Sanghamitra Dalal's Review of Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism (original) (raw)

The Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize (in Literature, in 1913), is not only revered as a poet and composer, but also as a novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, painter, philosopher, social reformer and educationist. Although the primary concern of this collection of essays is to re-evaluate Tagore’s three lectures on nationalism, delivered in Japan and the USA, and later compiled in a separate volume in 1917, the 14 chapters delve deeper into reassessing Tagore’s political philosophy from various perspectives. Scholars from different disciplines, both from the east and the west, re-examine Tagore’s selected essays, poems, fictions, travelogues, songs and also cinematic adaptations to ascertain the nature and level of his engagement with the idea of nationalism as well as his views on cosmopolitanism.