essay of rabindranath tagore

Rabindranath Tagore Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on rabindranath tagore.

Essay on Rabindranath Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore was a legendary Indian poet. Furthermore, he was also a great philosopher , patriot , painter, and humanist. People often made use of the word Gurudev with regard to him. This exceptional personality was born on the 7th of May in 1861 at Calcutta. His early education took place at home by a variety of teachers. Also, through this education, he got knowledge of many subjects. His higher education took place in England. Above all, Rabindranath Tagore began writing poems from a very young age.

Works of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore began to write drama from sixteen years of age. At the age of twenty, Rabindranath Tagore wrote original dramatic piece Valmiki Pratibha. Most noteworthy, Rabindranath Tagore works focused on feelings and not on action. In 1890 he wrote another drama work Visarjan. Visarjan is probably the best drama work of Rabindranath Tagore.

Similarly, from the age of sixteen Rabindranath Tagore began to write short stories. His first short story was Bhikarini. Most noteworthy, he is the founder of the Bengali-language short story genre. Tagore certainly wrote numerous stories from 1891 to 1895. Also, stories from this period form the collection of Galpaguchchha. It is a big collection of 84 stories.

Rabindranath Tagore was certainly in touch with novels as well. He wrote eight notable novels. Furthermore, he wrote four novellas.

Rabindranath Tagore was certainly not short on songs. The man enjoys the reputation of writing a mighty 2230 songs. The popular name in usage is rabindrasangit, which refers to Tagore’s songs. His songs certainly reflect Indian culture . His famous song Amar Shonar Bangla is the national anthem of Bangladesh. Above all, he wrote the national anthem of India Jana Gana Mana.

Rabindranath Tagore also had excellent skills in drawing and painting. Probably, Rabindranath Tagore was red-green color blind. Due to this, his artworks contain strange color themes.

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Rabindranath Tagore’s contribution to politics

Rabindranath Tagore was active in politics. He was in total support of Indian nationalists. Furthermore, he was in opposition to British rule . His work Manast contains his political views. He also wrote a number of patriotic songs. Rabindranath Tagore increased the motivation for Indian independence. He wrote some works for patriotism. There was great love among the masses for such works. Even Mahatma Gandhi showed his favor for these works.

Most noteworthy, Rabindranath Tagore did renunciation of his knighthood. Furthermore, he took this step to protest the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.

In conclusion, Rabindranath was a patriotic Indian. He was certainly a man of many talents. His contribution to Literature, arts, music, and politics is brilliant.

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Who was Rabindranath Tagore?

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Rabindranath Tagore

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Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet , short-story writer, song composer, playwright, and painter. He introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into  Bengali literature , helped introduce Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century  India .

What did Rabindranath Tagore write?

Rabindranath Tagore published several poetry collections, notably Manasi  (1890),  Sonar Tari  (1894;  The Golden Boat ), and Gitanjali  (1910); plays, notably  Chitrangada (1892;  Chitra ); and novels, including Gora  (1910) and  Ghare-Baire  (1916). He also wrote some 2,000 songs , which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali society.

What awards did Rabindranath Tagore win?

In 1913 Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to receive the  Nobel Prize for Literature . Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the  Amritsar (Jallianwala Bagh) Massacre .

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Rabindranath Tagore (born May 7, 1861, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died August 7, 1941, Calcutta) was a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature , thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit . He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India . In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature .

The son of the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore , he early began to write verses, and, after incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India. There he published several books of poetry in the 1880s and completed Manasi (1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some of his best-known poems, including many in verse forms new to Bengali , as well as some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.

In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family’s estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the Padma River (the main channel of the Ganges River ), in close contact with village folk, and his sympathy for them became the keynote of much of his later writing. Most of his finest short stories, which examine “humble lives and their small miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy, laced with gentle irony , that is unique to him (though admirably captured by the director Satyajit Ray in later film adaptations). Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside, most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these years he published several poetry collections, notably Sonar Tari (1894; The Golden Boat ), and plays, notably Chitrangada (1892; Chitra ). Tagore’s poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his more than 2,000 songs, which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali society.

In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at Shantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled permanently at the school, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. Years of sadness arising from the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907 are reflected in his later poetry, which was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (1912). This book, containing Tagore’s English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections, including Gitanjali (1910), was hailed by W.B. Yeats and André Gide and won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre .

From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India, lecturing and reading from his work in Europe , the Americas, and East Asia and becoming an eloquent spokesperson for the cause of Indian independence. Tagore’s novels in Bengali are less well known than his poems and short stories; they include Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire (1916), translated into English as Gora and The Home and the World , respectively. In the late 1920s, when he was in his 60s, Tagore took up painting and produced works that won him a place among India’s foremost contemporary artists.

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• An Essay On Renown Poet Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore Essay For Students And Children

Rabindranath Tagore is one of India’s most cherished renaissance figures, who has put us on the literary map of the world. He was a poet’s poet and a maker of not only modern Indian literature but also the modern Indian mind. Tagore was myriad-minded and a great poet, short story writer, novelist, dramatist, essayist, painter, and composer of songs. His worldwide acclaim as a social, political, religious and aesthetic thinker, an innovator in education and a champion of the ‘One World’ idea makes him a living presence. Gandhi called him the ‘Great Sentinel’. He was also renowned as Gurudev.

His Early Years

Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 6, 1861, in an affluent joint family at Jorasanko in Calcutta. His father Maharsi Debendranath Tagore was a religious reformer, scholar, and leader of Brahmo Samaj and his mother’s name was Sarada Devi. He was the youngest of thirteen children. He had spent most of his childhood with servants since his mother had passed away when he was very young. His home was the hub of literary and theatrical activities. In 1883, Rabindranath Tagore married Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri. He had two sons and three daughters.

In his childhood, Tagore never liked the school education within the four walls. He liked the outside world; the open sky overhead and the earth under his feet. So, he was educated at home by private tutors who taught him various subjects. English was his least favourite subject. His father guided him with Upanishads.

He extensively read the mystical and Vaishnav poets of India. From his early years, Rabindranath Tagore wrote poems. Some of his poems were published in periodicals when he was very young. He finished a long poem in Maithili style. His first short story in Bengali had the title, ‘Bhikharini’ (The Beggar Woman).

Tagore went to England for higher education but there also, he did not like the traditional system of education. He came back to India after a year. After he came back, he devoted himself completely to writing. Before he turned 18 years old, he had published more than 6000 lines of verse along with prose. He became an active member of the Bengal Literary Academy and frequently contributed to many periodicals. Bengal was swinging from the Renaissance in every field of religion, literature and politics when Rabindranath Tagore made his presence felt in the literary society.

He established a school named Shantiniketan at Bolpur (Birbhum district) in Bengal. In Shantiniketan, the teachers took classes under the trees with open sky overhead and green grass under the feet. The Gurukul pattern was followed in the school. Later, the school became a college and then a famous university under the name of “Visva-Bharati”. Today, students from different parts of the world come here to study. 

His Contributions

Rabindranath Tagore wrote not only poems but also short stories, drama, novels and essays. He was awarded the world-famous Nobel prize for Literature for his famous book of poetry called ‘Gitanjali’ in 1913. The British Crown awarded him the Knighthood. However, he returned the award to mark the protest against the inhumane massacre in Jallianwala Bagh. Tagore has 2230 songs in his collection, which he composed and they are known as ‘Rabindra Sangeet’. Till today, the Bengalis sing his composed songs with pride. His famous novels like ‘Gora’ ‘Ghare-Baire’, ‘Noukadubi’, ‘Chokher Bali’ and many have been made into movies, which have won accolades worldwide. 

Tagore also took up painting. He introduced a completely new form of art and his paintings were so exceptional that he won himself a very significant place among India’s

famous contemporary artists. 

Into Politics

Rabindranath Tagore was writing at a time when the entire country was thrown into the fever of the freedom struggle and he plunged with deep passion into the struggle. He took part in the freedom movements by opening a Swadeshi shop selling only Indian goods and by rejecting foreign goods. He also composed many patriotic songs and articles especially during the painful partition of Bengal in 1905. Those songs inspired the youth of the country. He gave us the National Anthem: “Jana Gana Mana”. He had also composed the National anthem of Bangladesh: “Amar Sonar Bangla”. He also wrote the lyrics of Sri Lanka’s National Anthem.

Tagore died on August 7, 1941, at Calcutta leaving behind a legacy of world-class literature. He is one of the most influential Indian writers and so not only the nation but also the entire intellectual community of the world suffered an irreparable loss. The nation lost a great poet, philosopher, social reformer, mystic and a greater human being. 

He was not only a representative of the nation but a wholesome product of Mother Earth, an amalgamation of Indian and modern values. Even though he is not among us, his presence can be felt through his vast works. His birthday is celebrated as Rabindra Jayanti in West Bengal. He will always be remembered as the source of inspiration for noble thoughts and great ideas for humanity. 

Descriptive Essay

A descriptive essay is one in which a person, place, thing, or any object is explained in detail. It vividly describes the experience of the five senses about the subject. The subject can be anything – a thing, an experience, a situation, or an emotion or feeling. A good descriptive essay has the power to paint a picture through words . It can make the reader experience the subject first-hand in his mind – such is the power of a good descriptive essay. Great writers can describe a thing with such vividity that it becomes a memorable piece of literature and becomes a classic.

Describing a Person

Writing an essay about a person is a kind of descriptive essay. The onus of bringing that person to life through words remains with the writer. We have memorable characters in books that were so well described in the literature that they appear to one like a real person. A good example is Sherlock Holmes, the creation of a doctor who wrote detective fiction while waiting for patients in his clinic. 

Hence, anyone can become good at describing a person. In a descriptive essay about a person, one needs to write about his life and death. The important events of his life have to be mentioned. His personality and characteristics that make him unique should be mentioned. With meticulous attention and creativity, a good picture of the subject’s life can be captured.

