She, along with her son Amartya, helped me to understand a lot about India and Tagore. I wanted to bring forth in this book the things that Tagore brought forward. First of all, he believed that Western nationalism was in part the product of a lack of cultivation of imagination and poetic sensibilities. He really did think that both the critical capacities and the imagination were essential for the health of any democracy.

In the book, I try to show, on the one hand, how those abilities were really quite central to the founding of the Indian democracy in the person of Gandhi; in particular, in the imagination of suffering.

One of the great strengths of the leadership in the early days of the democracy and Nehru, in particular, was the ability to connect, in imagination, with the suffering of the poor.

But, more recently, there are two dangers. First, the politics of Hindu nationalism has in some cases taken young children and disciplined them in a monolithic ideology that is not alive to the imaginative experience of the other. That's one danger.

But more generally, the schools in India are focusing so much now on science and technology as the dominant mode of instruction and rote learning that through India we see a marginalisation of imagination and also perhaps the critical capacities. And I worry about that; because one of the great strengths of Indian democracy has always been its imaginative vigour and its critical bite. So, I'm just hoping that people don't lose sight of these things that Tagore stood for.

Image: Rabindranath Tagore. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

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