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A Difficult Relationship: Letters of Edward Thompson & Rabindranath Tagore 1913-40
Edward Thompson, an English poet and Wesleyan missionary--and, later, father of the eminent historian E. P. Thompson--first met Rabindranath Tagore on the day the poet learned he had won the Nobel Prize in 1913. He became closely involved with him and his circle during the preparation of Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (OUP 1992), the first major English-language study of his writings. This volume of letters, ranging from 1913 until 1940, the year before Tagore's death, sheds new light on this remarkable and stormy friendship, and offers fresh insights into Anglo-Indian relations in the first quarter of the last century.
243 pages, Unknown Binding
First published February 6, 2003
12 people want to read
About the author
Rabindranath Tagore
2,589 books4,263 followersAwarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla.
The complete works of Rabindranath Tagore (রবীন্দ্র রচনাবলী) in the original Bengali are now available at these third-party websites:
http://www.tagoreweb.in/
http://www.rabindra-rachanabali.nltr....
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla.
The complete works of Rabindranath Tagore (রবীন্দ্র রচনাবলী) in the original Bengali are now available at these third-party websites:
http://www.tagoreweb.in/
http://www.rabindra-rachanabali.nltr....
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August 7, 2025
Today is the 85th Death Anniversary of Tagore
I first read A Difficult Relationship: Letters of Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore 1913–1940 in the summer of 2006, a year that now appears haloed in the amber of intellectual unrest and literary awakening.
I was 27 then, adrift in the complex world of postcolonial studies, trying to make sense of the complicated web of admiration, anxiety, and ambivalence that defined the Indo-British intellectual encounter. In the creases of that moment, this book arrived as both revelation and irritation. Edited by Uma Das Gupta—a Tagore scholar with the enviable virtue of allowing the voices of her subjects to clash unfiltered—the volume is less a mere collection of letters and more a dialogic theatre of unequals, where an English missionary-historian and a Bengali poet-philosopher spar, bond, and estrange each other over three decades.
This was no polite Victorian correspondence soaked in florid salutations and perfumed niceties. This was, instead, the archival representation of tension, ego, insecurity, admiration, and mutual incomprehension. Edward Thompson, an Oxford-trained historian and Wesleyan missionary with literary aspirations, is a figure that, like many colonial liberals, vacillates between admiration and condescension. Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Laureate, polymath, and moral conscience of a colonized world, finds in Thompson a problematic ally—a man more intelligent than most imperialists, yet still unable to free himself from the patronizing apparatus of the Empire’s epistemic framework.
Reading the letters in 2006, I was immediately struck by the tone of anxiety that underlay Thompson’s admiration for Tagore. The admiration was real—Thompson valued Tagore’s poetry, respected his global stature, and tried, albeit fumblingly, to interpret him for the West.
Yet this effort was shot through with a certain hegemonic anxiety: how do you explain a poet who writes with cosmic insight in a language you do not fully understand? How do you remain an interpreter without being an interloper? Thompson could never quite solve that riddle. In fact, he dramatized it.
One of the earliest letters in the volume captures this fragility. In a 1913 letter, Thompson writes to Tagore shortly after the Nobel Prize was announced, congratulating him with a mix of genuine warmth and veiled self-positioning. He acknowledges the world’s excitement about Tagore’s genius but also betrays a subtle attempt to claim interpretive ownership.
Throughout their correspondence, this duality remains: Thompson insists on mediating Tagore’s voice for an English audience, translating his work and writing a biography, all the while brushing up against Tagore’s growing discomfort with being explained by someone who, he felt, had not truly “seen” him.
What makes these letters so valuable is precisely this: they offer no illusion of unity, no false cosmopolitanism. Instead, they document the painful labour of translation—cultural, emotional, ethical—between two men bound by empire but resisting its terms. Tagore, for his part, oscillates between generosity and aloofness. In some letters, he corrects Thompson’s factual errors about his life and works with courteous patience. In others, he curtly dismisses Thompson’s interpretations as misguided.
His restraint is instructive. Rather than confront Thompson’s condescension head-on, Tagore often withdraws, cloaking his criticism in a veil of tired dignity. To a young reader like me in 2006, that silence was deafening.
There is one moment in the book I particularly remember pausing over—Tagore’s response to Thompson’s manuscript of his biography. Tagore was deeply uncomfortable with Thompson’s interpretations, especially the reductive psychoanalytic readings of his childhood and creativity. He wrote, with obvious fatigue, that he found the tone of the biography “repugnant.”
The word struck me. “Repugnant”—not merely incorrect or unfaithful, but ethically and aesthetically unacceptable. That response, I remember thinking, revealed Tagore’s acute awareness of interpretive violence, of how a life could be rewritten to fit foreign categories of knowledge. It also showed how even “friendly” Orientalism could wound.