How to Begin a Descriptive Essay on a Person?

Usually, students are asked to write an essay about a historical figure. In that case, the facts of his life can be collected to form the base of the essay. There should be no fiction or imagined detail, though inferences can be included. Good research is required to write a descriptive essay on an actual person. Sometimes characters of a well-known story are the subject, in that case, the piece of fiction in which the character appears needs to be studied thoroughly. Essays by other people, often as part of character study, can also be read to gather material for the essay. Good research goes a long way into an informative and rich essay.

Body of a Descriptive Essay on a Person

The introduction of an essay about a person needs to mention how he was known as – his profession or quality that made him stand apart. In short essays, only his major life-works or unique quality can be discussed. In longer essays, his physical descriptions (if any) can also be used, along with other details of his life that formed the culture and society of his time.

Conclusion of a Descriptive Essay on a Person

The essay should mention the legacy the subject leaves behind after his death and how it affects future generations. For example, a great cultural and literary figure like Rabindra Nath Tagore would require a deep and heavy conclusion to do justice to his great personality.

FAQs on An Essay On Renown Poet Rabindranath Tagore

1. When was Rabindranath Tagore born and who were his parents?

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 6th May 1861 to a very affluent Brahmin family to Maharsi Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi at Jorasanko in Calcutta. His father was a religious reformer, scholar and leader of Brahmo Samaj.

2. How did Tagore participate in the Movement for Freedom?

Tagore took part in the movement by opening a Swadeshi movement selling only Indian goods and rejecting foreign goods.

3. Mention a few of his Contributions to the World of Literature.

Tagore wrote poems, short stories and novels. He has composed 2230 songs, which are collectively called Rabindra Sangeet. His few novels like Gora, Ghare-Baire, Noukadubi, Chokher Bali and many more have been developed into cinemas. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his poetry book, Gitanjali. He also composed our National Anthem – Jana Gana Mana. He also composed the National Anthem for Bangladesh and wrote the lyrics for the National Anthem for Sri Lanka.

4. What is Shantiniketan?

Shantiniketan is the school that he had established at Bolpur. He followed the Gurukul way of teaching in the open. It has now become a famous University called Vishwa- Bharati where students come to study from different parts of the world.

5. What is the difference between descriptive and narrative essays?

A descriptive essay talks about a noun. It describes a person, place, thing, emotion, or situation. A narrative essay talks about a happening or incident. It tells a story. There are a series of actions that happen in it.

6. How can we use creativity in an essay?

Creativity can be used brilliantly in essays of all kinds. Creativity means originality of thought or expression. It should not be confused with creative writing, which is the writing of fiction, or imagined stories.

7.  Why is Rabindranath Tagore the topic of the essay?

Rabindranath Tagore is a legendary historical figure. He is a part of Indian culture; his cultural presence is so immense. Therefore, studying his life would be a learning experience for any student.

8.  What is the use of a descriptive essay?

A descriptive essay paints the picture of anything and this kind of writing forms the base of any good book. All great writers have a knack for writing great descriptions, this is what makes their work memorable.

9. Can anecdotes from the life of the subject be included in a descriptive essay?

Generally, anecdotes do not form part of a small essay on a person. However, if the essay is longer and the anecdote affected his life in a major way or formed the crux of his personality development, it would need to be mentioned.

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Tagore and his india, rabindranath tagore.

by Amartya Sen *

Voice of Bengal

Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of eighty, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. Anyone who becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be impressed by the power of Tagore’s presence in Bangladesh and in India. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories, and essays are very widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern part of India and throughout Bangladesh.

In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, the excitement that Tagore’s writings created in the early years of the twentieth century has largely vanished. The enthusiasm with which his work was once greeted was quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March of that year, and had been reprinted ten times by November, when the award was announced. But he is not much read now in the West, and already by 1937, Graham Greene was able to say: “As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.”

The contrast between Tagore’s commanding presence in Bengali literature and culture, and his near-total eclipse in the rest of the world, is perhaps less interesting than the distinction between the view of Tagore as a deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker in Bangladesh and India, and his image in the West as a repetitive and remote spiritualist. Graham Greene had, in fact, gone on to explain that he associated Tagore “with what Chesterton calls ‘the bright pebbly eyes’ of the Theosophists.” Certainly, an air of mysticism played some part in the “selling” of Rabindranath Tagore to the West by Yeats, Ezra Pound, and his other early champions. Even Anna Akhmatova, one of Tagore’s few later admirers (who translated his poems into Russian in the mid-1960s), talks of “that mighty flow of poetry which takes its strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called Rabindranath Tagore.”

An air of mysticism.

Confluence of cultures

Rabindranath did come from a Hindu family – one of the landed gentry who owned estates mostly in what is now Bangladesh. But whatever wisdom there might be in Akhmatova’s invoking of Hinduism and the Ganges, it did not prevent the largely Muslim citizens of Bangladesh from having a deep sense of identity with Tagore and his ideas. Nor did it stop the newly independent Bangladesh from choosing one of Tagore’s songs – the “Amar Sonar Bangla” which means “my golden Bengal” – as its national anthem. This must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations” – with “the Muslim civilization,” “the Hindu civilization,” and “the Western civilization,” each forcefully confronting the others. They would also be confused by Rabindranath Tagore’s own description of his Bengali family as the product of “a confluence of three cultures: Hindu, Mohammedan, and British”. 1

Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was well known for his command of Arabic and Persian, and Rabindranath grew up in a family atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts was combined with an understanding of Islamic traditions as well as Persian literature. It is not so much that Rabindranath tried to produce – or had an interest in producing – a “synthesis” of the different religions (as the great Moghul emperor Akbar tried hard to achieve) as that his outlook was persistently non-sectarian, and his writings – some two hundred books – show the influence of different parts of the Indian cultural background as well as of the rest of the world. 2

Abode of peace

Most of his work was written at Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), the small town that grew around the school he founded in Bengal in 1901, and he not only conceived there an imaginative and innovative system of education, but through his writings and his influence on students and teachers, he was able to use the school as a base from which he could take a major part in India’s social, political, and cultural movements.

The profoundly original writer, whose elegant prose and magical poetry Bengali readers know well, is not the sermonizing spiritual guru admired – and then rejected – in London. Tagore was not only an immensely versatile poet; he was also a great short story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, and composer of songs, as well as a talented painter whose pictures, with their mixture of representation and abstraction, are only now beginning to receive the acclaim that they have long deserved. His essays, moreover, ranged over literature, politics, culture, social change, religious beliefs, philosophical analysis, international relations, and much else. The coincidence of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence with the publication of a selection of Tagore’s letters by Cambridge University Press 3 , brought Tagore’s ideas and reflections to the fore, which makes it important to examine what kind of leadership in thought and understanding he provided in the Indian subcontinent in the first half of this century.

Gandhi and Tagore

Since Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi were two leading Indian thinkers in the twentieth century, many commentators have tried to compare their ideas. On learning of Rabindranath’s death, Jawaharlal Nehru, then incarcerated in a British jail in India, wrote in his prison diary for August 7, 1941:

“Gandhi and Tagore. Two types entirely different from each other, and yet both of them typical of India, both in the long line of India’s great men … It is not so much because of any single virtue but because of the tout ensemble, that I felt that among the world’s great men today Gandhi and Tagore were supreme as human beings. What good fortune for me to have come into close contact with them.”

Romain Rolland was fascinated by the contrast between them, and when he completed his book on Gandhi, he wrote to an Indian academic, in March 1923: “I have finished my Gandhi, in which I pay tribute to your two great river-like souls, overflowing with divine spirit, Tagore and Gandhi.” The following month, he recorded in his diary an account of some of the differences between Gandhi and Tagore written by Reverend C.F. Andrews, the English clergyman and public activist who was a close friend of both men (and whose important role in Gandhi’s life in South Africa as well as India is well portrayed in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi [1982]). Andrews described to Rolland a discussion between Tagore and Gandhi, at which he was present, on subjects that divided them:

“The first subject of discussion was idols; Gandhi defended them, believing the masses incapable of raising themselves immediately to abstract ideas. Tagore cannot bear to see the people eternally treated as a child. Gandhi quoted the great things achieved in Europe by the flag as an idol; Tagore found it easy to object, but Gandhi held his ground, contrasting European flags bearing eagles, etc., with his own, on which he has put a spinning wheel. The second point of discussion was nationalism, which Gandhi defended. He said that one must go through nationalism to reach internationalism, in the same way that one must go through war to reach peace.” 4

Tagore greatly admired Gandhi but he had many disagreements with him on a variety of subjects, including nationalism, patriotism, the importance of cultural exchange, the role of rationality and of science, and the nature of economic and social development. These differences, I shall argue, have a clear and consistent pattern, with Tagore pressing for more room for reasoning, and for a less traditionalist view, a greater interest in the rest of the world, and more respect for science and for objectivity generally.

Rabindranath knew that he could not have given India the political leadership that Gandhi provided, and he was never stingy in his praise for what Gandhi did for the nation (it was, in fact, Tagore who popularized the term “Mahatma” – great soul – as a description of Gandhi). And yet each remained deeply critical of many things that the other stood for. That Mahatma Gandhi has received incomparably more attention outside India and also within much of India itself makes it important to understand “Tagore’s side” of the Gandhi-Tagore debates.

In his prison diary, Nehru wrote: “Perhaps it is as well that [Tagore] died now and did not see the many horrors that are likely to descend in increasing measure on the world and on India. He had seen enough and he was infinitely sad and unhappy.” Toward the end of his life, Tagore was indeed becoming discouraged about the state of India, especially as its normal burden of problems, such as hunger and poverty, was being supplemented by politically organized incitement to “communal” violence between Hindus and Muslims. This conflict would lead in 1947, six years after Tagore’s death, to the widespread killing that took place during partition; but there was much gore already during his declining days. In December 1939, he wrote to his friend Leonard Elmhirst, the English philanthropist and social reformer who had worked closely with him on rural reconstruction in India (and who had gone on to found the Dartington Hall Trust in England and a progressive school at Dartington that explicitly invoked Rabindranath’s educational ideals): 5

“It does not need a defeatist to feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who, with all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions are being simultaneously subjected to hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething discontents of communalism.”

