In our inter-disciplinary UKIEREI project on ‘The Scottish-Indian Continuum of Ideas: The Relevance of Tagore and his Circle,’ we are studying the interchange of ideas initiated in the eighteenth century by Scottish Enlightenment ideas and will understand how they were reinterpreted and reshaped to fit the socio-cultural, religious and literary debates that affected the social fabric and ideology of the times in Scotland and India from around the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.

The project explores the socio-historic significance of the debates that were generated in the discourse that propelled the Bengal/Indian Renaissance Movement and will assess the similarities and points of departure that become evident as a result of the intellectual colonial encounter between Scotland and India.

The research team members from the UK include the Principal Investigator, Professor Bashabi Fraser, Prof Linda Dryden, Prof Indra Nath Choudhuri, Dr Scott Lyall and Dr Christine Kupfer who are based at the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs). ScoTs is part of the Research Institute of Creative Industries and will be benefiting from the input of colleagues and postgraduate students from across the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University. The team members named above will bring their varied research interests and expertise to this project, which will find impetus from the UKIERI support through its knowledge  exchange and knowledge transfer programme, to facilitate  capacity building.

The project will explore the socio-historic significance of the debates that were generated in the discourse that propelled the Bengal/Indian Renaissance Movement and will assess the similarities and points of departure that become evident as a result of the intellectual colonial encounter between Scotland and India.

The project will go back to seminal Orientalist figures like the historian William Robertson who had written of a sophisticated civilization in India from the Scottish metropole in Edinburgh in his 1791 volume on An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, tracing the commercial links that facilitated a cultural exchange between the West and India. This West meets East study will also look at Orientalists who were writing, in India like Quentin Crawford, who  endorsed a similar perspective in Sketches relating chiefly to the …Hindus (1790) and the work of Thomas Munro, John Malcolm and Mountsuart |Elphinstone.

At the heart of a movement for social and educational reform, stands the Tagore family, from Prince Dwarkanath Tagore (close associate of Raja Rammohan Roy, the founder of the Bramha Samaj in1828), his son, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore who gave a fresh impetus (1842-43 onwards) to validate the Upanishadic tenets of Hindu philosophy and his interest in Unitarianism, and his son, the Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.

The dissenting voices reflected amongst Bramho activists and the role of the Tattwabodhini Sabha and Patrika embody the centrality of ideas in a society that was confronting the challenges of transformation on the socio-religious front. Rabindranath was a pivotal figure who contributed substantially to bringing India to its modern status, willing to see the modern validity of ancient and medieval Indian thought, while welcoming the meeting of minds from the West and East in a mutually beneficial syncreticism.

The research programme will also weigh the narrative shift through the change in perception of India in Western discourse, effected by significant texts like James Mill’s six volume History of British India, published in 1818. This History  became a source of   ‘knowledge’ on the inherent ‘evil’ and ‘corrupt’ nature of the Hindu and his ‘depravity’, fuelled by his superstition and ‘primitive’ religion, for British personnel who came out to serve in and rule India, as it  was their recommended text. The initial use of ‘Hindu’ in British discourse was a synonym for everything ‘Indian’, which only in later times was used for the religious majority of the sub-continent.

The misreading justified the sense of the coloniser’s ‘superiority’  which led to a disinterest amongst East India Company servants and later employees of the Raj, in Indian culture, literature and  the historical continuity of an old civilization that had been validated by earlier ‘Orientalists’. This project will study how the reading of history and interpretations of culture and literature have been instrumental in forming the minds of generations responsible for governing India, establishing business houses, managing plantations and trade in Indian produce in a global market.

Mill had never set foot in India and had no linguistic acquaintance with Indian languages, claiming his ‘expertise’ in India’s history from the distance of the metropole, in an act that marginalises India’s history through a written discourse based on secondhand knowledge which takes on the aura of ‘authenticity’ associated with the written word. Mill’s treatise was further consolidated by Thomas Babington Macaulay whose Minute on Education in 1835, passed the judgement that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ – a sweeping statement made by a Member of the Governor-General’s Council, who, like Mill, did not possess any knowledge of Indian Languages or of Arabic.

