ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Rabindranath Tagore's complex and evolving views on the British Empire and the Indian national movement are represented in his writings for younger audiences. It begins with a brief examination of some of his historical poems for children, penned in the late 1890s and compiled in Legends and Tales, and focuses on The Land of Cards, a musical drama for young adults, in which Tagore's views on the oppressive nature of colonial rule and the importance of political, intellectual, and spiritual freedom are clearly articulated. In the tradition of the early nineteenth-century Bengali reformist, Raja Rammohan Roy, who had looked to Western ideas and modes of thought as a means to emancipate the eastern Indian state of Bengal from superstition and ritualism, Tagore, like many Bengalis of his generation, was never fully dismissive of British presence in India.
