Rabindranath Tagore Critical Analysis

Tagore’s Internationalism and its Contemporary Relevance: A Feminist Perspective

Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, the philosopher, the painter, the dramatist are all beings of awe. Yet to the student of International Relations, it is Tagore the Internationalist who is perhaps of the greatest interest. Living in the 21st century, having celebrated his 150th birth anniversary, we are yet to decipher to the full extent of the multitude of what he had to say. Yet, as we read more and more of the man, we tend to put him in a divine altar almost making considering him to be infallible. This is not a very hard thing to do, especially when we do discover that when we use terms such as “modern” or “post modern” today, Tagore had already been bearing some of these traits around a hundred years back. Tagore was very much a contemporary to the rising feminist movement in Europe. Though he never formally called himself a feminist he made serious endevours to make life better for women. But then we do observe the dire need for deconstructing his ideas. As we all know that the latter is very much essential if we are to assimilate his ideas and chalk out their contemporary relevance. His works and ideas have made many call him a reformist while others have blamed him for the establishment of neo patriarchy. The challenge today is in determining whether these ideas and values are going to be sustainable in the contemporary world and in which way are they going to affect gender relations and