An IASH Work-in-Progress Seminar, delivered by Dr Payel C Mukherjee (Nominated Fellow, 2024)
Tagore’s Geddes: An Aesthetic Friendship and the Quest for Knowledge Spaces
The dialogues the Indian thinker, social reformer, and literary giant Rabindranath Tagore had with the Scottish sociologist and urban designer Patrick Geddes underpinned the evolution of Visva-Bharati, a university in Shantiniketan for embracing global vision and deep traditional roots. Geddes' pragmatic, interdisciplinary approach to knowledge resonated with Tagore's creative visual imagination to produce a new structural value for Shantiniketan's adaptation of modern educational methods in an Indian environment. A series of close interactions between Tagore and Geddes across several places between 1915 and 1930 were integral to how their ideas on national and cosmopolitan belonging and ecological aesthetics of education took shape. The intimacy of an emotional friendship between Tagore and Geddes emerges through published writings, letters, and public and private correspondence, contributing to an intellectual synthesis despite the innate differences that came with geographies and nationalities. Interacting with Geddes advanced Tagore's perspectives on emerging notions of education, prioritizing harmony with nature, regeneration of the land and the lives of people, habits of coexistence being inclusive of cultural alterity, and spaces of argumentation on nationalism. Critical deliberations on these conversations are integral to imagining the continuity of world dialogues despite identities thoroughly marked by discursive sovereignties.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
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