Tan Chung - Professor of Chinese, University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi.
Tagore and China is the first full account in English of Rabindranath Tagore's visit to China and its civilizational import. Perhaps for the first time, exhaustive material related to the visit has been collected.
The book charts Tagore's 'grand visit' in 1924 undertaken in response to China's 'Tagore fever' and the series of talks he gave there, their antecedents as well as impact. Also discussed is the foundation of Cheena-Bhavana at Visva-Bharati-and thereby of Chinese studies in India-and Tan Yun-shan's lifelong dedication to it and the Sino-Indian love it held.
This well-researched book unearths new material from Chinese sources to confirm the devotion of Tagore's interpreter, poet Xu Zhimo, to him and Tagore's affection for Xu Zhimo. Tagore's two personal visits to Xu Zhimo, preceded by the latter's visit to Santiniketan, have also been detailed.
Supplemented by several rare photographs, Tagore and China is a fitting tribute to Tagore's 150th birth anniversary and is going to be of abiding value to Sino-Indian understanding.
[The book] is an extraordinary, perhaps unique collection (perceptive and scholarly) that provides penetrating original insights into Tagore's significant contributions towards "social obligations"…Erudite, lively, wide-ranging, this assemblage brings together a mosaic of forward-looking ideas as well as perspectives on china's past "civilisational sagacity" and its intellectual circles' sensitivity against "western cultural poison", and offers precise and informative, if not critical, knowledge of Tagore's cosmology of ideas…An extremely rich book, it is an essential reading for all who are interested in the history of Sino-Indian cultural concord or in the secular ideas of Tagore in regard to a deeper understanding of Indian and Chinese civilisations, and the educated public in general.
There are arcane discoveries of great value to academics, such as an inquiry into the origins of specific documents and inscriptions, leading to a reassessment of some of the chronology and understanding of Tagore's time in China. There is also exceptional granular detail in some instances.
The well-researched and illuminating articles in this collection make Tagore and China an authoritative work on the very special relationship Rabindranath Tagore shared with China. It is a collection of illuminating articles by scholars from India and China on the very special relationship Tagore shared with China. Tagore and China is, indeed, a tribute to that vision.
Tagore was a visionary, always forward-looking. He sought to promote the cause of India-China understanding, envisioning the ascent of India and China to a higher platform of civilizational leadership and fraternal partnership.
Tagore was the first thinker of modern India to be invited by the thinking elite of China, along with the likes of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, as the Chinese grappled with the question of China`s place in a modern world.
This collection of articles by eminent academics and scholars...is a timely and significant addition to the existing literature on Tagore and will promote our understanding of Tagore, as we celebrate the universalism of his ideas and thoughts.