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16.15 Uhr

Negotiating Hindu Indegenism:

Negotiating Hindu Indigenism

Rabindranath Tagore and the Problematics of Cultural Reform in a Postcolonial Society

Dr. Sayan Chattopadhyay, Indian Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

The paper seeks to explore the conflict between the desire to emulate aspects of the colonising culture and the growing assertion of Hindu indegenism that characterised the middle-class intellectual discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengali society. Rabindranath Tagore as one of the foremost intellectual figures of colonial Bengal participated in this debate through a series of socio-political essays written during the turn of the century.
A study of these essays shows a gradual shift in Tagore’s position vis-à-vis the idea of “learning from the coloniser” and his growing affiliation towards the ideology of Hindu indeginism. In this paper I suggest that understanding the
complex and often contradictory arguments that inform Tagore’s changing ideological position during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is an important prerequisite for understanding Tagore’s initial enthusiasm regarding the Swadeshi movement, the first Indian middle-class led anti-colonial mass movement, and his subsequent renunciation of the idea of Hindu indegenism.

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