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George Barr

Gerald Barr is the recipient of the 2018 - 2019 Tagore Scholar Passport Operating Scholarship

He is in the PhD English Literature program at the University of Houston.

As a literature scholar and professional-level tabla player of Indian Classical Music, I gravitate toward Rabindranath Tagore. His Rabindra Sangeet is an exemplary model of the fusion of poetry and music that propels my graduate studies. Thus, the first phase of the scholarship will be spent in the beginning of the semester at Visva-Bharati University in Bengal, India with professors of Rabindra Sangeet and English. My time here, and in Bengal, will also allow me to analyze Tagore’s local geographies and natural world for which his poetry is famous

My project for the Tagore Fellowship will also investigate a very relevant movement to Tagore’s philosophy that was recently launched in Chennai, India Urur-Olcutt Kuppam Vizha, or Celebrating Oneness, began in 2015 to address the caste oppression of folk, or subaltern art. This movement aims to dismantle the “immovable walls” (Tagore) of caste. Thus, I will be seeing subaltern and postcolonial theories in action within local and peripheral spaces of India.