Reclaiming Tagore the radical for our restless times

Each year on 9 May, India commemorates Rabindranath Tagore not merely as its first Nobel laureate, but as a cultural giant who reshaped the contours of Indian literature, education, and political thought.

- JOHN J KENNEDY

However, with every passing year, the tributes grow more ornate while the engagement becomes increasingly superficial. He is garlanded in ceremonies, quoted dutifully in school programmes, and invoked in political rhetoric. But in an era of algorithms, instant outrage, and deepening polarisation, both the man and his audacious vision for India begin to recede into the background. Once the conscience of a newly awakening nation, Tagore now risks being reduced to a museum relic: admired, archived, and ultimately anaesthetised. The real question, then, is not whether we remember Tagore. It is whether we can still truly hear him.

Tagore was a dreamer, yes, but not in the romantic sense of escapist idealism. He was a realist who saw into the soul of society and didn't flinch. His famously calm and melodic poetic voice disguised a radical thinker who critiqued nationalism, decried dogma, championed pluralism, and constructed alternative models of education, economy and art. In works like Gora and The Home and the World, Tagore engaged deeply with the political and moral fractures of his time, many of which have returned in uncanny echoes today.