Chats over Chai
Love and Tagore: Home and the World
Tagore is one of the founding fathers of the Republic of India, alongside the likes of Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar. He was a world-renowned poet, composer, playwright, painter and social reformer among many other things and was best known outside of South Asia for his collection of poems, Gitanjali, that awarded him the Nobel prize in Literature 1913, the first non-European to win such a prize. Tagore authored around 200 books and made 3000 artworks. He founded an art school, university, and rural development institute and composed the National anthems of both India and Bangladesh. There are a myriad of reasons to study Tagore, so today we are going to explore his work on love in terms of its norm-making and worldmaking.
CEO Lisa Singh will be joined by two leading Tagore scholars: Dr Liane Hartnett and Professor Bindu Puri for this Chats over Chai podcast episode.
Professor Bindu Puri
Bindu Puri is a professor of contemporary Indian Philosophy at the Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her main interests are in the areas of contemporary Indian philosophy and moral and political philosophy. Puri has made a large number of contributions to edited anthologies and philosophical and interdisciplinary journals. She has authored three monographs including; The Tagore-Gandhi Debate: On Matters of Truth and Untruth (Springer 2015); And The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: On Identity, Community and Justice (Singapore:Springer Nature, 2022). In addition, she has eight edited volumes, the most recent being Reading Sri Aurobindo – Metaphysics Ethics and Spirituality which is forthcoming in August 2022 with Springer Nature Publications.
Dr. Liane Hartnett
Dr. Liane Hartnett is an international political theorist with a doctorate in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on how and why love matters to world politics. She is the author of a number of articles and book chapters including, ‘Love is Worldmaking: Reading Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora as International Theory’, which features in International Studies Quarterly (2022) and ‘Love as a Practice of Peace: The Political Theologies of Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King’, which is published in Theology and World Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).