Books by Michael Collins
By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore's English language writings, this book ... more By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore's English language writings, this book places the work of India's greatest Nobel Prize winner and cultural icon in the context of imperial history and thereby bridges the gap between Tagore studies and imperial/postcolonial historiography. Using detailed archival research, the book charts the origins of Tagore's ideas in Indian religious traditions and discusses the impact of early Indian nationalism on Tagore's thinking. It offers a new interpretation of Tagore's complex debates with Gandhi about the colonial encounter, Tagore's provocative analysis of the impact of British imperialism in India and his questioning of nationalism as a pathway to authentic postcolonial freedom. The book also demonstrates how the man and his ideas were received and interpreted in Britain during his lifetime and how they have been sometimes misrepresented by nationalist historians and postcolonial theorists after Tagore's death. An alternative interpretation based on an intellectual history approach, this book places Tagore's sense of agency, his ideas and intentions within a broader historical framework. Offering an exciting critique of postcolonial theory from a historical perspective, it is a timely contribution.
Papers by Michael Collins
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020
In addressing the relationship between national and international worldmaking political projects,... more In addressing the relationship between national and international worldmaking political projects, Adom Getachew's impressive and thought-provoking recent book, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, seeks to move beyond recent debates between those who posit an inevitability thesis about the triumph of the nation-state after 1945, on the one hand, and those who insist on the possibilities of alternative pathways, on the other. The argument is compelling in demonstrating that the transcendence of race hierarchies was integral to arguments and aspirations about meaningful sovereignty. Getachew's central characters were visionaries in terms of imagining possible worlds beyond the nation-state. The book is less convincing in demonstrating that an intractable nationalism and indeed underlying racial thinking were not serious impediments to the achievement of these goals.
South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies, 2012
Caught between an arrogant European modernist elite and a proprietorial Indian nationalism, Tagor... more Caught between an arrogant European modernist elite and a proprietorial Indian nationalism, Tagore challenged the spatial dimensions of modernity by critiquing both Eurocentrism and a simplistic anti-imperialism. Tagore did build bridges with some Western intellectuals and social activists but much of his life illustrates the difficulties of meaningful cross-cultural relations and the shortcomings of a liberal 'politics of friendship'. If this is in part due to the inadequacy of translation, then we need more and better translations. Rather than resurrecting a platitudinous 'cosmopolitan' World Citizen, Tagore's work should require us to think more critically about parallel modernities and different ways of imagining our futures. As China and India, perhaps above all others, grow in economic, political and cultural strength, these questions are likely to become more pressing.
The Statesman: Special Supplement on Tagore, 150 Years, 2011
Existing historical accounts and interpretations of Tagore’s 1912 visit to London do not do justi... more Existing historical accounts and interpretations of Tagore’s 1912 visit to London do not do justice to the significance of his motivations, which grew out of a major shift in his thinking that followed the violence of the swadeshi period. The years 1912 and 1913 mark the period during which Tagore emerged into the imperial metropolitan public sphere. It constituted a new development in his identity, during which he began to write profusely and directly in English on a wide range of social, political, philosophical and theological issues: in short, this was the moment at which he became an English language theorist and critic. Most significantly of all, the archive for this period can be read as revealing the first enactment of Tagore’s grand design for repairing the damage done by colonialism to the relationship between East and West.
Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, 2008
Rabindranath Tagore is often referred to as a ‘nationalist poet’ or a ‘nationalist leader’. This ... more Rabindranath Tagore is often referred to as a ‘nationalist poet’ or a ‘nationalist leader’. This presents problems both historical and historiographical, since by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century Tagore had explicitly rejected nationalism. At the same time, Tagore’s legacy is further complicated by certain trends in Indian postcolonial historiography. Work emerging from the Subaltern Studies Collective has often put forward a more complex historical analysis, moving beyond a straightforward dichotomy between nationalism and anti-nationalism. In this version of Tagore’s place in India’s past, he is simultaneously both inside and outside: a Bengali intellectual deeply marked by his ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘modernism’ and other derivative tropes of western bourgeois intellectual and cultural life. But in this mode of analysis, Tagore too often suffers from simplistic application of various Western classifications, for example as a ‘romantic modernist’ or ‘liberal humanist’. In fact Tagore, like Hegel, Tagore saw World History as the steady unfolding of an idea. The marked distinction was that, unlike Hegel, he placed India at the centre of that process. In this regard, Tagore developed an alternative conception of modernity which saw the ideas, politics and technology of the West as only one aspect of a developing historical process, rather than its core movement. This not only challenges the spatial dimensions of modernity but also challenges us to think more critically about ‘modernities’ and the kinds of categories we deploy to make sense of the ‘modern’ and ‘counter-modern’. In this respect, the Tagore-Gandhi debates become a crucial historical and textual source for an interpretation of Tagore’s thinking on nationalism. These debates centred on the freedom struggle and India’s stance towards the West; and towards Britain as the colonial power. They point towards a complicated engagement with the West, its position in the world, its relationship to India and the political and intellectual influences that it had in India.
