Rabindranath Tagore: Axiology of Politics (Paperback)  | Released: 06-Apr-24

Among the Indian luminaries of the first half of the 20th Century, well-known in the East as well as the West, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), was arguably the most ‘gifted’ personality. An ‘ambassador’ of Indian culture to the West, Tagore also wrote voluminous essays and letters on socio-political issues—engaged himself in various protests against the raj; as a pacifist in international arena; and also as a polemical writer. It is not an easy task to carve out Tagore’s Political Philosophy from an ocean-like and multifaceted works of the poet. It is more difficult to draw a coherent and cohesive position/perspective of the poet on various related issues like justice, gender, ecology, community development and so on. Even when his ideas on a particular phenomenon were very fluid, Tagore always tried to evaluate them in order to justify his standpoint. And the axes that helped him to judge/evaluate an event/issue/phenomenon were twofold: Satya/Truth and Sundara/Beauty, which can also be understood as Ethics and Aesthetics. These axes formed Tagore’s axiology of weighing and evaluating all the social phenomena around him, including politics. The present book attempts to revisit Tagore’s opinion and standpoints on these constituent elements of politics from the stance of this marker—axiology, so that many well-known aspects of his thought may be seen in a different light.