Rabindranath Tagore

When Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his own English translation of Gitanjali (Song Offerings), he became the first non-European to do so, achieving immediate fame.Translations in other languages of this and other works followed. Reams were written on his writings, and his personality. As aworld citizen, Tagore aimed at bringing the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ together for an inclusive humanism. His was assumed to be the Voice of India—indeed of Asia and the colonised world. The Nobel Prize gave him the authority to speak, and the intellectual elite of many countries listened. 

The editors of Rabindranath Tagore:  One Hundred Years of Global Reception had asked Tagore experts worldwide to narrate how the Bengali author was received from 1913 until our time. Their thirty-five essays arranged by region or language group inform us about translations, the impact of Tagore’s visits, and his subsequent standing in the world of letters. Tagore’s reception while often enthusiastic was not always adulatory, occasionally undergoing dramatic metamorphoses, and diverse political and social milieus and cultural movements responded to him differently. This nuanced global reception is for the first time dealt with comprehensively and systematically in this volume presented as a work of reference. These essays remind us that Tagore’s works keep being reprinted or retranslated for he continues to be relevant to modern readers.