How would Tagore have viewed the India of today? Would he see progress there, or wasted opportunity, perhaps even a betrayal of its promise and conviction? And, on a wider subject, how would he react to the spread of cultural separatism in the contemporary world?

East and West

Given the vast range of his creative achievements, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the image of Tagore in the West is its narrowness; he is recurrently viewed as “the great mystic from the East,” an image with a putative message for the West, which some would welcome, others dislike, and still others find deeply boring. To a great extent this Tagore was the West’s own creation, part of its tradition of message-seeking from the East, particularly from India, which – as Hegel put it – had “existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans.” 6 Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Herder, and Schopenhauer were only a few of the thinkers who followed the same pattern. They theorized, at first, that India was the source of superior wisdom. Schopenhauer at one stage even argued that the New Testament “must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism, its pessimism, and its avatar,” in “the person of Christ.” But then they rejected their own theories with great vehemence, sometimes blaming India for not living up to their unfounded expectations.

We can imagine that Rabindranath’s physical appearance – handsome, bearded, dressed in non-Western clothes – may, to some extent, have encouraged his being seen as a carrier of exotic wisdom. Yasunari Kawabata , the first Japanese Nobel Laureate in Literature, treasured memories from his middle-school days of “this sage-like poet”:

His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were long like two beards, and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard. 7

That appearance would have been well-suited to the selling of Tagore in the West as a quintessentially mystical poet, and it could have made it somewhat easier to pigeonhole him. Commenting on Rabindranath’s appearance, Frances Cornford told William Rothenstein, “I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before.” Beatrice Webb, who did not like Tagore and resented what she took to be his “quite obvious dislike of all that the Webbs stand for” (there is, in fact, little evidence that Tagore had given much thought to this subject), said that he was “beautiful to look at” and that “his speech has the perfect intonation and slow chant-like moderation of the dramatic saint.” Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, among others, first led the chorus of adoration in the Western appreciation of Tagore, and then soon moved to neglect and even shrill criticism. The contrast between Yeats’s praise of his work in 1912 (“These lyrics … display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long,” “the work of a supreme culture”) and his denunciation in 1935 (“Damn Tagore”) arose partly from the inability of Tagore’s many-sided writings to fit into the narrow box in which Yeats wanted to place – and keep – him. Certainly, Tagore did write a huge amount, and published ceaselessly, even in English (sometimes in indifferent English translation), but Yeats was also bothered, it is clear, by the difficulty of fitting Tagore’s later writings into the image Yeats had presented to the West. Tagore, he had said, was the product of “a whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us,” and yet “we have met our own image, … or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.” 8

Yeats did not totally reject his early admiration (as Ezra Pound and several others did), and he included some of Tagore’s early poems in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited in 1936. Yeats also had some favorable things to say about Tagore’s prose writings. His censure of Tagore’s later poems was reinforced by his dislike of Tagore’s own English translations of his work (“Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English,” Yeats explained), unlike the English version of Gitanjali which Yeats had himself helped to prepare. Poetry is, of course, notoriously difficult to translate, and anyone who knows Tagore’s poems in their original Bengali cannot feel satisfied with any of the translations (made with or without Yeats’s help). Even the translations of his prose works suffer, to some extent, from distortion. E.M. Forster noted, in a review of a translation of one of Tagore’s great Bengali novels, The Home and the World, in 1919: “The theme is so beautiful,” but the charms have “vanished in translation,” or perhaps “in an experiment that has not quite come off.” 9

Tagore himself played a somewhat bemused part in the boom and bust of his English reputation. He accepted the extravagant praise with much surprise as well as pleasure, and then received denunciations with even greater surprise, and barely concealed pain. Tagore was sensitive to criticism, and was hurt by even the most far-fetched accusations, such as the charge that he was getting credit for the work of Yeats, who had “rewritten” Gitanjali. (This charge was made by a correspondent for The Times, Sir Valentine Chirol, whom E.M. Forster once described as “an old Anglo-Indian reactionary hack.”) From time to time Tagore also protested the crudity of some of his overexcited advocates. He wrote to C.F. Andrews in 1920: “These people … are like drunkards who are afraid of their lucid intervals.”

God and others

Yeats was not wrong to see a large religious element in Tagore’s writings. He certainly had interesting and arresting things to say about life and death. Susan Owen, the mother of Wilfred Owen, wrote to Rabindranath in 1920, describing her last conversations with her son before he left for the war which would take his life. Wilfred said goodbye with “those wonderful words of yours – beginning at ‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word.'” When Wilfred’s pocket notebook was returned to his mother, she found “these words written in his dear writing – with your name beneath.”

The idea of a direct, joyful, and totally fearless relationship with God can be found in many of Tagore’s religious writings, including the poems of Gitanjali. From India’s diverse religious traditions he drew many ideas, both from ancient texts and from popular poetry. But “the bright pebbly eyes of the Theosophists” do not stare out of his verses. Despite the archaic language of the original translation of Gitanjali, which did not, I believe, help to preserve the simplicity of the original, its elementary humanity comes through more clearly than any complex and intense spirituality:

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.

An ambiguity about religious experience is central to many of Tagore’s devotional poems, and makes them appeal to readers irrespective of their beliefs; but excessively detailed interpretation can ruinously strip away that ambiguity. 10 This applies particularly to his many poems which combine images of human love and those of pious devotion. Tagore writes:

I have no sleep to-night. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend! I can see nothing before me. I wonder where lies thy path! By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom, art thou threading thy course to come to see me, my friend?

I suppose it could be helpful to be told, as Yeats hastens to explain, that “the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s home-coming in the empty house” is “among the images of the heart turning to God.” But in Yeats’s considerate attempt to make sure that the reader does not miss the “main point,” something of the enigmatic beauty of the Bengali poem is lost – even what had survived the antiquated language of the English translation. Tagore certainly had strongly held religious beliefs (of an unusually nondenominational kind), but he was interested in a great many other things as well and had many different things to say about them.

Some of the ideas he tried to present were directly political, and they figure rather prominently in his letters and lectures. He had practical, plainly expressed views about nationalism, war and peace, cross-cultural education, freedom of the mind, the importance of rational criticism, the need for openness, and so on. His admirers in the West, however, were tuned to the more otherworldly themes which had been emphasized by his first Western patrons. People came to his public lectures in Europe and America, expecting ruminations on grand, transcendental themes; when they heard instead his views on the way public leaders should behave, there was some resentment, particularly (as E.P. Thompson reports) when he delivered political criticism “at $700 a scold.”

An ambiguity about religious experience.

Reasoning in freedom

For Tagore it was of the highest importance that people be able to live, and reason, in freedom. His attitudes toward politics and culture, nationalism and internationalism, tradition and modernity, can all be seen in the light of this belief. 11 Nothing, perhaps, expresses his values as clearly as a poem in Gitanjali:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; … Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; … Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath’s qualified support for nationalist movements – and his opposition to the unfreedom of alien rule – came from this commitment. So did his reservations about patriotism, which, he argued, can limit both the freedom to engage ideas from outside “narrow domestic walls” and the freedom also to support the causes of people in other countries. Rabindranath’s passion for freedom underlies his firm opposition to unreasoned traditionalism, which makes one a prisoner of the past (lost, as he put it, in “the dreary desert sand of dead habit”).

Tagore illustrates the tyranny of the past in his amusing yet deeply serious parable “Kartar Bhoot” (“The Ghost of the Leader”). As the respected leader of an imaginary land is about to die, his panic-stricken followers request him to stay on after his death to instruct them on what to do. He consents. But his followers find their lives are full of rituals and constraints on everyday behavior and are not responsive to the world around them. Ultimately, they request the ghost of the leader to relieve them of his domination, when he informs them that he exists only in their minds.

Tagore’s deep aversion to any commitment to the past that could not be modified by contemporary reason extended even to the alleged virtue of invariably keeping past promises. On one occasion when Mahatma Gandhi visited Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, a young woman got him to sign her autograph book. Gandhi wrote: “Never make a promise in haste. Having once made it fulfill it at the cost of your life.” When he saw this entry, Tagore became agitated. He wrote in the same book a short poem in Bengali to the effect that no one can be made “a prisoner forever with a chain of clay.” He went on to conclude in English, possibly so that Gandhi could read it too, “Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.” 12

Tagore and Gandhi, in Shantiniketan, 1940.

Tagore had the greatest admiration for Mahatma Gandhi as a person and as a political leader, but he was also highly skeptical of Gandhi’s form of nationalism and his conservative instincts regarding the country’s past traditions. He never criticized Gandhi personally. In the 1938 essay, “Gandhi the Man,” he wrote:

Great as he is as a politician, as an organizer, as a leader of men, as a moral reformer, he is greater than all these as a man, because none of these aspects and activities limits his humanity. They are rather inspired and sustained by it.

And yet there is a deep division between the two men. Tagore was explicit about his disagreement:

We who often glorify our tendency to ignore reason, installing in its place blind faith, valuing it as spiritual, are ever paying for its cost with the obscuration of our mind and destiny. I blamed Mahatmaji for exploiting this irrational force of credulity in our people, which might have had a quick result [in creating] a superstructure, while sapping the foundation. Thus began my estimate of Mahatmaji, as the guide of our nation, and it is fortunate for me that it did not end there.

