The Universalist, Humanist Bard

There is never an end to Tagore. Even after so many decades, the way this nineteenth century polyglot is read, researched, and written about today is certainly mind-boggling. This review intends to focus on two very recent additions to Tagoreana, both scholarly contributions that approach to study him from rather different yet similar perspectives. Himani Bannerji’s book Decolonization and Humanism: The Postcolonial Vision of Rabindranath Tagore is a collection of six essays that the author wrote over a long stretch of time, had published them earlier in different places, and they have been revised and rewritten now for this volume. Through the lens of humanist universalism, they examine the social and political thought of Rabindranath Tagore, especially his writings on the self, pedagogy, patriarchy, human development and alienation, and provide evidence of his place as a classic, and perhaps the earliest, example of anti-colonial critique globally from within the heart of colonized India.