Contemporary western discussion of the subcontinent is mostly about its economic success – but this ignores a rich history of art, poetry and ideas

Once upon a time, and a very bad time it was, there roamed a gang of men called Orientalists. Western dilettantes for the most part, they took it upon themselves to discuss and disseminate arts and books and ideas from the east, bringing to bear the prejudices and assumed superiority of Empire. The Indian subcontinent, China, the Middle East: these places and their peoples were exoticised, romanticised and patronised.

So much for the bad old days. Except it is not clear that what has succeeded orientalism is so much better. In place of imperial condescension, we now have a kind of globalised incuriosity. Where once the British would pounce on differences with other cultures and blow them up, now they are more inclined not to deal with them at all. Take for instance the strange disappearance from view of Rabindranath Tagore. Born 150 years ago this month, Tagore was one of the greatest poets and writers ever produced by India. Yet even that description does not capture his importance: he was the first non-European to win the Nobel prize for literature; the composer of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh; a painter; educationalist; social reformer and early feminist.

Even now, 70 years after Tagore's death, it is quite common for middle-class households in his native Bengal to display his pictures, and have tapes (yes, still) and CDs of his songs (which comprise an entire genre, Rabrindasangeet); tube stations in Kolkata are decorated with his poems.

Nor was his appeal strictly local. While visiting Britain in 1912, Tagore found a fierce advocate in WB Yeats. The Irish poet wrote the introduction to the landmark anthology Gitanjali. "We fight and make money and fill our heads with politics . . . while Mr Tagore, like the Indian civilisation itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity." For anyone who didn't catch the notes of enthusiastic condescension, Yeats also likened his Indian counterpart to a child, coming from an "unbroken", homogenous culture.

Compare that fevered tribute from the era of orientalism with the current state of affairs. During a trawl last week of the newspaper archives for coverage of the 150th anniversary, I turned up only two articles, one in the Independent and a Guardian column by my colleague Ian Jack. Nothing in the literary sections of this or any other national. Barely a mention in the Times Literary Supplement, either, besides an item in the weekly notebook that began, "Who reads Rabindranath Tagore now?" – as if the silence of the press might not have something to do with that; or as if the public was rushing out to buy £130 histories of the use of plaster casts in antiquity (subject of the lead review in the latest TLS). In the past few weeks, there has been only one assessment of Tagore's work in the mainstream press, and that is in the latest New Yorker.

The oddity here is that the British press is all too willing to carry pieces on Indian writing – provided it is in English and not too thornily local. There are many excellent Indian authors in English; but there are also plenty of mediocre ones whose notional subject is India but whose sensibility has been more influenced by time spent at Cornell or Magdalen College, Oxford.

In much the same way, western discussion of India is mostly taken up with its economic success – the opening up of its markets and its rapid growth rates; its newfound consumerism and outsourcing services to western businesses. Another way of saying this is that the media interest is in how India is coming to resemble a western free-market economy. And that only reinforces Indian officialdom's own carelessness with the country's cultural heritage. Try walking into the dustbowl that is any national museum in India; or as Rosinka Chaudhuri, a fellow at the centre for studies in the social sciences in Kolkata, points out, try and lay your hands on the collected works of any number of great Indian writers.

This impatience with too much difference can be felt much closer to home. Blogging for the New York Review of Books this month, the novelist and essayist Tim Parks quoted the blurb of a book he had just been sent, by Thomas Pletzinger: "Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn't know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly." As Parks pointed out: "To make it in America, Pletzinger must shed his German-ness as if he were an immigrant with an embarrassing accent."

Both in the era of orientalism and in the new age of incuriosity, what is lost is any sense of the different ideas that can be provided by other cultures. By making Tagore out to be some kind of child-sage, Yeats and others missed out on much of what the Bengali had to offer: his light-footedness, his democratic impulses, his commitment to empowerment for women.

Most of all, there is the sheer pleasure to be had from reading Tagore. Take an early poem called I Won't Let You Go. Its narrator has to go on a work trip, but first has to get past his protesting daughter and then, seemingly, the entire landscape:

"From world's end to the blue dome of the sky

Echoes the eternal cry: 'Won't let you go!'

Everything cries, 'I won't let you go!'

Mother Earth too cries out to the tiny grass

It hugs on its bosom, 'I won't let you go!'"