论文部分内容阅读
It is widely accepted that Rabindranath Tagore through his life-long engagement with different aspects of Culture has challenged the existing paradigms of Bengali culture and society, and constructed new ones. So much so that a process of cultural transformation took place, touching and redefining the cultural practices of the time, including those related to gender. During the process he integrated and mobilized women as the beneficiaries and equal participants of social transformation. While doing so, Rabindranath Tagore incorporated and invented several elements of modernity and yet did not reject but adapted some of the traditional cultural values of Bengal. In other words, he integrated the traditional with the modern, and created a new image of the ideal Bengali woman, who became a representative symbol of Bengali culture. In the course of the tortuous journey through twentieth Century, especially after the New Culture Movement, women’s emancipation was also one of the important agenda of social transformation in China. The Chinese intellectuals also tried to look for an effective model for redefining the image of Chinese women in the process of this transformation. This paper will explore the methods used by Tagore and compare them with the Chinese experience in order to have an inter-cultural perspective of practices and experiences of women’s emancipation in Asia.