Call for Papers
Gitanjali and Beyond Issue 15
From Home to Horizon: Travel and Transformation in Rabindranath Tagore’s Writing
Concept Note
‘Travel’ in Rabindranath Tagore’s writings unfolds in multiple, interwoven dimensions – literal journeys across regions and continents, inward and spiritual movements, cultural and intellectual crossings, and imaginative travels across time, memory and artistic form. This call for papers invites contributions that examine travel not merely as physical displacement but as an aesthetic, ethical and political metaphor in Tagore’s extensive oeuvre.
Tagore was among the most widely travelled literary figures of the early twentieth century. His repeated journeys within India and abroad – to Britain, Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union, Japan, China and Southeast Asia, deeply shaped his ideas on nationalism, education, cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange. These itineraries find vivid expression in his poems, songs, letters, essays, travelogues and fiction. Whether writing from the estates of rural Bengal or recording his impressions of Java and Bali, Tagore turned travel into a mode of observing landscapes, labour, empire, and everyday life with characteristic sensitivity and nuance.
Alongside geographical movement, Tagore continually returned to the idea of inner travel, a quest for self-knowledge and spiritual illumination. In works such as Gitanjali and other lyric sequences, the journey becomes a metaphor for the soul’s ongoing pursuit of an elusive ideal. His reflections on music, nature and education at Santiniketan and Sriniketan introduce yet another paradox: forms of rootedness that are, in themselves, journeys of perception, ethical attention and imaginative growth. Travel in Tagore’s writings is therefore both outward and inward, voluntary and constrained, celebratory yet critical, prompting questions about mobility, exile, belonging, privilege and responsibility.
By proposing Different Forms of Travel in Tagore’s Writing as an organising theme, this call for papers seeks to reassess Tagore’s literary and aesthetic contributions in relation to contemporary discussions on migration, tourism, ecocriticism, world literature and decolonial thought. Contributors are encouraged to explore Tagore’s travel writings in both Bengali and English – letters, diaries, essays, and formal travelogues – alongside creative works in which movement is implicit, including stories, plays, songs and educational experiments. The intention is to foreground how travels – across regions, languages, genres, media and ideas – reshape Tagore’s conceptions of self, community and world.
Articles as well as creative pieces and art on the following broad themes are welcome:
- Physical Journeys and Travel Writing
- Inner, Spiritual and Existential Travel
- Cultural Crossings, Cosmopolitanism and Anti-Nationalism
- Rural Mobility, Landscape and Ecological Imagination
- Travelling Forms: Genre, Translation and Media
- Education, pedagogy and experiential journeys.
- Affective geographies-Exile and Nostalgia in travel
- Gendered Bodies, care and the politics of mobility.
- Cartographies of Empire: Anti-Imperial critique.
- Temporal Travels: Memory, History and Futurity
- Ecological Routes, Seasons and Climactic Rhythms
- Translation as travel: The journey across languages and scripts
Submission Details
Abstracts and full papers are invited from scholars, independent researchers and creative practitioners across literature, cultural studies, history, philosophy, translation studies, performance studies, visual arts and education. Contributions may examine any phase of Tagore’s career and may situate him alongside other travelling intellectuals, writers or artists from South Asia and beyond. Submissions that engage with archival sources, lesser-known travel writings or non-textual traces of travel, such as photographs, paintings, songs or institutional histories, are especially encouraged.
Submission deadline for title and abstract (max. 300 words) of proposed article: 15th February 2026
Submission deadline for complete article (max. 3000 words) with keywords: 15th November 2026
Please use the following email address for all submissions and enquiries:
Author and submission guidelines are available: gitanjaliandbeyond.co.uk/submissions
For any queries please write to [email protected]
The issue will be guest edited by Dr Mohona Chatterjee
