The idea and endeavour of Visva-Bharati thrived in its first two decades, the 1920s and the 1930s. Santiniketan became a hive of diverse communities. Rabindranath’s English biographer Edward Thompson, who had been visiting Santiniketan from 1913, wrote: Read more
The final experiments at Visva-Bharati took form in 1922 with the establishment of an institute of rural reconstruction named Sriniketan, abode of prosperity. Rabindranath insisted from the outset that an Indian education would be incomplete without a relationship with the village as the majority of Indians lived in the villages, and without inculcating a moral responsibility for their survival among the educated classes in India. Read more
Professor Amrit Sen and Mr Biswanath Banerjee from Visva-Bharati visited Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee in March 2015. Mr Banerjee has recently completed a joint UGC sponsored research project on Rabindranath Tagore and Science. Mr Banerjee has submitted his doctoral dissertation on “Science, Nation and Literature: Acharya P.C. Ray and Postcoloniality”. Read more
The nadi or the river is a continuous motif in Indian Literature and in Rabindranath Tagore’s literary works – in his numerous poems, songs, plays and prose pieces. This paper will show how the Indian literary tradition finds expression in Tagore’s work. Read more
This paper seeks to look at Tagore’s theorisation of travel in the context of the emergence of his ides of cosmopolitanism. Tagore’s first travelogue Europe Prabasir Patra (1878) works within the conventions of the contemporary travelogue, marked by a keen sense of difference and a satirical interrogation of the possibility of cultural interaction. Read more