But while it “did not end there,” that difference of vision was a powerful divider. Tagore, for example, remained unconvinced of the merit of Gandhi’s forceful advocacy that everyone should spin at home with the “charka,” the primitive spinning wheel. For Gandhi this practice was an important part of India’s self-realization. “The spinning-wheel gradually became,” as his biographer B.R. Nanda writes, “the center of rural uplift in the Gandhian scheme of Indian economics.” 13 Tagore found the alleged economic rationale for this scheme quite unrealistic. As Romain Rolland noted, Rabindranath “never tires of criticizing the charka.” In this economic judgment, Tagore was probably right. Except for the rather small specialized market for high-quality spun cloth, it is hard to make economic sense of hand-spinning, even with wheels less primitive than Gandhi’s charka. Hand-spinning as a widespread activity can survive only with the help of heavy government subsidies. 14 However, Gandhi’s advocacy of the charka was not based only on economics. He wanted everyone to spin for “thirty minutes every day as a sacrifice,” seeing this as a way for people who are better off to identify themselves with the less fortunate. He was impatient with Tagore’s refusal to grasp this point:

The poet lives for the morrow, and would have us do likewise …. “Why should I, who have no need to work for food, spin?” may be the question asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the spoliation of my countrymen. Trace the source of every coin that finds its way into your pocket, and you will realise the truth of what I write. Every one must spin. Let Tagore spin like the others. Let him burn his foreign clothes; that is the duty today. God will take care of the morrow. 15

If Tagore had missed something in Gandhi’s argument, so did Gandhi miss the point of Tagore’s main criticism. It was not only that the charka made little economic sense, but also, Tagore thought, that it was not the way to make people reflect on anything: “The charka does not require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgment and stamina.”

Celibacy and personal life

Tagore and Gandhi’s attitudes toward personal life were also quite different. Gandhi was keen on the virtues of celibacy, theorized about it, and, after some years of conjugal life, made a private commitment – publicly announced – to refrain from sleeping with his wife. Rabindranath’s own attitude on this subject was very different, but he was gentle about their disagreements:

[Gandhiji] condemns sexual life as inconsistent with the moral progress of man, and has a horror of sex as great as that of the author of The Kreutzer Sonata, but, unlike Tolstoy, he betrays no abhorrence of the sex that tempts his kind. In fact, his tenderness for women is one of the noblest and most consistent traits of his character, and he counts among the women of his country some of his best and truest comrades in the great movement he is leading.

Tagore’s personal life was, in many ways, an unhappy one. He married in 1883, lost his wife in 1902, and never remarried. He sought close companionship, which he did not always get (perhaps even during his married life – he wrote to his wife, Mrinalini: “If you and I could be comrades in all our work and in all our thoughts it would be splendid, but we cannot attain all that we desire”). He maintained a warm friendship with, and a strong Platonic attachment to, the literature-loving wife, Kadambari, of his elder brother, Jyotirindranath. He dedicated some poems to her before his marriage, and several books afterward, some after her death (she committed suicide, for reasons that are not fully understood, at the age of twenty-five, four months after Rabindranath’s wedding). Much later in life, during his tour of Argentina in 1924-1925, Rabindranath came to know the talented and beautiful Victoria Ocampo, who later became the publisher of the literary magazine Sur. They became close friends, but it appears that Rabindranath deflected the possibility of a passionate relationship into a confined intellectual one. 16 His friend Leonard Elmhirst, who accompanied Rabindranath on his Argentine tour, wrote:

Besides having a keen intellectual understanding of his books, she was in love with him – but instead of being content to build a friendship on the basis of intellect, she was in a hurry to establish that kind of proprietary right over him which he absolutely would not brook.

Ocampo and Elmhirst, while remaining friendly, were both quite rude in what they wrote about each other. Ocampo’s book on Tagore (of which a Bengali translation was made from the Spanish by the distinguished poet and critic Shankha Ghosh) is primarily concerned with Tagore’s writings but also discusses the pleasures and difficulties of their relationship, giving quite a different account from Elmhirst’s, and never suggesting any sort of proprietary intentions.

Victoria Ocampo, however, makes it clear that she very much wanted to get physically closer to Rabindranath: “Little by little he [Tagore] partially tamed the young animal, by turns wild and docile, who did not sleep, dog-like, on the floor outside his door, simply because it was not done.” 17 Rabindranath, too, was clearly very much attracted to her. He called her “Vijaya” (the Sanskrit equivalent of Victoria), dedicated a book of poems to her, Purabi – an “evening melody,” and expressed great admiration for her mind (“like a star that was distant”). In a letter to her he wrote, as if to explain his own reticence:

When we were together, we mostly played with words and tried to laugh away our best opportunities to see each other clearly … Whenever there is the least sign of the nest becoming a jealous rival of the sky [,] my mind, like a migrant bird, tries to take … flight to a distant shore.

Five years later, during Tagore’s European tour in 1930, he sent her a cable: “Will you not come and see me.” She did. But their relationship did not seem to go much beyond conversation, and their somewhat ambiguous correspondence continued over the years. Written in 1940, a year before his death at eighty, one of the poems in Sesh Lekha (“Last Writings”), seems to be about her: “How I wish I could once again find my way to that foreign land where waits for me the message of love!/… Her language I knew not, but what her eyes said will forever remain eloquent in its anguish.” 18 However indecisive, or confused, or awkward Rabindranath may have been, he certainly did not share Mahatma Gandhi’s censorious views of sex. In fact, when it came to social policy, he advocated contraception and family planning while Gandhi preferred abstinence.

Tagore with his wife Mrinalini Devi in 1883.

Science and the people

Gandhi and Tagore severely clashed over their totally different attitudes toward science. In January 1934, Bihar was struck by a devastating earthquake, which killed thousands of people. Gandhi, who was then deeply involved in the fight against untouchability (the barbaric system inherited from India’s divisive past, in which “lowly people” were kept at a physical distance), extracted a positive lesson from the tragic event. “A man like me,” Gandhi argued, “cannot but believe this earthquake is a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins” – in particular the sins of untouchability. “For me there is a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the untouchability campaign.”

Tagore, who equally abhorred untouchability and had joined Gandhi in the movements against it, protested against this interpretation of an event that had caused suffering and death to so many innocent people, including children and babies. He also hated the epistemology implicit in seeing an earthquake as caused by ethical failure. “It is,” he wrote, “all the more unfortunate because this kind of unscientific view of [natural] phenomena is too readily accepted by a large section of our countrymen.”

The two remained deeply divided over their attitudes toward science. However, while Tagore believed that modern science was essential to the understanding of physical phenomena, his views on epistemology were interestingly heterodox. He did not take the simple “realist” position often associated with modern science. The report of his conversation with Einstein, published in The New York Times in 1930, shows how insistent Tagore was on interpreting truth through observation and reflective concepts. To assert that something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe or perceive its truth, or to form a conception of what it is, appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable. When Einstein remarked, “If there were no human beings any more, the Apollo Belvedere no longer would be beautiful?” Tagore simply replied, “No.” Going further – and into much more interesting territory – Einstein said, “I agree with regard to this conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth.” Tagore’s response was: “Why not? Truth is realized through men.” 19

Albert Einstein and Tagore, in New York, 1930.

Tagore’s epistemology, which he never pursued systematically, would seem to be searching for a line of reasoning that would later be elegantly developed by Hilary Putnam, who has argued: “Truth depends on conceptual schemes and it is nonetheless ‘real truth.'” 20 Tagore himself said little to explain his convictions, but it is important to take account of his heterodoxy, not only because his speculations were invariably interesting, but also because they illustrate how his support for any position, including his strong interest in science, was accompanied by critical scrutiny.

Nationalism and colonialism

Tagore was predictably hostile to communal sectarianism (such as a Hindu orthodoxy that was antagonistic to Islamic, Christian, or Sikh perspectives). But even nationalism seemed to him to be suspect. Isaiah Berlin summarizes well Tagore’s complex position on Indian nationalism:

Tagore stood fast on the narrow causeway, and did not betray his vision of the difficult truth. He condemned romantic overattachment to the past, what he called the tying of India to the past “like a sacrificial goat tethered to a post,” and he accused men who displayed it – they seemed to him reactionary – of not knowing what true political freedom was, pointing out that it is from English thinkers and English books that the very notion of political liberty was derived. But against cosmopolitanism he maintained that the English stood on their own feet, and so must Indians. In 1917 he once more denounced the danger of ‘leaving everything to the unalterable will of the Master,’ be he brahmin or Englishman. 21

The duality Berlin points to is well reflected also in Tagore’s attitude toward cultural diversity. He wanted Indians to learn what is going on elsewhere, how others lived, what they valued, and so on, while remaining interested and involved in their own culture and heritage. Indeed, in his educational writings the need for synthesis is strongly stressed. It can also be found in his advice to Indian students abroad. In 1907 he wrote to his son-in-law Nagendranath Gangulee, who had gone to America to study agriculture:

To get on familiar terms with the local people is a part of your education. To know only agriculture is not enough; you must know America too. Of course if, in the process of knowing America, one begins to lose one’s identity and falls into the trap of becoming an Americanised person contemptuous of everything Indian, it is preferable to stay in a locked room.

Tagore was strongly involved in protest against the Raj on a number of occasions, most notably in the movement to resist the 1905 British proposal to split in two the province of Bengal, a plan that was eventually withdrawn following popular resistance. He was forthright in denouncing the brutality of British rule in India, never more so than after the Amritsar massacre of April 13, 1919, when 379 unarmed people at a peaceful meeting were gunned down by the army, and two thousand more were wounded. Between April 23 and 26, Rabindranath wrote five agitated letters to C.F. Andrews, who himself was extremely disturbed, especially after he was told by a British civil servant in India that thanks to this show of strength, the “moral prestige” of the Raj had “never been higher.”

