Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson; Cambridge University Press. 1997; Rs 550.
THIS selection of Rabindranath's letters edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson comes in the 'Oriental Publications' scries of the Cambridge University Press and spans the whole of the poet's epistolary career. It consists of approximately 350 letters, about a quarter of which have been translated by the editors from the original Bengali. While most of the Bangali letters in the original had been published earlier, about half the English letters in the selection are being seen in print for the first time. Apart from such well known letters as the one written to Lord Chelmsford after Jalianwalla Bagh (1919), or the one to Gandhi where heresponds to the anti-Rowlatt Act movement led by the latter (1919), or the one to C F Andrews where he makes a public statement against Fascism in Italy (1926), or the one to the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi, condemning the murderous attacks of the Japanese government on China (1938), this volume includes a large number of letters to eminent correspondents like Yeats, Rothenstein, Robert Bridges, Sturge Moore, Ezra Pound, Romain Rolland, Bertrand Russell, Victoria Ocampo, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Sarojini Naidu, etc. Other letters illuminating some important aspect of his work and thought, to correspondents perhaps not so well known, have also been included. These, along with the translated versions of a number of letters in Bengali, will be of great help to scholars and the general public, not acquainted with the language, but wishing to explore Rabindranath's career as a creative artist and a public man. Each letter is accompanied by an introduction and footnotes, meant to acquaint the reader with the specific context. This would surely benefit the reader.
