From the Broken Nest to Visva-Bharati

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Rabindranath Tagore, the greatest figure of the Indian renaissance, was in his life and works the finest embodiment of the humanist ideal of Iâ€™uomo universale, the universal man. Many were the spheres of creativity which he brought within his domain and in which he excelled. He left for his countrymen and the world a cultural heritage which in its inexhaustible reachness of meaning continues, even sixty years after his death, to invite fresh explorations and rediscovery. The essays in the book explore some aspects of the phenomenon Rabindranath. What role did he interface of the East and the West in the circumstances of British rule play in shaping the course of the Bengal renaissance and the development of its most versatile personality? How did Tagoreâ€™s own distinctly bifocal view of the individual both continue the traditional Hindu view and almost radically depart from it? Did Tagoreâ€™s personal involvement in the tragedy of the broken nest redeem itself in the life-long search for a different nest where the world might meet under the open sky? How to explain the volcanic eruption of the calm Apollonian emblem of wisdom and harmony into the Dionysian rebel who inaugurated the modern age in Indian Painting? What were some of the unresolved antinomies of the Indian awakening which expressed themselves in the lives and works of two of the most outstanding personalities of modern India â€“ Tagore and Gandhi? What kind of a common vision of a sane society did Tagore share with two such remarkable cotemporaries as Gandhi and Manabendra Nath Roy, with such strikingly different backgrounds and orientations? And what positive significance does Tagoreâ€™s life-long effort to promote the ideal of unity in diversity have in the 21st century, confronted as it is with the threat of cannibalistic globalization on the one hand and catastrophic clash of civilizations on the other? In exploring these issues Sibnarayan Ray offers in this book many new insights into the Tagore universe and its personal and socio-cultural setting. There is nothing bland or de ja-vu in these essays. As with his other writings here too his views may provoke controversy, but they are more likely to inspire fresh critical re-examination of many of the accepted notions, and father explorations of this multi-layered universe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sibnarayan Ray

Professor Sibnarayan Ray was a close associate of M. N. Roy during the last eight years of the latter's life. He was Chairman of the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, for nearly twenty years. Also Professor at the Universities of Bombay and California (Santa Barbara): Director of Rabindra Bhavana, Visva Bharati University; Research Fellow at the Universities of London and Chicago; and visiting lecturer at Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, and various other Universities in Europe, the United States, Australia and Asia. He gave the main address at the Third World Congress of Humanists at the University of Oslo, Norway, and was a member of the Executive and Board of Directors of International Humanist and Ethical Union, Holland; Chaired the First International Congress on Modernisatior. In Asia at the Korea University, Seoul; was Director of the international Seminar on EI Papel de la Inteligencia eu las Sociedades Asiatican Contempraneas at the University of Mexico. Author of about forty books in English and Bengali; be has been editing a Bengali quarterly of ideas and unquiry (Jijnasa) for the last eighteen years. He has been recently honoured with an Emeritus Fellowship in Literature. Besides writing a number of books in English and Bengali, he is engaged in editing the Selected Works of M. N. Roy, four volumes of which have already been published.