Rabindranath Tagore: Omnibus III

Rabindranath Tagore: Omnibus III brings together four of Tagore’s acclaimed works. Nationalism (1917) contains the lectures given by Tagore in Japan and the United States in 1916-17. In these essays, he criticises the nation-state in both east and west and offers his vision of a society independent of it. Mashi and other stories (1918) is a collection of fourteen short stories translated by W.W. Pearson, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Jadunath Sarkar, Keshub Chandra Mukhopadhyay, Anath Nath Mitra and E.P. Thomson. It also contains one of Tagore’s most famous stories, ‘The Postmaster’, translated by Debendranath Mitter and made into a film by Satyajit Ray. Translated by Surendranath Tagore, The Home and the World (1919) is the English rendition of Ghare-Baire, one of Tagore’s major novels. Replete with barbed irony and needle-sharp epigrams, the novel is woven around the love triangle of Bimala, Nikhilesh and Sandip, against the backdrop of the Indian freedom movement. Tagore’s love for nature included children, the child being a symbol of new life. Written primarily for children, the beauty and simplicity of the poems included in The Crescent Moon (Sishu, 1903) moved many of his illustrious contemporaries, including Nobel Laureates Gide and Jimenez.