Rabindranath Tagore: Reclaiming a Cultural Icon

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

Rabindranath Tagore can well he deemed a 'cultural icon' in the sense that he embodied an engaging integrated notion of human culture through his charismatic personality and manifold creative works, Tagore's humane vision of culture is one that stems from the cultural soil of his native Ben al and opens onto and embraces humanity as a whole, each portion of which is rooted in its own native cultural soil. This volume represents the efforts of nearly two dozen individuals - authorities in the respective aspects of Rabindranath Tagore's immense oeuvre that each knows best.

Rabindranath for Visva-Bharati is the guiding spirit and it is our constant endeavour to inform our work with his philosophy and vision. We derive our joys from the place that inspired a large part of his creative output. Santiniketan-Sriniketan the twin campuses of Visva-Bharati are like the two arms of a being who is dexterous in using both and it is here that we find the vitality of the founder's thoughts and ideas ever alive. In his lifetime, Rabindranath travelled widely in India and other countries to constantly refresh himself with the broadening experiences of travel and to share his thoughts with the cultures and peoples of other lands. There are very few personages who had the vision to gather the best and the brightest from all over the world for the institution that he built; Rabindranath was one such far-seeing person.

The present volume, I believe, is the result of the understanding between the University of Toronto and Visva-Bharati, in keeping with Rabindranath's spirit of collaboration and cooperation in the realm of knowledge. It gives me pleasure that the collection contains essays on diverse aspects by scholars from diverse fields-Rabindranath is relevant in diverse pursuits of knowledge. It is indeed difficult to limit his oeuvre.

Rabindranath had set up the Publishing Department primarily to publish his works in the form that would net the standards of the texts, the other aim was to publish in the vernacular, works that would further the cause of education. Over the years, the Publishing Department has published many titles in addition to the corpus of Rabindranath's works. The responsibility of making Rabindranath and his ideas accessible to world readers rests on this department and volumes like these are in that direction.