Government nod for Tagore schools in UK universities

Updated on: Wednesday, May 25, 2011

In one of the biggest initiative on Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, government has agreed to set up Tagore Centre for Global Thought at the India Institute of King’s College, London and Scottish Centre for Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University.

The proposal by Sunil Khilnani, director, India Institute has been accepted by a committee set up the HRD ministry. To be funded by the government of India, the Centre’s activities will include a biennial set of Tagore Distinguished Lectures in Global Thought to be delivered by a public intellectual of international repute on the global implications of aspects of Indian thought, doctoral fellowship and research programmes for students from India and elsewhere, and regular lectures, seminars and films on relevant themes.

Speaking to TOI, Khilnani said, “I am delighted that the newly-created India Institute at King’s College, London has been selected as one of the important locations to establish a Tagore Centre.” Khilnani said the Centre would be a “focal point for exploring the global implications of Tagore’s work, and to further the spirit of Tagore’s philosophy across the world.” It will highlight the ways in which ideas from India and the Indian subcontinent have long played an important role in global intellectual life.

He said that Tagore’s particular genius was to map the relationship between the concrete and the universal and connect the local with the global. “This will be the informing ethos of the Tagore Centre for Global Thought.” Khilnani argues that no one had a deeper sense of the value of history and the historical past than Tagore. “Yet and equally, he had an ability to think through the horizon of the future: to imagine India and the world’s future possibilities in terms at once universalist as well as rooted on to the particularities of myriad cultures. For him, patriotism and cosmopolitanism were twin commitments,” he says. Scottish Centre for Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University would also be involved in similar exercise as the one being proposed by India Institute.

Government nod for Tagore schools in UK universities

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