To Edward Thompson’s credit, however, his letters are not the work of a brute imperialist. They are intelligent, conflicted, and often deeply self-critical. He admits, at times, to not understanding Tagore, to misrepresenting him, to being too English in his judgments. But then, he returns again to the same project, the same act of interpretation. One could call it obsession. One could also call it a colonial inheritance he could not quite shake off: the need to understand the Other by reshaping him in familiar terms.
This makes A Difficult Relationship far more than a private correspondence. It becomes a case study in the broader politics of cross-cultural translation and representation. In 2006, when the field of postcolonial theory was abuzz with debates over Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, this book offered something rawer—less theorized, but more immediate. It was not just about East versus West, colonizer versus colonized. It was about two minds struggling to connect—and failing, beautifully, tragically, instructively.
Looking back now, nearly two decades later, I am more sympathetic to Thompson than I was then. At 27, I found him exasperating—a liberal with too much confidence in his interpretive right. Today, I see him also as a man trying, within the limitations of his time and formation, to be honest, to grapple with the enormity of Tagore’s genius. It is easy to mock his mistakes: the psychoanalytic caricatures, the cultural simplifications, the inability to grasp Tagore’s mysticism. But he was not indifferent. He tried. And that struggle is evident on every page.
Uma Das Gupta’s editorial work deserves praise here. She resists the temptation to “clean up” the letters, to explain away the awkwardness. She allows the tensions to speak for themselves, provides minimal but useful annotations, and leaves readers to wrestle with the discomfort. The result is a book that demands slow reading and invites re-reading. It is, in the best sense, a pedagogical text—not because it teaches lessons, but because it stages unresolved questions.
I remember taking the book to the riverside in Barrackpore that July of 2006, sitting for hours reading one letter at a time, trying to place myself inside the historical imagination of these two men. What did Tagore think when he read Thompson’s awkward analysis of his Brahmo upbringing? What did Thompson feel when Tagore declined to endorse his biography? Did either of them sense how posterity would judge their intellectual dance—awkward, poignant, sometimes painful, but undeniably vital?
The irony of course is that despite their differences, despite the bitterness, Thompson’s biography of Tagore was one of the first comprehensive attempts to grapple with the poet’s intellectual life for an English-speaking audience. That work, flawed as it is, kept Tagore in circulation during a time when Western interest in him was waning. And perhaps that too is part of the difficult relationship.
Even when misinterpreted, Tagore needed such interlocutors to remain audible in global discourse. And Thompson, despite himself, remained tethered to Tagore as his most perplexing subject.
In conclusion, A Difficult Relationship is not just a record of personal friction between two men. It is an archive of colonial modernity’s failed intimacies. It is about how admiration can shade into appropriation, how translation can become misrepresentation, and how friendship across power asymmetries can often collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Reading this book in 2006 gave me, for the first time, a visceral understanding of what cross-cultural engagement looks like—not in theory, but in real time.
It’s a lesson I carry still: that dialogue is hard, that listening is harder, and that sometimes, the most honest relationships are the ones that do not resolve easily.
I first read A Difficult Relationship: Letters of Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore 1913–1940 in the summer of 2006, a year that now appears haloed in the amber of intellectual unrest and literary awakening.
I was 27 then, adrift in the complex world of postcolonial studies, trying to make sense of the complicated web of admiration, anxiety, and ambivalence that defined the Indo-British intellectual encounter. In the creases of that moment, this book arrived as both revelation and irritation. Edited by Uma Das Gupta—a Tagore scholar with the enviable virtue of allowing the voices of her subjects to clash unfiltered—the volume is less a mere collection of letters and more a dialogic theatre of unequals, where an English missionary-historian and a Bengali poet-philosopher spar, bond, and estrange each other over three decades.
This was no polite Victorian correspondence soaked in florid salutations and perfumed niceties. This was, instead, the archival representation of tension, ego, insecurity, admiration, and mutual incomprehension. Edward Thompson, an Oxford-trained historian and Wesleyan missionary with literary aspirations, is a figure that, like many colonial liberals, vacillates between admiration and condescension. Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Laureate, polymath, and moral conscience of a colonized world, finds in Thompson a problematic ally—a man more intelligent than most imperialists, yet still unable to free himself from the patronizing apparatus of the Empire’s epistemic framework.
Reading the letters in 2006, I was immediately struck by the tone of anxiety that underlay Thompson’s admiration for Tagore. The admiration was real—Thompson valued Tagore’s poetry, respected his global stature, and tried, albeit fumblingly, to interpret him for the West.
Yet this effort was shot through with a certain hegemonic anxiety: how do you explain a poet who writes with cosmic insight in a language you do not fully understand? How do you remain an interpreter without being an interloper? Thompson could never quite solve that riddle. In fact, he dramatized it.