These texts were instrumental in constructing ‘truths’ as facts, and reality on the ground became secondary in an assessment of far-flung colonies which could be written about, assessed and branded as ‘inferior’ without association with the people or the land that was being described, negating the human association so necessary for a fuller understanding of the people and their context.

Mill’s representation of India continued to be challenged in subsequent publications, e.g., in thoughtful analyses like History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), A View of the Present State and Future Prospects of the Free Trade and Colonisation of India (1828) by James Crawford. A French account by Anquetil-Duperron  who came to India in 1754, was rediscovered by Raymond Schwab in 1950.  His La Renaissance Orientale was later translated into English in 1984 by Patterson-Black and Reinking. This Orientalist perspective of India, is considered a seminal text by Edward Said, whose 1978 theory of Orientalism will inform  this postcolonial analytical project.

While the intellectual analyses of the meaning of Indian thought and India’s progress will need to be evaluated in order to understand the continuum in the West-East constructs prevalent from the eighteenth century, this project will concentrate on the links between Scottish thought and the Indian Renaissance in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, seeking to interweave its findings into a coherent fabric on the exchange of ideas at various levels of thought, pertaining to literature, history, the arts, education, environmental and sociological concerns. The role that education has played in the evolution of modern India will be clarified in an estimation of the contributions of Scottish educators in India, like the Church of Scotland missionary, Revd. Alexander Duff and the watchmaker from Edinburgh, David Hare.

The path for Tagore’s reception in the drawing rooms of the metropolis had been laid by Raja Ram Mohan Roy (who travelled to England between 1830, and died in Bristol in 1833) and by Tagore’s  grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, who, in 1842, was made a Freeman of the City of Edinburgh, in spite of being of a subject nation. Tagore’s association with Scotland thus began through his familial connection.  Tagore met the London India Society in 1912, which became the springboard for some of his long lasting intellectual friendships and prominent associations.

The Nobel Prize awarded in 1913 to Rabindranath Tagore, catapulted the poet onto the world stage and he took this opportunity to take on a one-man mission to speak tirelessly over two decades, journeying across India and abroad, on the Creative Principle, on Nationalism, on Education, Cooperation, Rural reconstruction and the Environment. As Michael Collins (2011) points out, for Tagore, his lectures, talks and essays in English were a ‘political strategy’  to achieve global understanding through the ‘liberal politics of friendship’ to realize the ‘good society.’

Thus Tagore sought ‘cultivated intellectuals’ from the West and the East to facilitate the meeting of minds. As a transcultural ambassador, Tagore relied on transnational friendships to engender mutual appreciation. He challenged the binary of the East and the West, of the centre and the periphery, dismantling the imperial construct of hegemony to facilitate the great ‘Meeting of Minds’ that he strove to achieve in his lifetime. This project seeks to show how transnational intellectual and cultural exchanges can dissipate colonial constructs, engendering ‘dialogues’ across boundaries of nation.

Tagore’s lectures and essays in English thus show that his premise was that all knowledge was not related to constructs of  power,  as some knowledge could benefit both the East and West, having common human indicators that would benefit mankind beyond boundaries of nation, questioning the categories of superiority and inferiority, of the dominating and the subjected nations. Building on Rabindranath Tagore’s impact as an international figure in his time, this project aims to address decline in the interest in Tagore beyond India’s borders after his death, with a revisionist postcolonial approach to establish the validity of Tagore’s works and ideas and that of his circle.

While exploring and assessing the steady exchange of ideas and people across continents between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century especially between Scotland and India, this project will also look at the Indian scholars and artists who visited Scottish universities, like India’s premier chemist Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy and the artist Fanindra Nath Bose. Tagore’s main connection with Scotland was through his lasting friendship with the Scottish polymath, Sir Patrick Geddes, who was, amongst his other roles, a Town Planner and a Conservation Architect.

Geddes contributed to the designing of Santiniketan Ashrama and Visva-Bharati on Tagore’s invitation (see B. Fraser, ed., A Meeting of Two Minds: the Geddes-Tagore Letters, 2005). Geddes also built the Indian College at Montpellier, where he invited Tagore to be President and the botanist, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose to be Vice President. Geddes wrote the first biography of A.J.C. Bose and Geddes’s his son,  Arthur Geddes  played an invaluable part in the activities of Sriniketan, the rural reconstruction project that sought to contribute towards the goal of self sufficiency of the surrounding Indian villages.

