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masses through education and self-help programmes. He welcomed modernisation in many areas of life. For instance, he supported artificial contraception, which Gandhi opposed.
    Tagore was a great champion of the individual. In his fictional work he often portrays the thinking, conscientious, lonely individual , alienated from the unthinking and dogmatical group and liable to be persecuted by it. The vulnerable individual is often the focus of his attention in poetry too, as in the poem ‘The Boy’ in this anthology. He was acutely aware of the oppression of women and looked forward to the coming of an epoch when men and women would be equal partners.
    Tagore’s thinking mind and the times in which he lived inevitably involved him in political gestures. At home, he wrote songs which protested against Curzon’s partition of Bengal; returned his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre; spoke out against terrorism as a political strategy, to the displeasure of those who favoured it; criticised aspects of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement and engaged in dialogues and debates with him. These activities made him an all-India figure and won him the admiration of both Gandhi and Nehru. Abroad, he exposed the horrific dangers of competitive, aggressive nationalism in a series of lectures ( Nationalism, 1917), to the annoyance of Britain, the USA, and Japan. He was fully aware of the pressing need to oppose fascism (see poem no. 18 of Prantik in this book) and died profoundly saddened by the way in which the world was hurtling towards another major war, but he never lost his faith in humanity. Some of his poems are known to have inspired conscientious objectors to war in Britain during the Second World War. 5 Tagore died before the full horrors of Nazism became common knowledge and before the partition of his native land.
    The high quality of Tagore’s achievements in a diversity of fields assures his pre-eminent position within the Bengali cultural tradition. In that context he is still very much alive, a focal point of lively debates and controversies. Fortunately for the Bengali literary scene, a generation of writers who regarded themselves as post-Tagoreans established themselves before Tagore’s death, in the 1930s, so that there was no literary vacuum after his death. On the contrary, there were enough writers to take Bengali writing  successfully forward from the point where he left it, and the two decades after his death were remarkably fruitful, despite the lacerations that Bengal underwent in 1947. Tagore was a pioneer in so many fields that he has become a natural point of reference. If people go away from him in search of something they cannot find in him, they tend to come back to him for something that they cannot easily find anywhere else. The extreme revolutionary left, as represented by the Naxalite movement of the late sixties and early seventies, did indeed reject him, as it rejected other leaders of the Indian Renaissance, but that extremism of attitude discredited itself. In the eastern wing of Bengal Tagore played a crucial role in the self-definition of the people after partition. After the region became a part of Pakistan, a propaganda war was launched to belittle Tagore by portraying him as belonging to Hindus only and not of any relevance to Muslims. This sectarian view was rejected by a regional elite who were becoming increasingly secularised, who derived inspiration from Tagore during their struggle for political independence from Pakistan, and who managed to rally the people round his memory as a symbol of their identity as Bengalis. This act of recognition was sealed by the adoption of one of his patriotic songs as the national anthem of the new state of Bangladesh. (The Indian national anthem is also a composition of Tagore’s.)
    But Tagore does not belong to Bengalis or Indians only. Many of the Bengali post-Tagoreans rebelled against him, finding him lacking in the ennui, grotesquerie, and sense