A month after the massacre, Tagore wrote to the Viceroy of India, asking to be relieved of the knighthood he had accepted four years earlier:

The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilized governments, barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote. Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient organisation for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification … The universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers – possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons … I for my part want to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who for their so-called insignificance are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.

Both Gandhi and Nehru expressed their appreciation of the important part Tagore took in the national struggle. It is fitting that after independence, India chose a song of Tagore (“Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka,” which can be roughly translated as “the leader of people’s minds”) as its national anthem. Since Bangladesh would later choose another song of Tagore (“Amar Sonar Bangla”) as its national anthem, he may be the only one ever to have authored the national anthems of two different countries.

Tagore’s criticism of the British administration of India was consistently strong and grew more intense over the years. This point is often missed, since he made a special effort to dissociate his criticism of the Raj from any denigration of British – or Western – people and culture. Mahatma Gandhi’s well-known quip in reply to a question, asked in England, on what he thought of Western civilization (“It would be a good idea”) could not have come from Tagore’s lips. He would understand the provocations to which Gandhi was responding – involving cultural conceit as well as imperial tyranny. D.H. Lawrence supplied a fine example of the former: “I become more and more surprised to see how far higher, in reality, our European civilization stands than the East, Indian and Persian, ever dreamed of …. This fraud of looking up to them – this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude is disgusting.” But, unlike Gandhi, Tagore could not, even in jest, be dismissive of Western civilization.

Forthright in denouncing the brutality of British rule in India.

Even in his powerful indictment of British rule in India in 1941, in a lecture which he gave on his last birthday, and which was later published as a pamphlet under the title Crisis in Civilization, he strains hard to maintain the distinction between opposing Western imperialism and rejecting Western civilization. While he saw India as having been “smothered under the dead weight of British administration” (adding “another great and ancient civilization for whose recent tragic history the British cannot disclaim responsibility is China”), Tagore recalls what India has gained from “discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of nineteenth-century English politics.” The tragedy, as Tagore saw it, came from the fact that what “was truly best in their own civilization, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.” “If in its place they have established, baton in hand, a reign of ‘law and order,’ or in other words a policeman’s rule, such a mockery of civilization can claim no respect from us.”

Critique of patriotism

Rabindranath rebelled against the strongly nationalist form that the independence movement often took, and this made him refrain from taking a particularly active part in contemporary politics. He wanted to assert India’s right to be independent without denying the importance of what India could learn – freely and profitably – from abroad. He was afraid that a rejection of the West in favor of an indigenous Indian tradition was not only limiting in itself; it could easily turn into hostility to other influences from abroad, including Christianity, which came to parts of India by the fourth century; Judaism, which came through Jewish immigration shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, as did Zoroastrianism through Parsi immigration later on (mainly in the eighth century), and, of course – and most importantly – Islam, which has had a very strong presence in India since the tenth century.

Tagore’s criticism of patriotism is a persistent theme in his writings. As early as 1908, he put his position succinctly in a letter replying to the criticism of Abala Bose, the wife of a great Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose: “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.” His novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) has much to say about this theme. In the novel, Nikhil, who is keen on social reform, including women’s liberation, but cool toward nationalism, gradually loses the esteem of his spirited wife, Bimala, because of his failure to be enthusiastic about anti-British agitations, which she sees as a lack of patriotic commitment. Bimala becomes fascinated with Nikhil’s nationalist friend Sandip, who speaks brilliantly and acts with patriotic militancy, and she falls in love with him. Nikhil refuses to change his views: “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.” 22

As the story unfolds, Sandip becomes angry with some of his countrymen for their failure to join the struggle as readily as he thinks they should (“Some Mohamedan traders are still obdurate”). He arranges to deal with the recalcitrants by burning their meager trading stocks and physically attacking them. Bimala has to acknowledge the connection between Sandip’s rousing nationalistic sentiments and his sectarian – and ultimately violent-actions. The dramatic events that follow (Nikhil attempts to help the victims, risking his life) include the end of Bimala’s political romance.

This is a difficult subject, and Satyajit Ray’s beautiful film of The Home and the World brilliantly brings out the novel’s tensions, along with the human affections and disaffections of the story. Not surprisingly, the story has had many detractors, not just among dedicated nationalists in India. Georg Lukács found Tagore’s novel to be “a petit bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind,” “at the intellectual service of the British police,” and “a contemptible caricature of Gandhi.” It would, of course, be absurd to think of Sandip as Gandhi, but the novel gives a “strong and gentle” warning, as Bertolt Brecht noted in his diary, of the corruptibility of nationalism, since it is not even-handed. Hatred of one group can lead to hatred of others, no matter how far such feeling may be from the minds of large-hearted nationalist leaders like Mahatma Gandhi.

Admiration and criticism of Japan

Tagore’s reaction to nationalism in Japan is particularly telling. As in the case of India, he saw the need to build the self-confidence of a defeated and humiliated people, of people left behind by developments elsewhere, as was the case in Japan before its emergence during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of one of his lectures in Japan in 1916 (“Nationalism in Japan”), he observed that “the worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves.” Tagore shared the admiration for Japan widespread in Asia for demonstrating the ability of an Asian nation to rival the West in industrial development and economic progress. He noted with great satisfaction that Japan had “in giant strides left centuries of inaction behind, overtaking the present time in its foremost achievement.” For other nations outside the West, he said, Japan “has broken the spell under which we lay in torpor for ages, taking it to be the normal condition of certain races living in certain geographical limits.”

But then Tagore went on to criticize the rise of a strong nationalism in Japan, and its emergence as an imperialist nation. Tagore’s outspoken criticisms did not please Japanese audiences and, as E.P. Thompson wrote, “the welcome given to him on his first arrival soon cooled.” 23 Twenty-two years later, in 1937, during the Japanese war on China, Tagore received a letter from Rash Behari Bose, an anti-British Indian revolutionary then living in Japan, who sought Tagore’s approval for his efforts there on behalf of Indian independence, in which he had the support of the Japanese government. Tagore replied:

Your cable has caused me many restless hours, for it hurts me very much to have to ignore your appeal. I wish you had asked for my cooperation in a cause against which my spirit did not protest. I know, in making this appeal, you counted on my great regard for the Japanese for I, along with the rest of Asia, did once admire and look up to Japan and did once fondly hope that in Japan Asia had at last discovered its challenge to the West, that Japan’s new strength would be consecrated in safeguarding the culture of the East against alien interests. But Japan has not taken long to betray that rising hope and repudiate all that seemed significant in her wonderful, and, to us symbolic, awakening, and has now become itself a worse menace to the defenceless peoples of the East.

How to view Japan’s position in the Second World War was a divisive issue in India. After the war, when Japanese political leaders were tried for war crimes, the sole dissenting voice among the judges came from the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, a distinguished jurist. Pal dissented on various grounds, among them that no fair trial was possible in view of the asymmetry of power between the victor and the defeated. Ambivalent feelings in India toward the Japanese military aggression, given the unacceptable nature of British imperialism, possibly had a part in predisposing Pal to consider a perspective different from that of the other judges.

More tellingly, Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation of Rash Behari Bose), a leading nationalist, made his way to Japan during the war via Italy and Germany after escaping from a British prison; he helped the Japanese to form units of Indian soldiers, who had earlier surrendered to the advancing Japanese army, to fight on the Japanese side as the “Indian National Army.” Rabindranath had formerly entertained great admiration for Subhas Bose as a dedicated nonsectarian fighter for Indian independence. 24 But their ways would have parted when Bose’s political activities took this turn, although Tagore was dead by the time Bose reached Japan.

Tagore saw Japanese militarism as illustrating the way nationalism can mislead even a nation of great achievement and promise. In 1938 Yone Noguchi, the distinguished poet and friend of Tagore (as well as of Yeats and Pound), wrote to Tagore, pleading with him to change his mind about Japan. Rabindranath’s reply, written on September 12, 1938, was altogether uncompromising:

It seems to me that it is futile for either of us to try to convince the other, since your faith in the infallible right of Japan to bully other Asiatic nations into line with your Government’s policy is not shared by me …. Believe me, it is sorrow and shame, not anger, that prompt me to write to you. I suffer intensely not only because the reports of Chinese suffering batter against my heart, but because I can no longer point out with pride the example of a great Japan.

He would have been much happier with the postwar emergence of Japan as a peaceful power. Then, too, since he was not free of egotism, he would also have been pleased by the attention paid to his ideas by the novelist Yasunari Kawabata and others. 25

Yasunari Kawabata

International concerns

Tagore was not invariably well-informed about international politics. He allowed himself to be entertained by Mussolini in a short visit to Italy in May-June 1926, a visit arranged by Carlo Formichi, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Rome. When he asked to meet Benedetto Croce, Formichi said, “Impossible! Impossible!” Mussolini told him that Croce was “not in Rome.” When Tagore said he would go “wherever he is,” Mussolini assured him that Croce’s whereabouts were unknown.

Such incidents, as well as warnings from Romain Rolland and other friends, should have ended Tagore’s flirtation with Mussolini more quickly than it did. But only after he received graphic accounts of the brutality of Italian fascism from two exiles, Gaetano Salvemini and Gaetano Salvadori, and learned more of what was happening in Italy, did he publicly denounce the regime, publishing a letter to the Manchester Guardian in August. The next month, Popolo d’Italia, the magazine edited by Benito Mussolini’s brother, replied: “Who cares? Italy laughs at Tagore and those who brought this unctuous and insupportable fellow in our midst.”

With his high expectations of Britain, Tagore continued to be surprised by what he took to be a lack of official sympathy for international victims of aggression. He returned to this theme in the lecture he gave on his last birthday, in 1941:

While Japan was quietly devouring North China, her act of wanton aggression was ignored as a minor incident by the veterans of British diplomacy. We have also witnessed from this distance how actively the British statesmen acquiesced in the destruction of the Spanish Republic.

