Biography
Marlon James opens his brilliant novel A Brief History of Seven Killings with these lines: “Listen. Dead people never stop talking.” Tagore personifies these lines from the place I come from. The effervescent cultural milieu of Santiniketan, suffused with the ineffable presence of Rabindranāth Thākur (as Bengalis know him), alongside a pragmatic desire to mitigate the ennui attendant upon protracted thesis (MPhil) composition, catalysed my scholarly proclivities. The research constitutes a thoughtful excavation into the religious and political philosophy of Tagore. At a juncture when global discourse is saturated with the rhetorical grandiloquence of nationalism — an idea lionised in contemporary political parlance yet fraught with perilous implications — my inquiry aims to illuminate Tagore’s prescient critique of nationalism through the concept of advaita.
Prior to my affiliation with the Department of Religion, I had completed an MPhil from the Department of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India. The dissertation interrogated how religious discourses and gender profoundly shaped British domesticity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Bengal.