Rabindranath Tagore

Chandalika constructs a “nationalist subject” capable of annihilating caste, while simultaneously implementing new standards of morality rooted in casteist and sexist ideologies.

Respectable scientific opinion holds that the human species is on the verge of untimely extinction. According to Noam Chomsky, the so-called "least advanced" people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us from extinction. Informed by their ancient knowledge systems, indigenous populations across the world are resisting the plunder of the planet. However, indigenous knowledge systems are in radical conflict not only with global capitalism but with modern education itself, thus raising the issue of radical choice. The issue goes much beyond the classical domain of the pedagogy of the oppressed.

The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 included a prize money of £8,000. It is commonly assumed that Tagore spent this entire sum on the asrama school in Santiniketan, and later for setting up his dream project – the Visva-Bharati University. The truth, however, is quite different. This note attempts to revisit the “will” of the poet, arguing that his decision regarding the investment of the substantial sum reveals a complex story in which the need of the peasants of his zamindari and that of the community in Visva-Bharati were held in a delicate ethical balance.

Japan by Yamaguchi Hiroichi; National Book Trust, W New Delhi, 2006; pp 198, Rs 50.

While agreeing in substance with Ramachandra Guha's critique of expatriate Indian intellectuals, that commentary is extended here to (a) point to an important impediment in their intellectual project coming in the way of their taking their migrant status seriously and hence interrogating their milieu with greater rigour; and (b) reply to grounded patriots that there are other legitimate albeit unstable locations from which to construct a social science. Turning to Guhaâ??s peculiar smugness about 'relevance', it is argued that in talking of discourse and deployment of power within intellectual communities, the nation may not be the only legitimate category of analysis.