Transcultural Utopian Imagination and the Future: Tagore, Gandhi and India-Britain Entanglements in the Early 1930s

British Academy International Research Fellowship

Project Lead: Professor Sandra Kemp

International Research Fellow: Dr Barnita Bagchi

This international research fellowship explored the legacies of Ruskin’s ideas about political economy on the transcultural, utopian imagination of early 20^th-century India and Britain.

Dr Barnita Bagchi (Utrecht University) examined the work of Rabindranath Tagore in the early 1930s, and his exchanges with his associates Charles Freer Andrews and Mahatma Gandhi, who was himself influenced by Ruskin. Drawing on letters, essays, and autobiographical writings, the project considered the envisioning of socially experimental and utopian communities in the past, present and the future.

Image: W. G. Collingwood, Ruskin's St George's Diamond 1884 (© The Ruskin, Lancaster University)