SOCIAL SCIENTIST 85 or radiantly spiritual, compassionate, humane, sparkling with wit and above all, with a sweep of intellect that takes the breath away. "Interest in the life and work of the Nobel prize-winning writer Rabindranath Tagore is now enjoying a revival after many years of neglect outside India", says the blurb of the Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (with notes in fascinating detail on the circumstances surrounding each and every letter, and its recipient, by editors Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson). Very true, Last year, an NRI produced a film with an international cast, based on a well-known Tagore short story, and a British choreographer fused east and west and toured India with a programme called "Songs From Tagore". This year, the key figure for Malaysia' s Asian Renaissance is Tagore, and in July, singers, dancers and other luminaries from all over the world will gather there to honour and perform the work of this artist of artists. While in India, filmmaker Kumar Shahani' s Char Adhyaya, based on Tagore' s brilliant last novel, was screened in the Indian Panorama at the 29th International Film Festival in Delhi. In 1939, Tagore wrote to his American friend, Leonald Elmhirst, who came to India and worked with Tagore on rural reconstruction: But what about India? It does not need a defeatist to feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who with all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions are being simultaneously subjected to hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething discontents of communalism. Our people do not possess the vitality that you have in Europe, and the crisis, even before this war started in the West, has become acute in India. Needless to say interested groups led by ambition and outside instigation are today using the communal motive for destructive political ends. Does this sound like 1939? Or 1998? As a matter of fact, Tagore displayed remarkable prescience more than once with Gandhiji, whose politics he could not accept, but whose greatness he never questioned. Their relationship was almost symbolic. "Mahatmaji is the prophet of tapasya and I am the poet of ananda", he once wrote to Mirben. Gandhiji often consulted him, or wrote to him for public support for his campaigns. History now supports Tagore. On the subjects of untouchability and the Muslim question, Tagore felt that Gandhiji was paying for too much attention to the former, and not