Transcultural Utopian Imagination and the Future: Tagore, Gandhi, Andrews, and India–Britain Entanglements in the Early 1930s

Abstract

This article focuses on the transcultural utopian imaginings of futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, anticolonial politician M. K. Gandhi, and British Christian activist C. F. Andrews at the center. Homing in on two trips made to England by Tagore (1930) and Gandhi (1931), especially their visits to Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, and on Gandhi’s visit to Lancashire, the article shows how British Christian and Quaker utopians and Indian utopians cooperated with each other. The article excavates the utopian experiments of Corder Catchpool, also a Quaker, in Darwen, Lancashire, where Gandhi stayed. Religion should be accorded an important place in our understanding of utopia, the article argues. A human propensity to create a paradoxical sense of futurity that does not negate the past, one that Tagore highlights in The Religion of Man (1931), is found in all the utopians discussed.