Tagore literature with all its cornucopian variety has always been a rich quarry for translators for well over a century, ever since Sister Nivedita and Jagadish Chandra Bose produced the earliest translations of Rabindranath’s short stories. And his translators are legion. Yet so much remains to be translated. Education as Freedom—Tagore’s Paradigm brings together in translation a number of Rabindranath’s major essays, speeches and letters spread over five decades—a period when he came into his own not only as a world poet but also as a notable exponent of an alternative paradigm to colonial education in British India—an exponent who had his own syncretic vision and spoke with formidable original authority to intervene in the contemporary Euro-centric colonial discourse in education. Of course this unique Tagorean vision is epitomised in Visva-Bharati University and the Visva-Bharati saga is an integral part of the history of emergence of modern India.
Subhransu Maitra, Superintendent, Publication, Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata, is a distinguished translator who translates modern Bengali literature into English.