By Ashish Singh
Rabindranath Tagore is often invoked as a figure who belonged to everyone and everywhere, yet the ease with which his name circulates today sometimes conceals how demanding his thought actually was. For Bangladeshi-Swedish writer Anisur Rahman, Tagore is not a monument or a cultural emblem but a thinker whose work continues to ask uncomfortable questions about power, belonging and moral responsibility.
When asked how he understands Tagore’s universal humanism in a world increasingly divided by borders and identities, Rahman returns to something simple and fundamental. Tagore, he says, wrote about what people feel before they are taught how to divide themselves. His poetry and prose speak to pain, joy, longing and ethical struggle in ways that do not require shared nationality or belief. Language and place mattered deeply to Tagore, but they were never fences. A work like Gitanjali does not belong to one country or tradition. It belongs wherever someone is willing to read it with openness. Even now, Rahman notes, Tagore remains available to anyone who chooses to meet him halfway.
This openness did not mean political detachment. Tagore’s criticism of aggressive nationalism was rooted in lived experience, and Rahman believes South Asia has still not fully reckoned with that critique. The region remains marked by the afterlife of colonial rule, especially the habit of governing through division and fear. In this context, Tagore functions both as guidance and warning. Rahman recalls that Tagore was banned in Pakistan during the 1960s because his ideas were seen as dangerous to authoritarian nationalism. Today, he sees a quieter but equally troubling pattern in Bangladesh, where the current political climate has pushed Tagore to the margins of public life. He argues that the pro-imperial Yunus government has weakened Tagore’s central place in cultural identity while encouraging forces fundamentally at odds with his humanistic vision.
Despite this political marginalisation, Rahman insists that Tagore has not disappeared from everyday life. For Bengali speakers, he remains deeply present. His songs begin the day and close it. Cultural rituals feel incomplete without his words. In moments of grief, people turn to him instinctively. In moments of celebration, his presence lends gravity. Rahman speaks of Tagore not as a figure remembered on anniversaries but as someone woven into the rhythms of living. This, he suggests, is why Tagore continues to matter even when politics turns away from him.
At the same time, Rahman is clear that reverence has not translated into understanding. Bengali society, he argues, has largely failed to absorb Tagore’s ideas in a meaningful way. Quoting the late scholar Sanjida Khatun, he points out that Tagore’s philosophy has not reached ordinary people as living thought. This is not because his work is inaccessible, but because institutions have failed him. Education systems reduce him to examination material. Politics uses his image without embracing his ethical demands. Meanwhile, some academics elevate him into a distant prophetic figure, separating him from the language and social world that shaped him. In doing so, they make him easier to admire but harder to engage.
Tagore’s ideas on education offer a particularly sharp lens for the present moment. Rahman sees today’s global education systems as deeply compromised, shaped by inequality, commercialisation and political interference. Tagore believed education should be internationally open yet culturally grounded. Knowledge, for him, crossed borders, but culture grew from local soil. He was clear that politics had no right to dominate the spirit of education. Rahman recalls Tagore’s visit to Mussolini’s Italy, where he remarked that politics belongs to the state but culture belongs to humanity. That distinction guided Visva Bharati, which was meant to be a space of shared learning rather than ideological training. In an era when education is increasingly privatised, Rahman argues, Tagore’s insistence on human dignity over profit feels urgent again.
Reading Tagore as an anti-colonial thinker rather than a narrow nationalist helps clarify his relevance today. Rahman points out that colonialism did not end with independence. It adapted into new forms of economic domination and cultural hierarchy. Tagore understood this early. He sought to rebuild dignity through cultural confidence, education and social reform rather than through exclusionary politics. His writings on the crisis of civilisation speak directly to a world still struggling with domination, inequality and moral exhaustion. Tagore did not advocate retreat from the world. He argued for connection without submission and openness without erasure.
Rahman illustrates this ethical clarity with an episode from Tagore’s life. In the 1930s, while traveling from Canada to Japan, Tagore was harassed by United States officials. Instead of accepting the humiliation quietly, he publicly condemned their behaviour as foolish and unjust. For Rahman, this moment captures something essential. Tagore did not romanticise power, whether colonial or democratic. He believed authority must always remain open to moral judgment. The fact that scandals and abuses continue to surface in global centres of power today only reinforces the relevance of that stance.
When the conversation turns to literature and its future, Rahman speaks quietly but firmly. Writing, he says, belongs to solitude. It existed long before markets and will outlast them. Tagore understood this deeply. In one of his songs, he urges that, if no one responds to your call, you must still walk forward alone. For Rahman, this remains one of Tagore’s most radical lessons for young writers. Creation demands ethical independence and the courage to stand apart. In that solitude, literature retains its freedom. And in that freedom, Tagore continues to speak.
(Ashish Singh is a social and political scientist.)
