'Alien Homage': Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore

Edward (E. J.) Thompson first met Rabindranath Tagore on the day the poet learned he had won the Nobel Prize in 1913, and became closely involved with him and his circle during the preparation of Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (OUP 1992), the first major English-language study of his writings. Drawing on his father's letters and journals, eminent historian E. P. Thompson, not only traces this stormy friendship, but also offers fresh insights into Anglo-Indian relations in the first quarter of this century.

Edward John Thompson, a young English poet and Wesleyan educational missionary, came to Bankura College in West Bengal in 1910 and remained there (with an interval for war service) until 1923. He first met Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan on the day when the news of the Nobel Prize came through in 1913. He subsequently set himself the difficult task of writing the first major English-language critical study of Tagore's poetry. This work involved him in difficult relations with Tagore, and also with a wide circle of Calcutta intellectuals and scholars, including Brajendranath Seal, Ramananda Chatterji, and a great statistician and Tagore scholar - Prasanta Mahalanobis. The present study by E.P. Thompson - the internationally famous historian and Peace Movement campaigner - draws upon the extensive correspondence and manuscripts in the Thompson Collection, and throws light on unfamiliar (sometimes entertaining, sometimes painful) aspects of an interface between Bengali and British culture. In an important appendix another scholar, Dr Uma Das Gupta, edits a hitherto unknown notebook of Thompson's conversations with Tagore.