The present volume comprises complete translations of two important collections of Tagore’s essays on literature: Sāhityer Pathe and Sāhityer Svarūp. Tagore’s literary essays, however, are certainly not confined to the essays included in these two collections. He has innumerable literary essays written on different occasions in different periods of his long literary career, and a careful survey of all the critical writings of Tagore can show the graph of Tagore’s gradual development as a critical theorist. This is quite natural, because opinion, unlike dogma, has a growth, and, since these two books belong to the final phase of his career (Sāhityer Pathe was published in 1936 and Sāhityer Svarūp was posthumously published in 1943), they may be regarded as the final observations of Tagore on literature and literary criticism.
Tagore was intimately acquainted with both the Western critical ideas and the Indian aesthetic tradition. One can discover an interesting affinity between Tagore and Coleridge in respect of their views about the nature of poetry. There are interesting affinities, parallels, resonances and reverberations between Tagore’s critical observations and some critical observations of Arnold, Eliot, Woolf, Bakhtin and the New Critics as well. However, a close scrutiny would reveal that the Western views are confined mainly to surface-level similarities, and that Tagore’s ideas about literature have their roots deep in the Indian poetics and particularly in the philosophy of the Upanishad, in the belief that the world is created out of joy.
The book will fulfill a long-standing need of the Tagore scholars who cannot read Tagore in the original, but who are interested, nevertheless, in Tagore’s views on literature and literary criticism. It is expected to give a succinct idea of Tagore’s aesthetics and his dominant position as a literary critic.
A full Professor since 1982, and now retired, Dr Mohit K. Ray (1940-), D.Litt (honoris causa) is one of the seniormost Professors in India. He has six books and a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals in India and abroad.
Dr. Ray was nominated for the prestigious title Man of the Year 2002 by American Biographical Institute, Inc. North Carolina; and awarded the ‘International Man of the Year 2003’ title by International Biographical Centre, Cambridge.
Professor Ray has attended and chaired sessions as an invited participant in many international conferences, seminars, and colloquia held in different parts of the globe—England, France, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Estonia, America, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Italy, etc.
Dr. Ray has edited several anthologies of critical studies, and presently edits The Atlantic Critical Review, an international quarterly of global circulation. He is also working as Chief Editor of Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd. New Delhi.
Dr Rama Kundu, Emeritus Fellow (UGC), and former Professor of English, Department of English, Burdwan University, West Bengal, India, since 1976, is the author of twelve books: Vision and Design in Hardy’s Fiction (1984); Wrestling With God: Studies in English Devotional Poetry (1996); Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (2005); New Perspectives on British Authors: From William Shakespeare to Graham Greene (2006); E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (2007); Intertext: A Study of the Dialogue Between Texts (2008); Emerging Territories: A Study in New Literatures in English (2009); The Unfamiliar Hardy: A New Look (2010); Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (2008), Rabindranath Tagore’s Jīvansmŗti as Jīvansmŗti: The Birth of a Poet’s Soul (both translated jointly with Mohit K. Ray), Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi (2010); Ānandamath O Sāmpradāiktā (in Bengali on Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1987); and Manobīj (collection of personal essays in Bengali), Renaissance Publishers, Kolkata (2013).
