The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of a 'national' school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. It categorically argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed as part of what has been called the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th-20th centuries, was not merely a normalization of nationalist or orientalist principles, but was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community, geared toward the fashioning of an alternate nation, resistant to the stereotyping identity f.

This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the national school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. The book categorically argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed during the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th–20th centuries, was not merely a normalization of national or oriental principle, but was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community. It establishes that his form of art—embedded in communitarian practices like kirtan, alpona, pet-naming, syncretism, and storytelling through oral allegories—sought a social identity within the inter-subjective context of locality, regionality, nationality, and trans-nationality. The author presents Abanindranath as a creative agent who, through his art, conducted a critical engagement with post-Enlightenment modernity and regional subalternity.

Study on the selected paintings of Abanindranath Tagore, 1871-1951, Indian painter; includes reproduction of the original paintings.

This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore's relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore's literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical developments in postcolonial literature and social theory. The authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Tagore’s educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Tagore's literary and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of globalization; the nature of the influence of Tagore's music and literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in Bengal and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Tagore’s art. This volume opens up a space for Tagore’s critique and his creative innovations in present theoretical engagements.

What India’s founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India’s own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought. Taking five of the most important founding figures—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar—Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India’s founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence. Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India’s struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.