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Tagore’s Educational Experiments and Right to Education Bill: a Comparison

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Falguni P. Desai, V. S. Patel College of Arts and Science, Gujarat, India

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Abstract

As one of the earliest educators to think in terms of the global village and free education for all, Rabindranath Tagore’s educational pattern Loka-siksha has a distinctive understanding and suitability for education within multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-cultural situations, amidst conditions of acknowledged economic discrepancy and political imbalance of contemporary times where education and cost are twined. The paper proposes to focus on Tagore’s philosophy on education an idea of extending equal right of education for all. Keep Reading

Tagore’s Paintings: a Creation of Genius[i]

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Rajdeep Konar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

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Standing even at his 150th birth anniversary, there still remains a tendency to see Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings as “aberrations” to his aesthetic creed. This article makes an attempt at understanding the “thought gesture” behind Tagore’s paintings and thus relocating them in his personal tradition of art. This argues that the significance of Tagore’s painting will be fully realized not in a minute technical analysis of his painting. There have been numerous attempts at asserting judgmental views on Tagore’s paintings concerning the absence of any “methodological approach” to his painting. Rather, the pertinent questions which should be posed are: Why did Tagore essentially began painting? And why did he paint what he did? These questions could lead us towards comprehending the potentially infinite “thought gesture” which lies beneath the finite, pragmatic act of painting. This could let us into a greater understanding of his act of painting as not an event of ‘exception’ but as a development of the very ideas and concepts which constituted his consciousness in whatever he did. Keep Reading

On Reading ‘Streer Patra’, Mrinal’s Letter to Her husband

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Shyamali Dasgupta, Seth Soorajmull Jalan Girl’s College, India

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Tagore’s famous short story, ‘Streer Patra’, highlights the suffering, ignominy and neglect that women have to face in a male dominated society. Although set in late nineteenth century Kolkata, Tagore’s story has relevance for the discerning reader even today. It dwells upon issues like child-marriage, commoditization of women, the appalling state of woman-and-child healthcare, high rates of infant mortality as well as the marginalisation of economically dependent women. The story also exposes the terrible plight of orphaned, homeless girls without any means, like Bindu whose way to survive was to accept servitude and total humiliation, from which death becomes the only form of escape. Mrinal’s final rejection of her marital state and decision of leaving her husband is a lone woman’s act of defiance against the relentless subjugation of women in society. Keep Reading

Two Cosmopolitan Friends: Tagore and Cousins

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Utpal Mitra,Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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The word cosmopolitanism has different connotations. According to the philosophical cosmopolitans, who are also designated as Moral Universalists, there does not exist any boundary between nations, states and cultures, as they believe all human beings to be fellow citizens and compatriots. This article attempts to address the cosmopolitan ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and James H. Cousins. Moving beyond the parochial notion of nationalism, both Tagore and Cousins adopted the notion of universalism that assimilates all cultures, races and religions under the broader category of Humanism. Keep Reading

Tagore’s Philosophy of Life – a Study of Sadhana

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Marie Josephine Aruna, Tagore Arts College

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This paper seeks to study the collection of Tagore’s lectures in the book Sadhana which deals with his philosophy of life. At various instances in his lectures Tagore repeatedly emphasizes on the Indian philosophy of oneness of Being that is the cause for the progress of the soul towards the union with the Brahman. The collection is compiled of eight lectures, based on ideas of the individual’s relation to the universe, soul consciousness, evil, self, of love, of action and of beauty and finally the nature of union with the Infinite. The Infinite can be attained through endless means of activities found in joy and love. His sadhana has been in writing poetry and in living his life in all its hues and colors and thereby attaining realization of life. Keep Reading

Love of Creation and Mysticism in Tagore’s Gitanjali and Stray Birds

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Paula Hayes, Strayer University, USA

