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Sirshendu Majumdar’s new book has recently been published by Routledge!

This book presents a set of original letters exchanged between Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the eminent Irish poet and theosophist, James Henry Cousins. Through these letters, the volume explores their shared ideas of culture, art, aesthetics, and education in India; aspects of Irish Orientalism; Irish literary revival; theosophy, eastern knowledge, and spiritualism; cross-cultural dialogue and friendship; Renaissance in India; anti-imperialism; nationalism; internationalism; and cosmopolitanism. The book reveals a hitherto unexplored facet concerning two leading thinkers in the history of ideas in a transnational context.

With its lucid style, extensive annotations and a comprehensive Introduction, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Bengali literature, comparative literature, South Asian studies, Tagore studies, modern Indian history, philosophy, cultural studies, education, political studies, postcolonial studies, India studies, Irish history, and Irish literature. It will also interest general readers and the Bengali diaspora.

Ragini Mohite’s new book addresses W.B. Yeats’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s engagements with identity, nationalism, and the literary and cultural traditions of Ireland and India. It offers a fresh critical perspective on their work from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their international collaborations most significantly influence the cross-border lives of their literature.

This book foregrounds the Yeats-Tagore relationship, significant among their international collaborations, provides a new analysis of the fraught beginning to Tagore’s international fame, and the value of reading his English translations as original texts, as is done by many English-language readers. Of Tagore’s many international acquaintances, Yeats looms largest over his first English-language publications. This brief relationship, in part due to its tensions, is significant when considering literary modernism’s global nature and appeal.

Exploring the thematic parallels and generic innovations in the works of Yeats and Tagore allows readers to recognize the significant moments of tension and divergence in their oeuvres. Reading Yeats and Tagore comparatively offers a timely historical perspective on how the nationalized valences of identity and selfhood might become transnational in contemporary readings.