A Poet’s Ashram : Rabindranath Tagore’s Experimental Community in Colonial India

The remarkably creative life of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) has long been an area of scholarly enquiry. Yet, surprisingly, his role as the founder of an experimental ashram community remains unexplored. A Poet’s Ashram retrieves the idea of his ashram through an exploration of his writings on the institutions he built.

The ashram community Tagore endeavoured to create in Santiniketan during the period 1901-41 was an educational experiment, his response to the question of modernity and a way to reinvent the ancient Indian idea of the ashram. This book traces the history of how the ashram school evolved into a community that practiced egalitarianism, inclusiveness and creativity through its daily existence. It explores a range of nineteenth and twentieth century discourses and Tagore’s engagement with them to situate that idea within its historical context, a critical juncture in the history of modern India and the world. This book’s reading of his project unravels its anti-colonial underpinnings and the commonalities it shared with some of the other similar experimental communities that challenged illiberal ideologies and power relations during the early twentieth century.

Rich with archival material, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of history, political science, culture studies, English literature, Bengali literature, institution building, history of colonial modernity, and postcolonial studies. It will also be of interest to educationists, teachers, policymakers, and those interested in modern Indian history, the philosophy of education, peace, inclusivity and sustainability.

Chapters 1 and 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.