Education As Freedom

Tagore's paradigm

Plot

Tagore literature with all its cornucopian variety has always been a rich quarry for translators for well over a century, ever since Sister Nivedita and Jagadish Chandra Bose produced the earliest translations of Rabindranath s short stories. And his translators are legion. Yet so much remains to be translated. Education as Freedom -Tagore s Paradigm brings together in translation a number of Rabindranath s major essays, speeches and letters spread over five decades - a period when he came into his own not only as a world poet but also as a notable exponent of an alternative paradigm to colonial education in British India - an exponent who had his own syncretic vision and spoke with formidable original authority to intervene in the contemporary Euro-centric colonial discourse in education. Of course this unique Tagorean vision is epitomised in Visva-Bharati University and the Visva-Bharati saga is an integral part of the history of emergence of modern India.