Bankura’s Englishman

Amit Chaudhuri

• Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore by E.P. Thompson
  Oxford, 175 pp, £8.95, June 1993, ISBN 0 19 563011 4

Two Englishmen spring to mind in connection with Tagore: C.F. Andrews and W.W. Pearson. Andrews, with his further association with Gandhi, looms now and then in Indian history books and national folklore as a ‘friend of India’, and, strange as it may sound, nothing more. The adoration and idealising passion with which Andrews engaged with India make us engage with him as a sincere but rather bland generality, an ideal Englishman, and rarely as a person. We see him walking with Tagore and Gandhi, part disciple and part companion, with little apparent contact with ordinary people, till he becomes, in our minds, one of the great stereotypes of that era, to figure occasionally in fairy tales such as Attenborough’s Gandhi. E.J., or Edward, Thompson, seldom remembered these days, and always uneasy in his role as ‘friend of India’, was, on the other hand, involved with the country of his long domicile (from 1910-23) in a way that was often uncomfortable but always intimate; he reappears now in a short book written by his son, E.P. Thompson.