Tagore was profoundly interested in the Scottish philanthropist Sir Daniel Hamilton’s concept of micro credit and his scheme for rural regeneration through the cooperative system in the Sunderbans.  Hamilton was a great impetus for Tagore’s own work on rural reconstruction at Sriniketan and the idea of building cooperatives. There were several Scots associated with figures of the Bengal/Indian Renaissance, including Scots who founded or led the Indian National Congress like Octavius Hume, George Yule and William Wedderburn.

This project will explore the Indo-Scottish association in an exploration of the ‘Democratic Intellect’ as described by George Davie in his analysis of the influence of education at Scottish universities (1961) and consider the significance of the exchange of ideas in a transcultural East-West encounter. It will assess the modern relevance of such thinkers, educators and designers who participated in an intellectual exchange finding expression in pragmatic projects to construct and establish this narrative of a transnational interchange.

Tagore envisioned Visva-Bharati as a meeting of India with the world. In 1916, he wrote to his son Rathindranath from Japan, ‘The Santiniketan School must be the thread linking India with the world. We must establish there a centre for humanistic research concerned with all the world’s peoples. The age of narrow chauvinism is coming to an end. For the sake of the future the first step towards this great meeting of world humanity will take place in these very fields of Bolpur.

The task of my last years is to free the world from the coils of national chauvinism.’  We wish to create a hub in the west through the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), working in collaboration with Visva-Bharati, to take forward Tagore’s transnationalism through a knowledge exchange network of  researchers, scholars and artists in an inter-disciplinary research programme that will embody Tagore’s ideas in their multi-media relevance and application.

This Initiative wishes to address several key research questions. What were the literary, historical, environmental and sociological ideas that were exchanged? To what extent were they moderated and conditioned by the ideas of colonisation? How did the Scottish Universities’ literary milieu and print culture relate to India and Bengal? How in turn did Scotland take an important part on the Bengali/Indian intellectual horizon? What were the profiles of Indian students visiting Scotland and Scottish individuals visiting Bengal? What were their respective contributions  like in each country?

This project will document and analyse this intellectual and cultural exchange within the historical context of colonization. It will interrogate how a sense of marginality would create empathy between thinkers of the East and West and how ideas of transnationalism and transculturalism challenged borders. As part of this project, researchers will look at print records, newspaper achieves, correspondences and literary sources to trace the contours of this fascinating exchange.

The project will explore the socio-historic significance of the debates that were generated in the discourse that propelled the Bengal/Indian Renaissance Movement and will assess the similarities and points of departure that become evident as a result of the intellectual colonial encounter between Scotland and India.

The project will go back to seminal Orientalist figures like the historian William Robertson who had written of a sophisticated civilization in India from the Scottish metropole in Edinburgh in his 1791 volume on An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, tracing the commercial links that facilitated a cultural exchange between the West and India. This West meets East study will also look at Orientalists who were writing, in India like Quentin Crawford, who  endorsed a similar perspective in Sketches relating chiefly to the …Hindus (1790) and the work of Thomas Munro, John Malcolm and Mountsuart |Elphinstone.

At the heart of a movement for social and educational reform, stands the Tagore family, from Prince Dwarkanath Tagore (close associate of Raja Rammohan Roy, the founder of the Bramha Samaj in1828), his son, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore who gave a fresh impetus (1842-43 onwards) to validate the Upanishadic tenets of Hindu philosophy and his interest in Unitarianism, and his son, the Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.

The dissenting voices reflected amongst Bramho activists and the role of the Tattwabodhini Sabha and Patrika embody the centrality of ideas in a society that was confronting the challenges of transformation on the socio-religious front. Rabindranath was a pivotal figure who contributed substantially to bringing India to its modern status, willing to see the modern validity of ancient and medieval Indian thought, while welcoming the meeting of minds from the West and East in a mutually beneficial syncreticism.

