visva-Bharati (Tagore’s University) who is on a lecture tour at Scottish Universities, organised by the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs). Prof Sen is a visiting scholar on the UKIERI Knowledge Exchange project, which is a research collaboration between ScoTs and Visva-Bharati.
11 March 2015, 2-4 pm, University of Glasgow