A Critical Review of Samiran Kumar Paul’s Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore: With Critical Evaluations (Notion Press, 2020)

Anita Ghosh

doi:10.63363/aijfr.2025.v06i06.2775

A Critical Review of Samiran Kumar Paul’s Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore: With Critical Evaluations (Notion Press, 2020)

Author(s)	Dr. Anita Ghosh
Country	India
Abstract	Samiran Kumar Paul’s Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore: With Critical Evaluations (Notion Press, 2020) is conceived as a pedagogically oriented, reader-facing critical companion to Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. Positioned between classroom guide, interpretive commentary, and devotional-literary appreciation, the book attempts to make Tagore’s lyric spirituality intelligible to contemporary readers while sustaining a broad critical frame: philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethical. This review offers a detailed assessment of Paul’s critical aims, method, organization, and interpretive value. It argues that the book’s principal achievement lies in its commitment to accessibility—explaining poems as lived thought rather than as merely canonical artefacts—and in foregrounding Gitanjali as a text where lyric art and spiritual praxis converge. Paul’s evaluative stance consistently reads Tagore’s devotional voice as simultaneously inward and world-facing: the human subject’s longing for the infinite is explored alongside compassion, humility, and ethical self-cultivation. The review also examines the book’s critical architecture—its approach to translation questions, symbolism, imagery, and recurring motifs such as prayer, surrender, nature, time, silence, and the “Thou” of address. Further, it evaluates the book’s usefulness for students and researchers by considering its explanatory clarity, thematic mapping, and implied argument about Tagore’s universalism. At the same time, the review identifies areas that could strengthen the work’s academic robustness: fuller engagement with translation scholarship on the English Gitanjali (1912), clearer differentiation between the Bengali Gitanjali and Tagore’s self-translated English selection, expanded dialogue with modern Tagore criticism, and more explicit methodological signposting. Overall, Paul’s volume is best read as an interpretive bridge-text—especially valuable for readers approaching Tagore for the first time—while inviting future expansion into a more fully theorized critical monograph.
Keywords	Abstract Samiran Kumar Paul’s Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore: With Critical Evaluations (Notion Press, 2020) is conceived as a pedagogically oriented, reader-facing critical companion to Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. Positioned between classroom guide, interpretive commentary, and devotional-literary appreciation, the book attempts to make Tagore’s lyric spirituality intelligible to contemporary readers while sustaining a broad critical frame: philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethical. This review offers a detailed assessment of Paul’s critical aims, method, organization, and interpretive value. It argues that the book’s principal achievement lies in its commitment to accessibility—explaining poems as lived thought rather than as merely canonical artefacts—and in foregrounding Gitanjali as a text where lyric art and spiritual praxis converge. Paul’s evaluative stance consistently reads Tagore’s devotional voice as simultaneously inward and world-facing: the human subject’s longing for the infinite is explored alongside compassion, humility, and ethical self-cultivation. The review also examines the book’s critical architecture—its approach to translation questions, symbolism, imagery, and recurring motifs such as prayer, surrender, nature, time, silence, and the “Thou” of address. Further, it evaluates the book’s usefulness for students and researchers by considering its explanatory clarity, thematic mapping, and implied argument about Tagore’s universalism. At the same time, the review identifies areas that could strengthen the work’s academic robustness: fuller engagement with translation scholarship on the English Gitanjali (1912), clearer differentiation between the Bengali Gitanjali and Tagore’s self-translated English selection, expanded dialogue with modern Tagore criticism, and more explicit methodological signposting. Overall, Paul’s volume is best read as an interpretive bridge-text—especially valuable for readers approaching Tagore for the first time—while inviting future expansion into a more fully theorized critical monograph.
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 6, Issue 6, November-December 2025
Published On	2025-12-30
DOI	https://doi.org/10.63363/aijfr.2025.v06i06.2775
Short DOI	https://doi.org/hbhk3x

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A Critical Review of Samiran Kumar Paul’s Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore: With Critical Evaluations (Notion Press, 2020)

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