Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the Humanities in Literary Studies Rabindranath
Tagore is widely regarded as a romantic poet speaking of beauty and truth as a
transcendentalist a believer in the absolute a propagandist for universal man and as a
national icon. But as Amit Chaudhuri shows in these remarkable and widely admired essays about
the poet and his milieu his secret concern was really with life play and contingency with
the momentary as much as it was with the eternal. It is this strain of unacknowledged modernism
as well as a revolutionary life-affirming vision that gives his work Chaudhuri argues its
immense power. Acute challenging and path-breaking Amit Chaudhuri's collection will become a
classic reading of Rabindranath Tagore and the way he is perceived today. On Tagore was awarded
the Rabindra Puraskar the West Bengal government's highest literary honour in 2012 in
recognition of the 'significance in the English language of its critical analysis of Tagore's
works'.
