Sisir Kumar Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Show Yourself to My Soul, a translation of gītāñjali (the Bengali book of that name, which does not correspond exactly to the selection in Tagore’s own English Gitanjali) by James Talarovic, foreword by William Radice, introduction by David E. Schlaver (Notre Dame, Indiana: Sorin Books, 2002; translation originally published in 1983 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, by the University Press Ltd).

Three Plays [raktakarabī, tapatī and arūp ratan], trans. with an extensive introduction by Ananda Lal (Calcutta: Birla Foundation, 1987; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

About Tagore

For fuller bibliographies, see the books by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson.

Chatterjee, Bhabatosh, Rabindranath Tagore and Modern Sensibility (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Chaudhuri, Nirad C., Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), especially Book 2, Chapter 5, pp. 595–636: ‘Tagore; the lost great man of India’.

Das Gupta, Uma (ed.), A Difficult Friendship: Letters of Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore 1913–1940 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996).

Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson (eds.), Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, with a foreword by Amartya Sen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A wide-ranging selection, combining English letters with letters translated from Bengali and with extensive notes and commentary; an essay on Tagore and Einstein by Dipankar Home and Andrew Robinson is included in an appendix.

Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988).

Fraser, Bashabi (ed.), The Geddes-Tagore Correspondence (Edinburgh: The Edinburgh Review 109, 2002; Kolkata: Visva-Bharati (The Tagore-Geddes Correspondence), 2004).

Hogan, Patrick Colm and Lalita Pandit (eds.), Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition (Cranbury, NJ, London, UK and Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 2003). Includes essays on Tagore and nationalism, education, science, Yeats, Satyajit Ray, Gora and Jane Austen, Janusz Korczak, etc.

Kripalani, Krishna, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, and New York: Grove Press, 1962; revised edn, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1980).

Kundu, Kalyan, Sakti Bhattacharya and Kalyan Sircar (eds.), Imagining Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore and the British Press (1912–1941) (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad in collaboration with The Tagore Centre UK, 2000).

Lago, Mary M. (ed.), Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore 1911–1941 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972).

Lago, Mary and Ronald Warwick (eds.), Rabindranath Tagore: Perspectives in Time (London: Macmillan, 1989). Includes essays on Tagore’s Western career, his short stories, his educational ideals, Tagore and Elmhirst, Tagore’s paintings, Tagore and Western composers, etc.

O’Connell, Kathleen M., Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 2002).

Radice, William, Poetry and Community: Lectures and Essays 1991–2001 (New Delhi: DC Publishers, 2003). Includes essays on translating Tagore, and on Tagore and the Nobel Prize.

Radice, William, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 53 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Ray, Sibnarayan, From the Broken Nest to Visva-Bharati: Six Exploratory Essays on Rabindranath (Kolkata: Renaissance Publishers, 2001).

Robinson, Andrew, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore, with a foreword by Satyajit Ray (London: André Deutsch, 1989).

Sahitya Akademi (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore 1861–1961: A Centenary Volume (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961, reprinted 1986). Introduction by Jawaharlal Nehru; memoirs by several of Tagore’s associates; essays on all aspects of Tagore’s life and work; essays on Tagore in other lands; bibliography of Tagore’s Bengali and English works (with dates); very useful chronicle of his life compiled by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee (Tagore’s biographer in Bengali) and Kshitis Roy.

Thompson, Edward, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1926; second edn 1948; new edn with an introduction by Harish Trivedi, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Chronology

Introduction

When someone from the Western world tries to write about some aspect of India, one of his difficulties is that his habits of thought and ways of writing will not necessarily fit the subject he is describing. Brooding on this problem, I was suddenly struck by a verse from the āśā Upanisad. It consists of six propositions, linked by most translators into pairs:

It stirs and it stirs not; it is far, and likewise near.

It is inside of all this, and it is outside of all this.

(Max Müller)

He moves, and he moves not. He is far, and he is near.

He is within all, and he is outside all.

(Juan Mascaró)

The Upanisads, some of which date back to the eighth century B.C., meant more to Rabindranath Tagore than any other literature; and the āśā Upanisad – expounded in detail in the second lecture of Personality (1917) – was particularly dear to him. The āsā Upanisad had been a revelation to his father, the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, who describes in his autobiography how he found the first verse of the text by chance, on a loose page of a Sanskrit book fluttering past him. The verse that struck me is the fifth. It is about the nature of God, Brahman, and it attempts through its contradictions to describe the interplay of world and spirit, eternal and temporal, infinite and finite, transcendent and immanent which Tagore himself defined as the main subject of all his writings. It seemed to me, therefore, that the separate propositions in the verse would serve well as headings for the main sections of this Introduction. I shall be stretching their meaning far beyond what the seer who composed the āśā Upanisad intended; but I know of no better way in which to deal with the complexity and contradictions of Tagore’s life and work – a complexity compounded by the fact that this is not a book of his poems in the language in which they were written, but a book of translations.

He moves

Tagore was a child of nineteenth-century Bengal, of Calcutta, a place and a time to which nearly all the main cultural, political and economic features of modern India can be traced.