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| Library status: currently open during regularly scheduled hours. |
Tagore and the Feminine: A Journey in Translations by 
Tagore and China by
Tagore and China is the first full account in English of Rabindranath Tagore's visit to China and its civilizational import. Perhaps for the first time, exhaustive material related to the visit has been collected. The book charts Tagore's 'grand visit' in 1924 undertaken in response to China's 'Tagore fever' and the series of talks he gave there, their antecedents as well as impact. Also discussed is the foundation of Cheena-Bhavana at Visva-Bharati-and thereby of Chinese studies in India-and Tan Yun-shan's lifelong dedication to it and the Sino-Indian love it held. This well-researched book unearths new material from Chinese sources to confirm the devotion of Tagore's interpreter, poet Xu Zhimo, to him and Tagore's affection for Xu Zhimo. Tagore's two personal visits to Xu Zhimo, preceded by the latter's visit to Santiniketan, have also been detailed. Supplemented by several rare photographs, Tagore and China is a fitting tribute to Tagore's 150th birth anniversary and is going to be of abiding value to Sino-Indian understanding.
Tagore's Ideas of the New Woman by
A notable contribution on Tagore's vision of womanhood This book theorizes the continuous reconfigurations--'making' and 'unmaking'--of female subjectivity in Tagore's life, his times, and his works. This transhistorical approach in the book makes gender formations and discourses of the past relevant and necessary to the understanding of postmodern gender issues and ideologies. A unique feature of this compilation is the variety of genres that it covers, ranging from Tagore's poems, dance dramas, dance forms and their innovative uses, the gender-specific nature of several Rabindrasangeet, his travel writings and paintings, to highlighting the postmodern reworks of Tagore's novels on celluloid. On the whole, this edited collection with its extensive focus on the issues of gender, heterosexual love, marriage and patriarchy in relation to the works of Tagore strengthens the claim that the politics of culture and the gendering of social subjectivity were intrinsic to the representative ideologies of literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Yeats and Tagore: A Comparative Study of Cross-Cultural Poetry, Nationalist Politics, Hyphenated Margins and The Ascendancy of the Mind by
This work is a comparative study of Rabindranath Tagore and William Butler Yeats. It explores their relationship and also seeks to clarify how and why these two poets shared certain ideas and ideals while there were also divergences. The author has also studied the role of James Henry Cousins, who in his early career was associated with the Irish Revival, but later on settled in India where he got involved with the cultural renaissance and nationalist movement. Cousins was related to both Tagore and Yeats; to Yeats by creative partnership (the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Revival) and Tagore via close contact and mutual beliefs. Professor Majumdar's research is based on fresh interpretation of the primary works of these writers. He has used published works in standard critical editions but most importantly he has discovered unpublished and translated them. The author reads Bengali, and has utilised a large number of Rabindranath Tagore's letters and works not available in English translation. He has also consulted Tagore's private papers and collections available only in the Rabindra Bhavana Archives and Library at Santiniketan. In addition Majumdar has also researched and translated primary works of other writers both in Bengal, Europe and Ireland, many of these primary sources are rare and not easily accessible to scholarship. Dr .Majumdar is one of India's finest scholars in Irish poetry and literature and this work is an important contribution to the study of Yeats as well as Tagore.