Universalist Hopes in India and Europe: The Worlds of Rabindranath Tagore and Srečko Kosovel

The book explores the often unexpected links between India and East-Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century through the writings of Slovenia's leading avant-garde poet Srecko Kosovel and India's best-known writer Rabindranath Tagore. This is the first in-depth comparative study of the two contemporaries grappling with the challenges of European imperialisms and 'western' modernity from their respective backgrounds. Kosovel strongly identified with Tagore in the post-WWI years when parts of Slovene-populated territory came under Italy. The two writers, despite their different backgrounds, are seen to share a similar set of preoccupations. They both rejected nationalism in favour of a broader, universalist perspective. Despite their differences, Tagore and Kosovel are seen to be kindred spirits. The contours of an expanding internationalist stage of the 1920s united the two writers in their world view. This book is also a reminder of responses from within Europe that have largely been overlooked in the dominant postcolonial and cultural studies perspectives An in-depth comparative study of a close, if rather one-sided, encounter between a Slovenian poet, Srecko Kosovel, and Rabindranath Tagore, whom Kosovel read in translation. While Kosovel took inspiration from his Indian contemporary in the 1920s, the two are seen to share a surprisingly similar set of preoccupations, at the core of which was a creative ideal of universalism rather than nationalism, which both considered exclusivist and, therefore, undesirable.