International Journal of the Humanities, 2007
This article examines the immediate historical context within which an image of Tagore-one that p... more This article examines the immediate historical context within which an image of Tagore-one that persists today-was constructed. It looks at the expectations and prejudices of Tagore's contacts in London such as William Rothenstein, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound; some of the ideas about Tagore articulated in the British press; and the Nobel Prize controversy. In so doing it seeks to clear away some of the historical misunderstandings surrounding Tagore's visit to London in 1912 and 1913 and the awarding of the Nobel Prize. It argues that this is a starting point for a better appreciation of Tagore as an historical actor, and hence to understanding both his real motivations for visiting to London in 1912 and the grander, more theoretically interesting, nature of Tagore's anti-colonial project.
Book chapters by Michael Collins
State and Society in South Asia: Themes of Assertion and Recognition, 2014
Rabindranath Tagore is often referred to as a ‘nationalist poet’ or a ‘nationalist leader’. This ... more Rabindranath Tagore is often referred to as a ‘nationalist poet’ or a ‘nationalist leader’. This presents problems both historical and historiographical, since by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century Tagore had explicitly rejected nationalism. At the same time, Tagore’s legacy is further complicated by certain trends in Indian postcolonial historiography. Work emerging from the Subaltern Studies Collective has often put forward a more complex historical analysis, moving beyond a straightforward dichotomy between nationalism and anti-nationalism. In this version of Tagore’s place in India’s past, he is simultaneously both inside and outside: a Bengali intellectual deeply marked by his ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘modernism’ and other derivative tropes of western bourgeois intellectual and cultural life. But in this mode of analysis, Tagore too often suffers from simplistic application of various Western classifications, for example as a ‘romantic modernist’ or ‘liberal humanist’. In fact Tagore, like Hegel, Tagore saw World History as the steady unfolding of an idea. The marked distinction was that, unlike Hegel, he placed India at the centre of that process. In this regard, Tagore developed an alternative conception of modernity which saw the ideas, politics and technology of the West as only one aspect of a developing historical process, rather than its core movement. This not only challenges the spatial dimensions of modernity but also challenges us to think more critically about ‘modernities’ and the kinds of categories we deploy to make sense of the ‘modern’ and ‘counter-modern’. In this respect, the Tagore-Gandhi debates become a crucial historical and textual source for an interpretation of Tagore’s thinking on nationalism. These debates centred on the freedom struggle and India’s stance towards the West; and towards Britain as the colonial power. They point towards a complicated engagement with the West, its position in the world, its relationship to India and the political and intellectual influences that it had in India.
Butts, Cindy and Ansari, Zafar and Collins, Michael and Moore, Michelle and Barber, Brendan, (eds.) Holding up a Mirror to Cricket: A Report by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket., 2023
It is vital for cricket to develop a more critical and self-aware approach, to be more cognisant ... more It is vital for cricket to develop a more critical and self-aware approach, to be more cognisant of the ways in which both its past and present are imbued with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions. We approach this task in the spirit of the great Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, who famously prefaced his treatise on Caribbean cricket and colonialism – Beyond a Boundary (1963) – by asking “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” In other words, if we are to understand the nature and extent of (in)equity in cricket, our sense of what cricket history is must go beyond ‘the game’: dates, scorecards, names and numbers. Developing a better sense of cricket history reveals many of the unspoken assumptions, inherited from the past, that have enabled particular groups of people to dominate the game in terms of power and access to resources, whilst others have remained at the margins. It can also help everyone in the game gain a better understanding of where contemporary injustices have come from. This chapter offers a historical context for the key themes that underpin the Commission’s Terms of Reference, and in doing so develop three central arguments:
● Cricket has not simply ‘reflected’ conflicts in wider society, it has frequently been central to fostering or reproducing those conflicts.
● Typically, elite social groups have commanded most of the power and control within cricket, and have resisted change.
● Although cricket has a long history, the period after about 1860 up to World War I was pivotal in terms of establishing the idea that cricket exemplified a specific version of Englishness – White, middle to upper class, profoundly male-dominated – with this image exported throughout Britain’s empire.
The Encyclopedia of Empire: Volume II, 2016
The decolonization of the European overseas empires in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean came late,... more The decolonization of the European overseas empires in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean came late, and was rapidly concluded. Each moment of independence was exemplary, and contributed cumulatively to the accelerating process of change, especially after 1957. Anti‐colonialists contributed greatly to this development, which was given institutional and legal meaning by way of independence as sovereign membership of the United Nations. But “flag independence” was not the end of decolonization as either a practical or intellectual problem: the legacies and consequences of decolonization remain very important. Formal independence was, though, indicative of a profound reshaping of the international system and its normative architecture after 1945. This may constitute the most significant aspect of decolonization as a process of historical change.
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Books by Michael Collins
Papers by Michael Collins
Book chapters by Michael Collins
● Cricket has not simply ‘reflected’ conflicts in wider society, it has frequently been central to fostering or reproducing those conflicts.
● Typically, elite social groups have commanded most of the power and control within cricket, and have resisted change.
● Although cricket has a long history, the period after about 1860 up to World War I was pivotal in terms of establishing the idea that cricket exemplified a specific version of Englishness – White, middle to upper class, profoundly male-dominated – with this image exported throughout Britain’s empire.