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"˜Can the icon that the multitude created escape the hunger of the eternal dust?` . . . Rabindranath Tagore wrote thus in 1939, two years before his death. This intellectual biography of Tagore, perhaps the first of its kind, portrays him as a man who was deeply skeptical, self-critical, tormented by conflicts in his ˜inner life`, aware of the historical significance of his times and continually interacted with adversaries and friends across the world; someone who built on the heritage of the nineteenth century renaissance in India and became one of the makers of the modern Indian mind. Young Rabi rebelled against ˜Western` schooling, suffered from chronic loneliness in childhood and after, and imbibed the cultural and literary climate in his privileged family; he also engaged as a cultural leader with the Swadeshi movement on Bengal`s partition in 1905, founded the school in Santiniketan and renounced his knighthood after Jallianwala Bagh. Through his eighty-one years, Tagore swung between public life and seclusion of a poet. Over time, he would reinvent his creative self. His life was, however, not bereft of contradictions. His patriotism and love for Bengal and India flowed alongside his belief in a transnational humanist universalism, the ˜religion of man` for the future of civilization. Rabindranath Tagore: an Interpretation situates the iconic figure in the history of his tumultuous times”of an India in the throes of the national struggle for independence and of a world moving from Victorian stability to the turmoil of World War II. Coinciding with his 150th birth anniversary, it illuminates Tagore`s extraordinary contributions: as a poet and writer, nationalist and ideologue, educationist and philosopher, composer and painter. " ISBN
9780670084555
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Pages : 320
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