Restoring Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

In The Reconstruction of India, published in 1930 just before the First Round Table Conference in London, Edward J. Thompson proposed measures that would in his view go far to encourage a new beginning in British-Indian relations. In a 1931 edition, published after the Conference, he explained why he had addressed the book not only to England and India but to America as well. He placed little trust in ‘the books by which the American public forms its opinions of Indian affairs’, for they gave that public a drastically distorted picture of the situation.1 Americans liked to think that in the Indian resistance to British control they were seeing their own early history repeated, and they tended to give things Indian a thick coating of romanticism. Neither in politics nor in cultural affairs was this desirable; Thompson wrote: It is intolerable that a whole field of human experience and activity, a field so vast and varied, should continue to be the home of ignorance and pedantry and brag and complacency. The main outlines of Indian legend and history and belief must become part of the normal equipment of educated men and women everywhere. The angry ghosts of nationalism and imperialism must be exorcized from the region where they have stalked so long2 KeywordsIndia SocietyIndian AffairVernacular LiteratureBengali LyricMusic CriticThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.