But distinguishing between the British government and the British people, Rabindranath went on to note “with admiration how a band of valiant Englishmen laid down their lives for Spain.”

Tagore’s view of the Soviet Union has been a subject of much discussion. He was widely read in Russia. In 1917 several Russian translations of Gitanjali (one edited by Ivan Bunin , later the first Russian Nobel Laureate in Literature) were available, and by the late 1920s many of the English versions of his work had been rendered into Russian by several distinguished translators. Russian versions of his work continued to appear: Boris Pasternak translated him in the 1950s and 1960s.

When Tagore visited Russia in 1930, he was much impressed by its development efforts and by what he saw as a real commitment to eliminate poverty and economic inequality. But what impressed him most was the expansion of basic education across the old Russian empire. In Letters from Russia, written in Bengali and published in 1931, he unfavorably compares the acceptance of widespread illiteracy in India by the British administration with Russian efforts to expand education:

In stepping on the soil of Russia, the first thing that caught my eye was that in education, at any rate, the peasant and the working classes have made such enormous progress in these few years that nothing comparable has happened even to our highest classes in the course of the last hundred and fifty years …. The people here are not at all afraid of giving complete education even to Turcomans of distant Asia; on the contrary, they are utterly in earnest about it. 26

When parts of the book were translated into English in 1934, the under-secretary for India stated in Parliament that it was “calculated by distortion of the facts to bring the British Administration in India into contempt and disrepute,” and the book was then promptly banned. The English version would not be published until after independence.

Education and freedom

The British Indian administrators were not, however, alone in trying to suppress Tagore’s reflections on Russia. They were joined by Soviet officials. In an interview with Izvestia in 1930, Tagore sharply criticized the lack of freedom that he observed in Russia:

I must ask you: Are you doing your ideal a service by arousing in the minds of those under your training anger, class-hatred, and revengefulness against those whom you consider to be your enemies? … Freedom of mind is needed for the reception of truth; terror hopelessly kills it …. For the sake of humanity I hope you may never create a vicious force of violence, which will go on weaving an interminable chain of violence and cruelty …. You have tried to destroy many of the other evils of [the czarist] period. Why not try to destroy this one also?

The interview was not published in Izvestia until 1988 – nearly sixty years later. 27 Tagore’s reaction to the Russia of 1930 arose from two of his strongest commitments: his uncompromising belief in the importance of “freedom of mind” (the source of his criticism of the Soviet Union), and his conviction that the expansion of basic education is central to social progress (the source of his praise, particularly in contrast to British-run India). He identified the lack of basic education as the fundamental cause of many of India’s social and economic afflictions:

In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions – all centre on this single factor.

It was on education (and on the reflection, dialogue, and communication that are associated with it), rather than on, say, spinning “as a sacrifice” (“the charka does not require anyone to think”), that the future of India would depend.

Tagore was concerned not only that there be wider opportunities for education across the country (especially in rural areas where schools were few), but also that the schools themselves be more lively and enjoyable. He himself had dropped out of school early, largely out of boredom, and had never bothered to earn a diploma. He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features. The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence.

Much of Rabindranath’s life was spent in developing the school at Santiniketan. The school never had much money, since the fees were very low. His lecture honoraria, “$700 a scold,” went to support it, as well as most of his Nobel Prize money. The school received no support from the government, but did get help from private citizens – even Mahatma Gandhi raised money for it.

The dispute with Mahatma Gandhi on the Bihar earthquake touched on a subject that was very important to Tagore: the need for education in science as well as in literature and the humanities. At Santiniketan, there were strong “local” elements in its emphasis on Indian traditions, including the classics, and in the use of Bengali rather than English as the language of instruction. At the same time there were courses on a great variety of cultures, and study programs devoted to China, Japan, and the Middle East. Many foreigners came to Santiniketan to study or teach, and the fusion of studies seemed to work.

I am partial to seeing Tagore as an educator, having myself been educated at Santiniketan. The school was unusual in many different ways, such as the oddity that classes, excepting those requiring a laboratory, were held outdoors (whenever the weather permitted). No matter what we thought of Rabindranath’s belief that one gains from being in a natural setting while learning (some of us argued about this theory), we typically found the experience of outdoor schooling extremely attractive and pleasant. Academically, our school was not particularly exacting (often we did not have any examinations at all), and it could not, by the usual academic standards, compete with some of the better schools in Calcutta. But there was something remarkable about the ease with which class discussions could move from Indian traditional literature to contemporary as well as classical Western thought, and then to the culture of China or Japan or elsewhere. The school’s celebration of variety was also in sharp contrast with the cultural conservatism and separatism that has tended to grip India from time to time.

The cultural give and take of Tagore’s vision of the contemporary world has close parallels with the vision of Satyajit Ray, also an alumnus of Santiniketan who made several films based on Tagore’s stories. 28 Ray’s words about Santiniketan in 1991 would have greatly pleased Rabindranath:

I consider the three years I spent in Santiniketan as the most fruitful of my life …. Santiniketan opened my eyes for the first time to the splendours of Indian and Far Eastern art. Until then I was completely under the sway of Western art, music and literature. Santiniketan made me the combined product of East and West that I am. 29

India today

At the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, the reckoning of what India had or had not achieved in this half century was a subject of considerable interest: “What has been the story of those first fifty years?” (as Shashi Tharoor asked in his balanced, informative, and highly readable account of India: From Midnight to the Millennium ). 30 If Tagore were to see the India of today, more than half a century after independence, nothing perhaps would shock him so much as the continued illiteracy of the masses. He would see this as a total betrayal of what the nationalist leaders had promised during the struggle for independence – a promise that had figured even in Nehru’s rousing speech on the eve of independence in August 1947 (on India’s “tryst with destiny”).

In view of his interest in childhood education, Tagore would not be consoled by the extraordinary expansion of university education, in which India sends to its universities six times as many people per unit of population as does China. Rather, he would be stunned that, in contrast to East and Southeast Asia, including China, half the adult population and two thirds of Indian women remain unable to read or write. Statistically reliable surveys indicate that even in the late 1980s, nearly half of the rural girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen did not attend any school for a single day of their lives. 31

This state of affairs is the result of the continuation of British imperial neglect of mass education, which has been reinforced by India’s traditional elitism, as well as upper-class-dominated contemporary politics (except in parts of India such as Kerala, where anti-upper-caste movements have tended to concentrate on education as a great leveller). Tagore would see illiteracy and the neglect of education not only as the main source of India’s continued social backwardness, but also as a great constraint that restricts the possibility and reach of economic development in India (as his writings on rural development forcefully make clear). Tagore would also have strongly felt the need for a greater commitment – and a greater sense of urgency – in removing endemic poverty.

At the same time, Tagore would undoubtedly find some satisfaction in the survival of democracy in India, in its relatively free press, and in general from the “freedom of mind” that post-independence Indian politics has, on the whole, managed to maintain. He would also be pleased by the fact noted by the historian E.P. Thompson (whose father Edward Thompson had written one of the first major biographies of Tagore: 32

All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind. 33

Tagore would have been happy also to see that the one governmental attempt to dispense generally with basic liberties and political and civil rights in India, in the 1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (ironically, herself a former student at Santiniketan) declared an “emergency,” was overwhelmingly rejected by the Indian voters, leading to the precipitate fall of her government.

Rabindranath would also see that the changes in policy that have eliminated famine since independence had much to do with the freedom to be heard in a democratic India. In Tagore’s play Raja O Rani (“The King and the Queen”), the sympathetic Queen eventually rebels against the callousness of state policy toward the hungry. She begins by inquiring about the ugly sounds outside the palace, only to be told that the noise is coming from “the coarse, clamorous crowd who howl unashamedly for food and disturb the sweet peace of the palace.” The Viceregal office in India could have taken a similarly callous view of Indian famines, right up to the easily preventable Bengal famine of 1943, just before independence, which killed between two and three million people. But a government in a multi-party democracy, with elections and free newspapers, cannot any longer dismiss the noise from “the coarse, clamorous crowd.” 34

Fearless reasoning in freedom.

Unlike Gandhi, Rabindranath would not resent the development of modern industries in India, or the acceleration of technical progress, since he did not want India to be shackled to the turning of “the wheel of an antiquated invention.” Tagore was concerned that people not be dominated by machines, but he was not opposed to making good use of modern technology. “The mastery over the machine,” he wrote in Crisis in Civilization, “by which the British have consolidated their sovereignty over their vast empire, has been kept a sealed book, to which due access has been denied to this helpless country.” Rabindranath had a deep interest in the environment – he was particularly concerned about deforestation and initiated a “festival of tree-planting” (vriksha-ropana) as early as 1928. He would want increased private and government commitments to environmentalism; but he would not derive from this position a general case against modern industry and technology.

On cultural separation

Rabindranath would be shocked by the growth of cultural separatism in India, as elsewhere. The “openness” that he valued so much is certainly under great strain right now – in many countries. Religious fundamentalism still has a relatively small following in India; but various factions seem to be doing their best to increase their numbers. Certainly religious sectarianism has had much success in some parts of India (particularly in the west and the north). Tagore would see the expansion of religious sectarianism as being closely associated with an artificially separatist view of culture.

He would have strongly resisted defining India in specifically Hindu terms, rather than as a “confluence” of many cultures. Even after the partition of 1947, India is still the third- largest Muslim country in the world, with more Muslims than in Bangladesh, and nearly as many as in Pakistan. Only Indonesia has substantially more followers of Islam. Indeed, by pointing to the immense heterogeneousness of India’s cultural background and its richly diverse history, Tagore had argued that the “idea of India” itself militated against a culturally separatist view – “against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others.”

Tagore would also oppose the cultural nationalism that has recently been gaining some ground in India, along with an exaggerated fear of the influence of the West. He was uncompromising in his belief that human beings could absorb quite different cultures in constructive ways:

Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine. Therefore it hurts me deeply when the cry of rejection rings loud against the West in my country with the clamour that Western education can only injure us.

