Contents: Vol. I. Preface. 2. Introduction. 2. Poetry and philosophy. 3. The philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore. 4. Rabindranath Tagore as reformer. 5. The distinctiveness of Rabindra Nath Tagore’s view on Indian renaissance. 6. Indian literature through the ages. 7. The western imperialistic challenge: Rabindra Nath Tgore, Aurobindo, Tilak and Gokhale. Bibliography. Index.

Vol. II. Preface. 1. Tagore and nationalism. 2. East and west: W.B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore. 3. The letters between Tagore and Noguchi. 4. Tagore as preceptor. 5. Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya and contemporary philosophy in India. 6. Outlook towards women: influence of Indian renaissance. 7. Violence of non-violence: interpretations by Rabindra Nath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. 8. The revolutionary movement: Tagore and Aurobidno. Bibliography. Index.

Rabindranath Tagore was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. He died in 1941 at the age of eighty, is a towering figure in the millennium old literature of Bengal. Anyone who becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be impressed by the power of Tagore’s presence in Bangladesh and in India. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories, and essays are very widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern part of India and throughout.

In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, the excitement that Tagore’s writings created in the early years of the twentieth century has largely vanished. The contrast between Tagore’s commanding presence in Bengali literature and culture, and his near total eclipse in the rest of the world, is perhaps less interesting than the distinction between the view of Tagore as a deeply relevant and many sided contemporary thinker in Bangladesh and India, and his image in the west as a repetitive and remote spiritualist.