The research programme will also weigh the narrative shift through the change in perception of India in Western discourse, effected by significant texts like James Mill’s six volume History of British India, published in 1818. This History  became a source of   ‘knowledge’ on the inherent ‘evil’ and ‘corrupt’ nature of the Hindu and his ‘depravity’, fuelled by his superstition and ‘primitive’ religion, for British personnel who came out to serve in and rule India, as it  was their recommended text.

The initial use of ‘Hindu’ in British discourse was a synonym for everything ‘Indian’, which only in later times was used for the religious majority of the sub-continent. The misreading justified the sense of the coloniser’s ‘superiority’  which led to a disinterest amongst East India Company servants and later employees of the Raj, in Indian culture, literature and  the historical continuity of an old civilization that had been validated by earlier ‘Orientalists’.

This project will study how the reading of history and interpretations of culture and literature have been instrumental in forming the minds of generations responsible for governing India, establishing business houses, managing plantations and trade in Indian produce in a global market. Mill had never set foot in India and had no linguistic acquaintance with Indian languages, claiming his ‘expertise’ in India’s history from the distance of the metropole, in an act that marginalises India’s history through a written discourse based on secondhand knowledge which takes on the aura of ‘authenticity’ associated with the written word.

Mill’s treatise was further consolidated by Thomas Babington Macaulay whose Minute on Education in 1835, passed the judgement that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ – a sweeping statement made by a Member of the Governor-General’s Council, who, like Mill, did not possess any knowledge of Indian Languages or of Arabic.

These texts were instrumental in constructing ‘truths’ as facts, and reality on the ground became secondary in an assessment of far-flung colonies which could be written about, assessed and branded as ‘inferior’ without association with the people or the land that was being described, negating the human association so necessary for a fuller understanding of the people and their context.

Mill’s representation of India continued to be challenged in subsequent publications, e.g., in thoughtful analyses like History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), A View of the Present State and Future Prospects of the Free Trade and Colonisation of India (1828) by James Crawford. A French account by Anquetil-Duperron  who came to India in 1754, was rediscovered by Raymond Schwab in 1950.  His La Renaissance Orientale was later translated into English in 1984 by Patterson-Black and Reinking. This Orientalist perspective of India, is considered a seminal text by Edward Said, whose 1978 theory of Orientalism will inform  this postcolonial analytical project.

While the intellectual analyses of the meaning of Indian thought and India’s progress will need to be evaluated in order to understand the continuum in the West-East constructs prevalent from the eighteenth century, this project will concentrate on the links between Scottish thought and the Indian Renaissance in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, seeking to interweave its findings into a coherent fabric on the exchange of ideas at various levels of thought, pertaining to literature, history, the arts, education, environmental and sociological concerns. The role that education has played in the evolution of modern India will be clarified in an estimation of the contributions of Scottish educators in India, like the Church of Scotland missionary, Revd. Alexander Duff and  the watchmaker from Edinburgh, David Hare.

The path for Tagore’s reception in the drawing rooms of the metropolis had been laid by Raja Ram Mohan Roy (who travelled to England between 1830, and died in Bristol in 1833) and by Tagore’s  grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, who, in 1842, was made a Freeman of the City of Edinburgh, in spite of being of a subject nation. Tagore’s association with Scotland thus began through his familial connection.  Tagore met the London India Society in 1912, which became the springboard for some of his long lasting intellectual friendships and prominent associations.

The Nobel Prize awarded in 1913 to Rabindranath Tagore, catapulted the poet onto the world stage and he took this opportunity to take on a one-man mission to speak tirelessly over two decades, journeying across India and abroad, on the Creative Principle, on Nationalism, on Education, Cooperation, Rural reconstruction and the Environment. As Michael Collins (2011) points out, for Tagore, his lectures, talks and essays in English were a ‘political strategy’  to achieve global understanding through the ‘liberal politics of friendship’ to realize the ‘good society.’