In this context, it is important to emphasize that Rabindranath was not short of pride in India’s own heritage, and often spoke about it. He lectured at Oxford, with evident satisfaction, on the importance of India’s religious ideas – quoting both from ancient texts and from popular poetry (such as the verses of the sixteenth-century Muslim poet Kabir). In 1940, when he was given an honorary doctorate by Oxford University, in a ceremony arranged at his own educational establishment in Santiniketan (“In Gangem Defluit Isis,” Oxford helpfully explained), to the predictable “volley of Latin” Tagore responded “by a volley of Sanskrit,” as Marjorie Sykes, a Quaker friend of Rabindranath, reports. Her cheerful summary of the match, “India held its own,” was not out of line with Tagore’s pride in Indian culture. His welcoming attitude to Western civilization was reinforced by this confidence: he did not see India’s culture as fragile and in need of “protection” from Western influence.

In India, he wrote, “circumstances almost compel us to learn English, and this lucky accident has given us the opportunity of access into the richest of all poetical literatures of the world.” There seems to me much force in Rabindranath’s argument for clearly distinguishing between the injustice of a serious asymmetry of power (colonialism being a prime example of this) and the importance nevertheless of appraising Western culture in an open-minded way, in colonial and postcolonial territories, in order to see what uses could be made of it.

Rabindranath insisted on open debate on every issue, and distrusted conclusions based on a mechanical formula, no matter how attractive that formula might seem in isolation (such as “This was forced on us by our colonial masters – we must reject it,” “This is our tradition – we must follow it,” “We have promised to do this – we must fulfill that promise,” and so on). The question he persistently asks is whether we have reason enough to want what is being proposed, taking everything into account. Important as history is, reasoning has to go beyond the past. It is in the sovereignty of reasoning – fearless reasoning in freedom – that we can find Rabindranath Tagore’s lasting voice. 35

1. Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Unwin, 1931, 2nd edition, 1961), p. 105. The extensive interactions between Hindu and Muslim parts of Indian culture (in religious beliefs, civic codes, painting, sculpture, literature, music, and astronomy) have been discussed by Kshiti Mohan Sen in Bharate Hindu Mushalmaner Jukto Sadhana (in Bengali) (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1949, extended edition, 1990) and Hinduism (Penguin, 1960).

2. Rabindranath’s father Debendranath had in fact, joined the reformist religious group, the Brahmo Samaj, which rejected many contemporary Hindu practices as aberrations from the ancient Hindu texts.

3. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore , edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 1997). This essay draws on my Foreword to this collection. For important background material on Rabindranath Tagore and his reception in the West, see also the editors’ Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), and Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology (Picador, 1997).

4. See Romain Rolland and Gandhi Correspondence, with a Foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Government of India, 1976), pp.12-13.

5. On Dartington Hall, the school, and the Elmhirsts, see Michael Young, > The Elmhirsts of Dartington: The Creation of an Utopian Community (Routledge, 1982).

6. I have tried to analyze these “exotic” approaches to India (along with other Western approaches) in “India and the West,” The New Republic, June 7, 1993, and in “Indian Traditions and the Western Imagination,” Daedalus, Spring 1997.

7. Yasunari Kawabata, The Existence and Discovery of Beauty, translated by V.H. Viglielmo (Tokyo: The Mainichi Newspapers, 1969), pp. 56-57.

8. W.B. Yeats, “Introduction,” in Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (London: Macmillan, 1913).

9 Tagore himself vacillated over the years about the merits of his own translations. He told his friend Sir William Rothenstein, the artist: “I am sure you remember with what reluctant hesitation I gave up to your hand my manuscript of Gitanjali, feeling sure that my English was of that amorphous kind for whose syntax a school-boy could be reprimanded.” These – and related – issues are discussed by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, “The ‘Foreign Reincarnation’ of Rabindranath Tagore,” Journal of Asian Studies, 25 (1966), reprinted, along with other relevant papers, in her Counterpoints: Essays in Comparative Literature (Calcutta: Prajna, 1985).

10. The importance of ambiguity and incomplete description in Tagore’s poetry provides some insight into the striking thesis of William Radice (one of the major English translators of Tagore) that “his blend of poetry and prose is all the more truthful for being incomplete” (“Introduction” to his Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories, Penguin, 1991, p. 28).

11. Satyajit Ray, the film director, has argued that even in Tagore’s paintings, “the mood evoked … is one of a joyous freedom” (Ray, “Foreword,” in Andrew Robinson, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore, London: André Deutsch, 1989).

12. Reported in Amita Sen, Anando Sharbokaje (in Bengali) (Calcutta: Tagore Research Institute, 2nd edition, 1996), p. 132.

13. B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 1958; paperback, 1989), p. 149.

14. The economic issues are discussed in my Choice of Techniques (Blackwell, 1960), Appendix D.

15. Mohandas Gandhi, quoted by Krishna Kripalani, Tagore: A Life (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1961, 2nd edition, 1971), pp. 171-172.

16. For fuller accounts of the events, see Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man , Chapter 25, and Ketaki Kushari Dyson, In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988).

17. Published in English translation in Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume, 1861-1961 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961), with an Introduction by Jawaharlal Nehru.

18. English translation from Krishna Kripalani, Tagore: A Life , p. 185.

19. “Einstein and Tagore Plumb the Truth,” The New York Times Magazine , August 10, 1930; republished in Dutta and Robinson, Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore.

20. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (Open Court, 1987). On related issues, see also Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986).

21. Isaiah Berlin, “Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality,” The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 265.

22. Martha Nussbaum initiates her wide-ranging critique of patriotism (in a debate that is joined by many others) by quoting this passage from The Home and the World (in Martha C. Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country, edited by Joshua Cohen, Beacon Press, 1996, pp. 3-4).

23. E.P. Thompson, Introduction, to Tagore’s Nationalism (London, Macmillan, 1991), p. 10.

24. For a lucid and informative analysis of the role of Subhas Chandra Bose and his brother Sarat in Indian politics, see Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (Columbia University Press, 1990).

25. Kawabata made considerable use of Tagore’s ideas, and even built on Tagore’s thesis that it “is easier for a stranger to know what it is in [Japan] which is truly valuable for all mankind” (The Existence and Discovery of Beauty, pp. 55-58).

26. Tagore, Letters from Russia, translated from Bengali by Sasadhar Sinha (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1960), p. 108.

27. It was, however, published in the Manchester Guardian shortly after it was meant to be published in the Izvestia. On this, see: Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, p. 297.

28. Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films (Calcutta: Disha Book/Orient Longman, third edition, 1993). I have tried to discuss these issues in my Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture, “Our Culture, Their Culture,” The New Republic, April 1, 1996.

29. The Guardian, August 1, 1991.

30. Arcade Publishing, 1997, p. 1.

31. On this and related issues, see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1996), particularly Chapter 6, and also Drèze and Sen, editors, Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives (Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1996).

32. Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (Oxford University Press, 1926).

33. Quoted in Shashi Tharoor, India, p. 9.

34. I have tried to discuss the linkage between democracy, political incentives, and prevention of disasters in Resources, Values and Development (Harvard University Press, 1984, reprinted 1997), Chapter 19, and in my presidential address to the American Economic Association, “Rationality and Social Choice,” American Economic Review, 85 (1995).

35. For helpful discussions I am most grateful to Akeel Bilgrami, Sissela Bok (Harvard Professor; the daughter of Gunnar Myrdal , recipient of The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1974, and Alva Myrdal , who was awarded The Nobel Peace Prize in 1982), Sugata Bose, Supratik Bose, Krishna Dutta, Rounaq Jahan, Salim Jahan, Marufi Khan, Andrew Robinson, Nandana Sen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Shashi Tharoor.

* With permission from The New York Review .

First published 28 August 2001

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Rabindranath Tagore

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On his 70th birthday, in an address delivered at the university he founded in 1918, Rabindranath Tagore said: “I have, it is true, engaged myself in a series of activities. But the innermost me is not to be found in any of these. At the end of the journey I am able to see, a little more clearly, the orb of my life. Looking back, the only thing of which I feel certain is that I am a poet ( ami kavi ).”

Although Nobel Prize-winning poet Tagore prioritized poetry, he also made notable contributions to literature as a dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and writer of nonfictional prose, especially essays, criticism, philosophical treatises, journals, memoirs, and letters. In addition, he expressed himself as musician, painter, actor-producer-director, educator, patriot, and social reformer. Referring to the variety and abundance of Tagore’s creative output, Buddhadeva Bose declared in An Acre of Green Grass , “It would be trite to call him versatile; to call him prolific very nearly funny.” Bose added, “The point is not that his writings run into a hundred thousand pages of print, covering every form and aspect of literature, though this matters: he is a source, a waterfall, flowing out in a hundred streams, a hundred rhythms, incessantly.”

A man of prodigious literary and artistic accomplishments, Tagore played a leading role in Indian cultural renaissance and came to be recognized, along with Mohandas Gandhi, as one of the architects of modern India. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote in Discovery of India , “Tagore and Gandhi have undoubtedly been the two outstanding and dominating figures in the first half of the twentieth century. ... [Tagore’s] influence over the mind of India, and especially of successive rising generations has been tremendous. Not Bengali only, the language in which he himself wrote, but all the modern languages of India have been molded partly by his writings. More than any other Indian, he has helped to bring into harmony the ideals of the East and the West, and broadened the bases of Indian nationalism.”

