Gitanjali and Beyond Issue 2: Tagore and the Environment

When Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a little boy, he longed to step out into the wide world and experience nature, but his early memories are of confinement within Jorasanko,the sprawling Tagore family home in Calcutta.

He would watch the outside world through the shutters of their great French windows, from the balcony and terrace, admiring the trees, marveling at the freedom of little boys diving into the pond outside, fascinated by the women filling pitchers or washing clothes and ducks swimming without a care in the world there. In My Reminiscences he recalls:

“How intimately did the life of the world throb for us in those days! Earth, water, foliage and sky, they all spoke to us and would not be disregarded. How often were we struck by the poignant regret that we could only see the upper story of the earth and nothing of the inner story.”…

 

Issue 2 – Autumn 2018

Download Issue 2

 

Contents

Foreword 4

Section I: Academic Articles 7

Rabindranath Tagore: The Deep-Rooted Environmentalist and The Origins of Sustainability, Charles Bruce 8
Re-reading Tagore’s Letters, Lectures and Addresses, Joyjit Ghosh 16
Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Politics of Science, Christin Hoene 26
Significance of the environment in the songs of Rabindranath Tagore,Reba Som 41
Liberating the River: Land and Politics in Tagore’s Plays, Debamitra Kar 51
A Home in the World: People and Places in Rabindranath Tagore’s Chaturanga, Kamalika Mitra 66
Ecotourism In and Around Santiniketan: Challenges and Potentialities, Sharmila Chandra 79
A Spoken Silence: Rabindranath and the Ecology of Modern Consciousness, Aseem Shrivastava 112

 

Section II: Book Review 128

Book Review: To Whom I Return Each Day 129

 

Section III: Poetry and Art 132

Chrys Salt 133
Ceramic leaf with words from Voltaire 140
Sue Whitmore 141
Dark Hedges 142
Jamaica 144
View from Moorish Castle 147
Path to Stella 148
Borgue beeches 149
Liz Niven 151
Prof (Dr) Tapati Gupta 154
Spring/Esctasy 155
Peace/Repose 156
Aspirations/Sruggle for fulfilment 157
Elation/Youth/Adventure 158
Ross Donlon 160
Usha Akella 168
Jaydeep Sarangi 172
Zoe Bicat 178
Beth Junor 185
Mario Relich 189
Sam Smith 192
Celia Purcell 197
Mandy Haggith 201
Section IV: Essay 205
The Ocean-Cradle of Birth and of Death – An Appreciation of Tagore’s Sea
Poetry, Mandy Haggith 206

 

Gitanjali-and-Beyond-Issue-2_compressed