On Race, Inequality and the Colonial Order: The Contemporary Relevance of Rabindranath Tagore
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, January 19, 2012 | 12:00PM - 2:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
Description
“When differences are too jarring, man cannot accept them as final; so he either wipes them out with blood, or coerces them into some kind of superficial homogeneity or he finds out a deeper unity which he knows to be the highest truth”.
Rabindranath Tagore, 1912
“Canada is too young to fall a victim to the malady of disillusionment and skepticism, and she must believe in great ideals in the face of contradictions . . . She will have to solve, for the salvation of man, the most difficult of all problems, the race problem....”
Message of farewell to Canada, Rabindranath Tagore, 1929
Rabindranath Tagore is the world’s first non-European Nobel Laureate (1913). Tagore remains best known as a poet, and in the West often as a mystic. Tagore’s social thought has received much less attention than it deserves, particularly the problematic of inequality and the quest for justice, which is a key element in Tagore’s thought. His writings articulate justice in all its dimensions: across gender, caste, religion and class, and between the colonizing West and the colonized East. Since 1912, Tagore also began writing more explicitly about racial inequality. His travels to Europe and the US were extremely important in shaping this body of thought. Tagore had also refused several invitations to come to Canada – as a way to register his protest against Canada’s treatment of immigrants. Drawing upon these various reflections, and Tagore’s speeches and writings, the paper explores the articulation of race in Tagore and its relationship to his understandings of equality and justice.
(You can find more information on Tagore at http://tagore150toronto.ca)
Ananya Mukherjee-Reed is Professor of Political Science and Development Studies at York University, Toronto. She is the Founding-Director of the International Secretariat of Human Development (ISHD) at York University. Under her leadership, ISHD has collaborated with leading international institutions such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), Geneva; United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), Rome; United Nations Development Program (UNDP); and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva. Ananya’s latest book Human Development and Social Power: Perspectives from South Asia is published by Routledge (London and New York, 2008).
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