Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, two of the greatest thinkers of the world had, between them, a kinship and appreciation of profound depth and mutuality. Both stood for universal humanism and emancipation of the dispossessed though their paths were seminally divergent. Their camaraderie had prompted Jawaharlal Nehru to reflect in his prison notebook of 1941, that “Gandhi and Tagore, two types entirely different from each other and yet both of them so typical of India, both in the long line of India’s great men…I have felt for so long that they were two outstanding examples in the world today…It is not so much because of any single virtue but because of the tout ensemble, that I felt that among the world’s great men today Gandhi and Tagore were supreme as human beings. What good fortune for me to have come into contact with them.”
After Gandhi’s permanent return to India in January 1915, the first major visit he along with his wife took in mid-February was at Santiniketan when the boys of his school (Phoenix) had already been staying there. However, he could meet Tagore only during his second visit on 6 March. Amongst a host of pleasantries between them, this visit took another interesting turn and perhaps was anticipating the rest of the glorious debate between them: Gandhi had not kept his displeasure hidden at the differential treatment of the Dalits and the fact that they had to have a separate kitchen at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan at that point in time. Three years later began the iconic epistolary communique between the two greats as also one of the most celebrated friendships in the history of world’s greats. Incidentally, Tagore, by then, had already begun his international career, travelled widely and developed relationships with Western intellectuals, artists, and reformers since 1912. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1913, he became one of the most internationally recognized non-European writers of his 

time, regularly engaging in dialogues with figures across Europe, the United States, and East Asia.
However, Tagore, in the midst of these cross-cultural encounters, as argued profoundly by Michael Collins (2011), remained ‘consistently misunderstood, misrepresented, sometimes ignored, and in many respects diminished as a writer and thinker’. Western admirers sometimes romanticized him as a mystical sage from the East, flattening the complexity of his thought. Others interpreted him through their own philosophical frameworks, missing the nuances of his critique of both nationalism, industrial capitalism and its imperial correlatives. However, this was not exactly something that Tagore had perhaps wanted. Neither did he subscribe to the imperialism-nationalism binary as a way of negotiating with the West. So, the only alternative was to aspire for a cult of cosmopolitanism, which Rabindranath did not care much about, since he had written later in 1917 that, ‘neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation- worship is the goal of human history’ (Nationalism Lectures 1917). Finding it difficult for himself to assimilate into either of these oppositional discourses, he instead chose to integrate himself into cultivating a form of liberal ‘politics of friendship’ (Collins, 2011). And herein took shape his disconcerting dialogues with Gandhi, who was getting too committed to anti-colonial nationalism that started rejecting anything aligned with the British. Their fascinating disagreements were significant enough to be impinge on their own personal discourses of freedom and modes of anti- colonial struggle. The tipping point of the discord reached during the Non-cooperation agitations and Gandhi’s call to boycott government’s schools, which for Tagore, was ‘political asceticism’ or ‘spiritual suicide’ , ‘fierce joy of annihilation’ or ‘disinterested delight in an unmeaning devastations’.
Building upon his criticisms for Gandhi’s idea of ‘Swaraj’ or liberty(‘crude, superficial and materialistic’ for Tagore) with the help of the ‘Charkha’, Tagore wrote an essay in 1925 titled ‘The Cult of the Charkha’ wherein he emphasized the demerits of relying merely on the spinning-wheel, in the hope of gaining independence. “Even if every one of our countrymen should betake himself to spinning thread,” Tagore contends, “That might somewhat mitigate their poverty, but it would not be Swaraj.” Gandhi’s response to Tagore’s essays on the charkha and swaraj, nevertheless, stands out for its extraordinary civility and for reflecting the mutual respect and friendship the two debaters shared. “If every disagreement were to displease,” writes Gandhi. “Since no two men agree exactly on all points, life would be a bundle of unpleasant sensations and therefore a perfect nuisance.” Gandhi begins by 

contrasting the role defined for him as a ‘Mahatma’ and for Tagore as a ‘Poet.’ “The Poet lives in a magnificent world of his own creation—his world of ideas. I am a slave of somebody else’s creation—the spinning wheel.” And therefore, while there is no scope for competition between the two, it is important to bear in mind that the philosophical ideas of each complement the other. It is with this assertion that Gandhi respectfully denies the criticism of the poet: “The fact is that the Poet’s criticism is a poetic licence and he who takes it literally is in danger of finding himself in an awkward corner.”
Their delightful dissonances continue even in the aftermath of severe ecological disaster of the 1934 Bihar Earthquake. Gandhi who was then campaigning against untouchability in parts of rural India called the earthquake ‘a divine chastisement for the great sin we have committed and are still committing against those whom we describe as untouchables…’ Reading this statement in the press, Tagore immediately retorted pointedly calling Gandhi ‘unscientific… unreason, which is a fundamental source of all blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-resect’. Could one believe, today, that Gandhi used to take delights in such admonishment from his Gurudev? And not just that, he had taken personal care to publish them in his ‘Harijan’. Reciprocally, Tagore too, had been ‘waiting for the Person…the Mahatma…not an association, not an organization, not a politician but a Man’ for whose spiritual influence people were ready to die, women too, came out of their inner apartments(Tagore, 1930).
Even when underscored by several public disagreements that remain clearly documented, it helps to observe that despite their ‘non-reciprocity’ at times in matters related to praxis of anti-colonial nationalism, it brings to our mind what Derrida had commented on the nature of friendships: “logic calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality; in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other.” (Derrida, 1994, 63). This “irreducible precedence of the other”, which is identified as a locus of received hospitality, and perhaps is to be conjectured as mutual respect and serene tolerance, is something that fast goes missing in this fiercely revanchist age of Neoliberal Inc. We are witnessing an era where a dangerous combination of conniving capitalism and muscular nationalism determines everything from global environmental responsibility to the steak on your dinner table.
It is in this growing climate of ever pixelating friendships and political camaraderie, we invoke an imaginary of newer kind for the postcolonial Global South that sees collective 

dialogue, mutual dignity and tolerance to engage us towards a new decorum of ‘friendly disagreement’ or ‘disagreeing well’(Collins 2023).
Keeping these quintessential conversations between two greats in mind, we invite abstracts- from young research scholars only- that engage with (but are not limited to):
 Tagore-Gandhi debates and their repercussions hundred years ago.
 Tagore-Gandhi differing on the idea of India and anticolonial nationalism.
 Tagore’s Idea of universal humanism and Gandhi’s position.
 Tagore’s and Gandhi’s position on Indian education.
 Relevance of their ideas in contemporary times.
 Postcolonial campus discourses, cultures of protest and neoliberal activism
 Contemporary geo-political upheavals, border conflicts and public discourse formation.
Submission Guidelines:
 Abstracts of about 300 words along with a short bio-note should be mailed at
greentagoreconference @gmail.com by 10 March.
 Notification of acceptance (for only accepted proposals): 12 March
 Registration fees (only for accepted papers):- 800/(INR).