Rosinka Chaudhuri:
Aesthetic Education in Schiller and Tagore

If an aesthetic education is an investigation into what the real ends of education might be, and an assertion, after Schiller, that art should be the basis of education, then a particularly powerful realisation of those ends are to be found in Rabindranath Tagore’s educational initiatives in an obscure corner of early twentieth-century Bengal, Santiniketan. Here he imagined and implemented new roles for art, aesthetics, and education animated by his own specific practices as poet, painter, composer, and choreographer. Individual contributions and many voices were accommodated in an unfolding of a practice of aesthetic education that was not just new to India, but new to the world. I show here how, in asking for a displacement of the Europe/non-Europe economy of correctness, Tagore put into practice an aesthetic education that was a fundamental reflection of his way of reading, privileging the useless, the superfluous, and the unnecessary as the core attributes of ananda (delight), the central philosophical tenet underpinning his notion of literature and existence in the world.

Rosinka Chaudhuri (D.Phil. Oxon) is Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She was inaugural Mellon Professor of the Global South at Oxford University, 2017-18, and has held visiting positions at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL; St Hugh’s College, Oxford; King’s College, London; Delhi University, Cambridge University and Columbia University.

Her books include Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Seagull: 2002), Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan: 2012) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (Oxford University Press: 2013, Peter Lang: 2014). A book titled India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire is forthcoming from Penguin Random House India in January 2025.

She has edited: Derozio, Poet of India: A Definitive Edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Indian Postcolonial (with Elleke Boehmer, Routledge UK, 2010), A History of Indian Poetry in English (Cambridge University Press, 2016), An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose (Oxford University Press, 2018), and a series titled Social Science Across Disciplines (co-edited with Partha Chatterjee, Oxford University Press, 2019). Most recently, she has edited, annotated and introduced George Orwell’s Burmese Days for Oxford World’s Classics as part of their Orwell series (2021).

Many articles, reviews and book chapters have been published nationally and internationally, while her translation Rabindranath Tagore’s letters, titled Letters from a Young Poet (1887-94) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014) received an Honorable Mention in the category A.K. Ramanujan Prize for Translation (S. Asia) at the Association for Asian Studies Book Prizes 2016. She serves on the board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and is an Advisory Board Member of Academy in Exile (Technische Universität Dortmund).