Tagore and China

Tan Chung is the recipient of Padma Bhushan (2010), the second Chinese scholar having this honour, after the illustrious Professor Ji Xianlin (2008) of Peking University. Born in Malaya and brought up in China, he spent his prime years in India (1955-1999), teaching consecutively in Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University and, later, as Professor-Consultant at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. He was a member of the informal China Group from 1969 onwards that founded the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi, and was its founder co-chairperson for more than a decade. He has ten books in English and six in Chinese to his credit. He is now settled in the USA as an Academic Associate of the University of Chicago. Amiya Dev was Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and has written widely in Bengali and English including biographies of two major Bengali poets after Tagore, and edited and co-edited a number of volumes, including Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice with Sisir Kumar Das, The Renewal of Song: Renovation in Lyric Conception and Practice with Earl Roy Miner, and Epic and Other Higher Narratives: Essays in Intercultural Studies with Steven Shankman for International Comparative Literature Association of which he is a former Vice-President. He retired as Vice-Chancellor of Vidyasagar University. Wang Bangwei, a disciple of Ji Xianlin the doyen of India studies in China, is China's foremost scholar now in India and Buddhist studies. Professor, Institute of Oriental Studies, Research Centre of Eastern Literature, and Centre for India Studies, Peking University, he is also Director of all three and Dean of the Academy of Eastern Studies. He has published a number of books and articles, mostly in China, some in Germany, France, India, Sweden, Japan and Estonia, on the history of Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage and accounts of Xuanzang and Yijing, besides Sino-Indian cultural relations. He is also a member the Nalanda Mentor Group for the project to re-establish a new Nalanda in India. Wei Liming is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Afro-Asian Languages in the Academy of Foreign Languages, Peking University, and a Fellow of the University's Centre for Eastern Literature Studies which is a special research base for humanities funded by the Ministry of Education. She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Eastern Literature Studies, and Deputy Secretary of the Association of Eastern Literatures within the Chinese Association of Foreign Literatures. She has published more than 30 research papers. She won award of educational technique innovation in Beijing city, award for character education, and first-grade achievement in teaching from Peking University.