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This paper is concerned with examining two of Tagore’s collections of poems, Gitanjali and Stray Birds, from the perspective of the poet’s love of nature and of God. The paper seeks to find a religious explanation for Tagore’s perpetual praise of the natural world, a praise that he was able to connect dynamically to his love of God. The explanation given is that Tagore’s repetition of nature motifs and his ability to link these motifs to a harmonious pursuit of the divine is rooted in an appreciation for cosmogony of the Rig Veda. The paper ends by addressing briefly how Tagore’s naturalism, rooted in a tradition extending back to sacred text, leads the poet to a mystical expression of personality through his poems. Keep Reading

The Scientist and the Poet: Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore

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Biswanath Banerjee, Visva-Bharati, India

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This article attempts to explore the scientific discourses of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore, to whom science did not signify a mechanistic analysis of facts, but rather a broader interpretation, a wider perception of the universe. Having their beliefs firmly rooted to the preachings of the ancient Hindu Upanishads and the Vedas, they conceived Nature not merely as a physical phenomenon, but a living spirit, which could help man to realize the essential Truth of Life. Keep Reading

The Sexologist and the Poet: On Magnus Hirschfeld, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Critique of Sexual Binarity

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J. Edgar Bauer, Researcher and Author                 

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Between 1930 and 1932, German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) undertook a world journey that he eventually reported in Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (1933), arguably the first non-Eurocentric, anti-colonialist critique of Asian cultures from a sexological perspective.  Saluted as “the modern Vatsyayana of the West,” Hirschfeld met during his stay in India personalities such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Radindranath Tagore, whom he visited at his family residence in Calcutta.  Against the backdrop of Hirschfeld’s “doctrine of sexual intermediaries” and his general postulate that truly creative artists have mostly “united in themselves both sexes in especially pronounced form,” the study analyzes and assesses his reference to Tagore’s femininity. While acknowledging the correspondences between the sexologist’s universalization of sexual intermediariness and the poet’s premise that “[t]he Creator must be conscious of both the male and female principles without which there can be no Creation,” the elaborations focus on their divergent conceptualizations of sexual difference, womanhood, and the erotic life. Keep Reading

In the World of Men: Tagore’s Arrival in the Spiritual Domain of Nationalism

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Banibrata Goswami, Panchakot Mahavidyalaya, India

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was born in a family which, on one hand, inherited a legacy of rich Indian culture, and on the other, did not hesitate to welcome the modernism, freshly arrived from Europe through waves of Enlightenment. He was sent early to England to imbibe the gifts of modern science and rationalism that could lead him to a standard and secured career. But even though the discipline of work, love for liberalism and quest after scientific truth and technological perfection there impressed him much, in its over all effect the West’s efforts of de-humanization disappointed Tagore and disillusioned him as well. This led him finally to the realization and reconstruction of the motherland that is India. He came to meet the common man and his everyday sorrows and tears in rural Bengal, in Silaidaha, Patisar and Sazadpur where he was given the duty to look after the family estate. The raw and rough smell of the soil, the whirl of the waves in river Padma, the play of seasons on the strings of nature lent him a unique insight. He learnt to weave his words offering a perfect slide show of mutual reciprocation of man and nature, accompanied by a hitherto unheard melody of folk tune that glorifies the struggles of that life and thereby consolidating it gradually to a consciousness out of which a nation is born. The present essay intends to seek and understand the secrets of that story, which, though lacking miserably in sound and fury, strives towards a steady self emergence and emancipation paving the way for political freedom. Keep Reading

Jatiyo Itihaas vis-à-vis Manab Itihaas: Tagore the Historiographer

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Sajalkumar Bhattacharya, Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, West Bengal, India

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Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay wrote Krishnacaritra (1858) with an aim to counter the bias of the western scholars in the history of India recorded by them. But Rabindranath Tagore’s review article of Krishnacaritra is even more interesting, for it provides us with fascinating insights into Tagore’s views on history and historiography. These views are not only more modern and rational than those of Bankim, but they also appear to anticipate the takes of many sociologists, historians and novelists of today. This article attempts to analyse some of Tagore’s review articles as well as some of his essays to examine this alternative method of historiography proposed by him. Keep Reading