One of the earliest letters in the volume captures this fragility. In a 1913 letter, Thompson writes to Tagore shortly after the Nobel Prize was announced, congratulating him with a mix of genuine warmth and veiled self-positioning. He acknowledges the world’s excitement about Tagore’s genius but also betrays a subtle attempt to claim interpretive ownership.
Throughout their correspondence, this duality remains: Thompson insists on mediating Tagore’s voice for an English audience, translating his work and writing a biography, all the while brushing up against Tagore’s growing discomfort with being explained by someone who, he felt, had not truly “seen” him.
What makes these letters so valuable is precisely this: they offer no illusion of unity, no false cosmopolitanism. Instead, they document the painful labour of translation—cultural, emotional, ethical—between two men bound by empire but resisting its terms. Tagore, for his part, oscillates between generosity and aloofness. In some letters, he corrects Thompson’s factual errors about his life and works with courteous patience. In others, he curtly dismisses Thompson’s interpretations as misguided.
His restraint is instructive. Rather than confront Thompson’s condescension head-on, Tagore often withdraws, cloaking his criticism in a veil of tired dignity. To a young reader like me in 2006, that silence was deafening.
There is one moment in the book I particularly remember pausing over—Tagore’s response to Thompson’s manuscript of his biography. Tagore was deeply uncomfortable with Thompson’s interpretations, especially the reductive psychoanalytic readings of his childhood and creativity. He wrote, with obvious fatigue, that he found the tone of the biography “repugnant.”
The word struck me. “Repugnant”—not merely incorrect or unfaithful, but ethically and aesthetically unacceptable. That response, I remember thinking, revealed Tagore’s acute awareness of interpretive violence, of how a life could be rewritten to fit foreign categories of knowledge. It also showed how even “friendly” Orientalism could wound.
To Edward Thompson’s credit, however, his letters are not the work of a brute imperialist. They are intelligent, conflicted, and often deeply self-critical. He admits, at times, to not understanding Tagore, to misrepresenting him, to being too English in his judgments. But then, he returns again to the same project, the same act of interpretation. One could call it obsession. One could also call it a colonial inheritance he could not quite shake off: the need to understand the Other by reshaping him in familiar terms.
This makes A Difficult Relationship far more than a private correspondence. It becomes a case study in the broader politics of cross-cultural translation and representation. In 2006, when the field of postcolonial theory was abuzz with debates over Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, this book offered something rawer—less theorized, but more immediate. It was not just about East versus West, colonizer versus colonized. It was about two minds struggling to connect—and failing, beautifully, tragically, instructively.
Looking back now, nearly two decades later, I am more sympathetic to Thompson than I was then. At 27, I found him exasperating—a liberal with too much confidence in his interpretive right. Today, I see him also as a man trying, within the limitations of his time and formation, to be honest, to grapple with the enormity of Tagore’s genius. It is easy to mock his mistakes: the psychoanalytic caricatures, the cultural simplifications, the inability to grasp Tagore’s mysticism. But he was not indifferent. He tried. And that struggle is evident on every page.
Uma Das Gupta’s editorial work deserves praise here. She resists the temptation to “clean up” the letters, to explain away the awkwardness. She allows the tensions to speak for themselves, provides minimal but useful annotations, and leaves readers to wrestle with the discomfort. The result is a book that demands slow reading and invites re-reading. It is, in the best sense, a pedagogical text—not because it teaches lessons, but because it stages unresolved questions.
I remember taking the book to the riverside in Barrackpore that July of 2006, sitting for hours reading one letter at a time, trying to place myself inside the historical imagination of these two men. What did Tagore think when he read Thompson’s awkward analysis of his Brahmo upbringing? What did Thompson feel when Tagore declined to endorse his biography? Did either of them sense how posterity would judge their intellectual dance—awkward, poignant, sometimes painful, but undeniably vital?
The irony of course is that despite their differences, despite the bitterness, Thompson’s biography of Tagore was one of the first comprehensive attempts to grapple with the poet’s intellectual life for an English-speaking audience. That work, flawed as it is, kept Tagore in circulation during a time when Western interest in him was waning. And perhaps that too is part of the difficult relationship.
Even when misinterpreted, Tagore needed such interlocutors to remain audible in global discourse. And Thompson, despite himself, remained tethered to Tagore as his most perplexing subject.
In conclusion, A Difficult Relationship is not just a record of personal friction between two men. It is an archive of colonial modernity’s failed intimacies. It is about how admiration can shade into appropriation, how translation can become misrepresentation, and how friendship across power asymmetries can often collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Reading this book in 2006 gave me, for the first time, a visceral understanding of what cross-cultural engagement looks like—not in theory, but in real time.
It’s a lesson I carry still: that dialogue is hard, that listening is harder, and that sometimes, the most honest relationships are the ones that do not resolve easily.
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