Meeting With Mussolini

Of the many countries Rabindranath Tagore visited in his lifetime, his Italian sojourns of 1925 and 1926, at the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's invitation, have been of immense interest to Tagore scholars. His visits stoked an adverse international response, and were largely debated in Indian and Italian media during and after his tours. Realizing how he was influenced by the Italian propaganda machine to make him appear a defender of fascism, Tagore wrote a letter to C.F. Andrews, later published in The Manchester Guardian, to end all speculation on his much-debated tours to Italy. Kalyan Kundu's evaluative study unfolds the story of this encounter between a humanist and a tyrant. This well-researched work is based on a vast corpus of reportage -- lectures and conversations, letters and memoirs, articles and news reports -- available on the controversial Tagore-Mussolini episode.