Guest Lecture on ‘Tagore and the Feminine: Contemporary Perspectives’

The department of English of the IIS University organized a guest lecture on 30^th August 2018 on the topic of “Tagore and the Feminine: Contemporary Perspectives”. The speaker for the same was Prof. Malashri Lal, Former Head, Dept. of English and Dean, Academic Activities and Projects, Delhi University. She talked about her book Tagore and the Feminine: A Journey in Translations emphasising on the search for Tagore's engagement with the feminine as subject and agency, character and voice, philosophy and politics. She went on to draw a parallel between ‘androgene’ and ‘ardhnarishvara’ while concurrently differentiating the two as western and eastern conceptions and pointing at Tagore’s keen interest in the same. One of the major focuses of the talk was the exploration of gender and sexuality in Tagore’s work and how the three women in his life, viz., his wife, his sister-in-law, and Victoria Ocampo, his hostess in a foreign land, shaped his thinking. She highlighted how Tagore’s relationship with these women as well as his experiences with other women, as common as a housemaid, were critical to his understanding of the feminine.

She concluded the talk by asserting how Tagore, as a ‘feminine’ writer, covered a broad spectrum of writings from Gitanjali, to the mythical woman Chitrangada and how it is possible to preserve the beauty of Tagore’s original Bengali writing in translations.