Abstract
AbstractRabindranath Tagore was ‘a poet who was an indefatigable man of action’ (Uma Das Gupta, A Biography ix). Over eighty years ago, Tagore saw the world environment collapsing due to ‘an epidemic of voracity that has infected the total area of civilization’ (‘City and Village’ 310). His practical activities involved a progressive school and university, integrated with research and assistance concerned with village revival and rebuilding the local economy and community. It is timely to re‐examine what Tagore tried to achieve. Information about these initiatives, together with a study of Tagore's insights as expressed in his essays, those written in English and those translated from Bengali, can yield an understanding of the form of local and global community he envisaged and tried to bring into being. That vision is compatible with the aims and development of the Transition Movement, which is motivated by a recognition that the capitalist machine is running out of control, to the detriment of planet and people. This reading of Tagore reveals that, in effect, he advocated a withdrawal from the capitalist system, ‘back to the future’, not to a rustic existence bound by rigid cultural constraints, but to local cooperative farming and industry, progressive education and renewed culture and creativity.
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