Thus Tagore sought ‘cultivated intellectuals’ from the West and the East to facilitate the meeting of minds. As a transcultural ambassador, Tagore relied on transnational friendships to engender mutual appreciation. He challenged the binary of the East and the West, of the centre and the periphery, dismantling the imperial construct of hegemony to facilitate the great ‘Meeting of Minds’ that he strove to achieve in his lifetime. This project seeks to show how transnational intellectual and cultural exchanges can dissipate colonial constructs, engendering ‘dialogues’ across boundaries of nation.

Tagore’s lectures and essays in English thus show that his premise was that all knowledge was not related to constructs of  power,  as some knowledge could benefit both the East and West, having common human indicators that would benefit mankind beyond boundaries of nation, questioning the categories of superiority and inferiority, of the dominating and the subjected nations. Building on Rabindranath Tagore’s impact as an international figure in his time, this project aims to address decline in the interest in Tagore beyond India’s borders after his death, with a revisionist postcolonial approach to establish the validity of Tagore’s works and ideas and that of his circle.

While exploring and assessing the steady exchange of ideas and people across continents between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century especially between Scotland and India, this project will also look at the Indian scholars and artists who visited Scottish universities, like India’s premier chemist Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy and the artist Fanindra Nath Bose.

Tagore’s main connection with Scotland was through his lasting friendship with the Scottish polymath, Sir Patrick Geddes, who was, amongst his other roles, a Town Planner and a Conservation Architect. Geddes contributed to the designing of Santiniketan Ashrama and Visva-Bharati on Tagore’s invitation (see B. Fraser, ed., A Meeting of Two Minds: the Geddes-Tagore Letters, 2005).

Geddes also built the Indian College at Montpellier, where he invited Tagore to be President and the botanist, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose to be Vice President. Geddes wrote the first biography of A.J.C. Bose and Geddes’s his son,  Arthur Geddes  played an invaluable part in the activities of Sriniketan, the rural reconstruction project that sought to contribute towards the goal of self sufficiency of the surrounding Indian villages.

Tagore was profoundly interested in the Scottish philanthropist Sir Daniel Hamilton’s concept of micro credit and his scheme for rural regeneration through the cooperative system in the Sunderbans.  Hamilton was a great impetus for Tagore’s own work on rural reconstruction at Sriniketan and the idea of building cooperatives. There were several Scots associated with figures of the Bengal/Indian Renaissance, including Scots who founded or led the Indian National Congress like Octavius Hume, George Yule and William Wedderburn.

This project will explore the Indo-Scottish association in an exploration of the ‘Democratic Intellect’ as described by George Davie in his analysis of the influence of education at Scottish universities (1961) and consider the significance of the exchange of ideas in a transcultural East-West encounter. It will assess the modern relevance of such thinkers, educators and designers who participated in an intellectual exchange finding expression in pragmatic projects to construct and establish this narrative of a transnational interchange.

Tagore envisioned Visva-Bharati as a meeting of India with the world. In 1916, he wrote to his son Rathindranath from Japan, ‘The Santiniketan School must be the thread linking India with the world. We must establish there a centre for humanistic research concerned with all the world’s peoples. The age of narrow chauvinism is coming to an end. For the sake of the future the first step towards this great meeting of world humanity will take place in these very fields of Bolpur.

The task of my last years is to free the world from the coils of national chauvinism.’  We wish to create a hub in the west through the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), working in collaboration with Visva-Bharati, to take forward Tagore’s transnationalism through a knowledge exchange network of  researchers, scholars and artists in an inter-disciplinary research programme that will embody Tagore’s ideas in their multi-media relevance and application.

This Initiative wishes to address several key research questions. What were the literary, historical, environmental and sociological ideas that were exchanged? To what extent were they moderated and conditioned by the ideas of colonisation? How did the Scottish Universities’ literary milieu and print culture relate to India and Bengal? How in turn did Scotland take an important part on the Bengali/Indian intellectual horizon? What were the profiles of Indian students visiting Scotland and Scottish individuals visiting Bengal? What were their respective contributions  like in each country?

This project will document and analyse this intellectual and cultural exchange within the historical context of colonization. It will interrogate how a sense of marginality would create empathy between thinkers of the East and West and how ideas of transnationalism and transculturalism challenged borders. As part of this project, researchers will look at print records, newspaper achieves, correspondences and literary sources to trace the contours of this fascinating exchange.