ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the social and political issues to which Rabindranath Tagore gives serious thought in his various writings and it is devoted to aspects of Tagore's social thinking. Tagore has a utopian vision of India as a place of pilgrimage for the happy abode of different races, tribes and religions. In Hindu Musalman, Rabindranath points out that once the Hindus and the Muslims were close to one another despite the differences between them. They were not indeed free from religious dogmatism, but religion had not dominated the problems, events and activities of their everyday life. Like the Hindu Muslim problem, Hindu marriage is another social problem that Tagore addresses with great sensitivity, and which illustrates his critical evaluation of the Hindu social system. Tagore's devotion to nature provokes his despair over the denatured situation of most people, and he endorses the system of education, on the model of forest hermitages, that existed in ancient India.
