Wanderlust Travels of The Tagore Family

The Tagore family, with over three hundred years of history, has been one of the leading families of Kolkata and is regarded as a key influence during the Bengal Renaissance in the nineteenth century. They were the most splendid, free-spirited and venturesome of the great Calcutta families and consisted of members who were itinerant travellers. They had wanderlust ingrained in them and travelled to different parts of India and outside it for various reasons. On several occasions they recorded their travel experiences in diaries or memoirs; on other occasions nothing was written down or published. This anthology offers vignettes of travel undertaken by nineteen male and female members of the Tagore household beginning from Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846) to Sumitendranath Tagore (1930-2006).

Somdatta Mandal is Professor of English at the Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Her areas of interest are contemporary fiction, film and culture studies, Diaspora studies and translation. She is presently translating a series of travel narratives by Bengali writers across genres and also travel essays by Rabindranath Tagore.