Penguin Books India is proud to announce that

May 2012

Amit Chaudhuri's On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today
has been awarded the Rabindra Puraskar,
the West Bengal state government's highest literary honour'
 
Rabindra Puraskar is the highest honorary literary award given in West Bengal. This award is administered by the Government of West Bengal under the aegis of the Paschimbanga Bangla Academy (Bengali Academy of West Bengal), Kolkata. The award is given for creative literature, non-fiction and books about Bengal in Bengali as well as other languages.
 
On Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore is widely regarded as a romantic poet, speaking of beauty and truth; as a transcendentalist; a believer in the absolute; a propagandist for universal man. But, as Amit Chaudhuri shows in these remarkable and widely admired essays about the poet and his milieu, his secret concern was really with life, play, and contingency, with the momentary as much as it was with the eternal. It is this strain of unacknowledged modernism, as well as a revolutionary life-affirming vision, that gives his work, Chaudhuri argues, its immense power.

Acute, challenging, and path-breaking, Amit Chaudhuri’s collection will become a classic reading of Rabindranath Tagore and the way he is perceived today.