Tagore’s career, extending over a period of more than 60 years, not only chronicled his personal growth and versatility but also reflected the artistic, cultural, and political vicissitudes of India in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Tagore wrote in “My Life,” an essay collected in Lectures and Addresses (1988), that he “was born and brought up in an atmosphere of the confluence of three movements, all of which were revolutionary”: the religious reform movement started by Raja Rammohan Roy, the founder of the Bramo Samaj (Society of Worshipers of the One Supreme Being); the literary revolution pioneered by the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who “lifted the dead weight of ponderous forms from our language and with a touch of his magic aroused our literature from her age-long sleep”; and the Indian National Movement, protesting the political and cultural dominance of the West. Members of the Tagore family had actively participated in all the three movements, and Tagore’s own work, in a broad sense, represented the culmination of this three-pronged revolution.

The earliest influences that shaped Tagore’s poetic sensibility were the artistic environment of his home, the beauty of nature, and the saintly character of his father. “Most members of my family,” he recalled in “My Life,” “had some gift—some were artists, some poets, some musicians—and the whole atmosphere of our home was permeated with the spirit of creation.” His early education was administered at home under private tutors, but, Tagore wrote in My Boyhood Days (1940), he did not like “the mills of learning” that “went on grinding from morn till night.” As a boy, he was admitted to four different schools in Calcutta, but he hated all of them and began frequently to play truant. Nature was his favorite school, as he recorded in “My Life”: “I had a deep sense, almost from infancy, of the beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and the clouds, and felt in tune with the musical touch of the seasons in the air. ... All these craved expression, and naturally I wanted to give them my own expression.” His father, Debendranath, popularly called Maharshi (Great Sage), was a writer, scholar, and mystic, who for many years had been a distinguished leader of the Brahmo Samaj (Theistic Church) movement founded by Raja Rammohan Roy.

In Letters to a Friend (1928) Tagore told C.F. Andrews, “I saw my father seldom; he was away a great deal, but his presence pervaded the whole house and was one of the deepest influences on my life.” When Rabindranath was 12 years old, his father took him on a four-month journey to the Punjab and the Himalayas. “The chains of the rigorous regime which had bound me snapped for good when I set out from home,” he wrote in his Reminiscences. Their first stop was at Bolpur, then an obscure rural retreat, now internationally known as Santiniketan, the seat of Visva-Bharati University founded by Tagore on December 22, 1918. This visit was Tagore’s first contact with rural Bengal, which he later celebrated in his songs. The Tagores’ final destination was Dalhousie, a beautiful resort in the Himalayas. Overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of the mountains, young Tagore wandered freely from one peak to another. During the sojourn, Debendranath took charge of his son’s education and read with him selections from Sanskrit, Bengali, and English literatures. Debendranath also sang his favorite hymns and recited to Rabindranath verses from the metaphysical Hindu treatises, the Upanishads. Stephen N. Hay surmised, in Asian Ideas of East and West, that “the special attention Debendranath had paid to his youngest sons” during this trip and the sense of liberation experienced by Rabindranath miraculously transformed him “from ugly duckling into much-admired swan.” In Hay’s view, “the pleasurable memory of sudden recognition consequent to a glamorous journey may have remained for the rest of Rabindranath’s life a stimulus to re-enact this archetypal experience.”

Among other influences, Tagore acknowledged three main sources of his literary inspiration: the Vaishnava poets of medieval Bengal and the Bengali folk literature; the classical Indian aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical heritage; and the modern European literary tradition, particularly the work of the English Romantic poets. Underlining Tagore’s many affinities with the European mind, Alexander Aronson, in Rabindranath through Western Eyes , tried to fit him into the Western literary tradition, but, as Edward J. Thompson pointed out in Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist , “Indian influences, of course, were the deepest and touched his mind far more constantly than any European ones, and at a thousand points.” Harmoniously blended and synthesized in Rabindranath were the sensuous apprehension and the mythopoeic tendency of the English romantics, the vision of the great mystics of India, the metaphysical quest of the sages of the Upanishads, the aesthetic sensibilities of an ancient poet like Kalidasa, and the devotional spirit of the medieval Vaishnavite poet-saints and the Bauls—mendicant wandering religious minstrels of Bengal.

Tagore began writing poetry at a very early age, and during his lifetime he published nearly 60 volumes of verse, in which he experimented with many poetic forms and techniques—lyric, sonnet, ode, dramatic monologue, dialogue poems, long narrative and descriptive works, and prose poems. “Unfortunately for both the West and for Tagore,” Mary M. Lago pointed out in Rabindranath Tagore , “many of his readers never knew—still do not know—that so many of his poems were written as words for music, with musical and verbal imagery and rhythms designed to support and enhance each other.” His Gitabitan (“ Song Collection ”), containing 2,265 songs that were all composed, tuned, and sung by himself, not only started a new genre in Bengali music, known as Rabindrasangit, but, in Lago’s view, became “an important demonstration” of his “belief in the efficacy of cultural synthesis. He used all the musical materials that came to hand: the classical ragas, the boat songs of Bengal, Vaishnava kirtan [group chanting] and Baul devotional songs, village songs of festival and of mourning, even Western tunes picked up during his travels and subtly adapted to his own uses.” Such spirit of experimentation and synthesis marked Tagore’s entire creative career.

His first notable book of lyrics, Sandhya Sangit (1882; “ Evening Songs ”), won the admiration of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Tagore later wrote in his Reminiscences , “the sadness and pain which sought expression in the Evening Songs had their roots in the depth of my being.” The book was closely followed by Prabhat Sangit (1883; “ Morning Songs ”), in which he celebrated his joy at the discovery of the world around him. The new mood was the outcome of a mystical experience he had had while looking at the sunrise one day: “As I continued to gaze, all of a sudden a covering seemed to fall away from my eyes, and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side. This radiance pierced in a moment through the folds of sadness and despondency which had accumulated over my heart, and flooded it with this universal light,” he recalled in Reminiscences. He recounted this experience in greater detail in The Religion of Man : “I felt sure that some Being who comprehended me and my world was seeking his best expression in all my experiences, uniting them into an ever-widening individuality which is a spiritual work of art. To this Being I was responsible; for the creation in me is His as well as mine.” He called this Being his Jivan devata (“ The Lord of His Life ”), a new conception of God as man’s intimate friend, lover, and beloved that was to play an important role in his subsequent work.

His newly awakened sense of all-pervading joy in the universe expressed itself in Chhabi O Gan (1884; “ Pictures and Songs ”) and Kari O Kamal (1886; “ Sharps and Flats ”), in which he boldly celebrated the human body in such poems as “Tanu” (“Body”), “Bahu” (“Arms”), “Chumban” (“The Kiss”), “Stan” (“Breasts”), “Deher Milan” (“Physical Union”), and “Vivasana” (“Undraped Beauty”). He described Kari O Kamal as “the Song of Humanity standing on the road in front of the gateway of the Palace of Life” and believed it to be an important landmark in the evolution of his poetic outlook. It was, however, his new contemplative, mystical, religious, and metaphysical tone dominating Manasi (1890; “ The Mind’s Creation ”), Sonar Tari (1894; “ The Golden Boat ”), Chitra (1896), Naivedya (1901; “ Offerings ”), Kheya (1906; “ Ferrying Across ”), and Gitanjali (1910; Song Offerings ) that gave his lyrical poetry depth, maturity, and serenity and that eventually brought him world renown with the publication of the English translations of Gitanjali in 1912.

The publication of Gitanjali was the most significant event in Tagore’s writing career, for, following the volume’s appearance, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913—the first such recognition of an Eastern writer. And yet this slender volume of poems, which was “hailed by the literary public of England as the greatest literary event of the day” and which created “the literary sensation of the day” in America, according to the editors of the Literary History of the United States , reached English readers almost by chance. As Tagore explained in a letter to his niece Indira, he undertook the task of translating some of his poems into English during a March, 1912, illness that delayed his departure for England; he began his translations because he “simply felt an urge to recapture through the medium of another language the feelings and sentiments which had created such a feast of joy within me in the days gone by.” And once on board the ship in May 1912, he continued his translations to while away the time of travel.

Arriving in London in June 1912, he gave these translations to English painter William Rothenstein, who had visited India in 1910 and had shown interest in the poet’s work. Deeply impressed, Rothenstein had copies typed and sent to poet William Butler Yeats , poet and critic Stopford Brooke, and critic Andrew Bradley—all of whom enthusiastically received them. On June 30, Tagore gave a reading of his poems at Rothenstein’s house to a distinguished group of fellow poets, including American poet Ezra Pound , who was at that time the foreign editor of Poetry , founded by Harriet Monroe . Pound wanted Poetry to be the first American magazine to print Tagore, and in a letter of December 24, 1912, he wrote to Harriet Monroe that Tagore’s poems “are going to be THE sensation of the winter.” In November 1912, the India Society of London published a limited edition of 750 copies of Gitanjali , with an introduction by Yeats and a pencil-sketch of the author by Rothenstein as frontispiece. In December 1912, Poetry included six poems from the book. And thus the Gitanjali poems reached both sides of the Atlantic to an ever-widening circle of appreciative readers.

Gitanjali was written shortly after the deaths of Tagore’s wife, his two daughters, his youngest son, and his father. But as his son, Rathindranath, testified in On the Edges of Time , “he remained calm and his inward peace was not disturbed by any calamity however painful. Some superhuman sakti [force] gave him the power to resist and rise above misfortunes of the most painful nature.” Gitanjali was his inner search for peace and a reaffirmation of his faith in his Jivan devata. Its central theme was the realization of the divine through self-purification and service to humanity. When presenting Tagore the Nobel Prize, Harold Hjarne noted, “The Gitanjali is Mysticism, but not a mysticism that, relinquishing personality, seeks to become absorbed in the All to a point of Nothingness, but one that, with all the faculties of soul at highest pitch, eagerly sets forth to meet the Living Father of all Creation.” Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan said in The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore , “The poems of Gitanjali are the offerings of the finite to the infinite.” In his introduction to Gitanjali , Yeats called it “the work of supreme culture” and confessed, “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how it moved me.” Pound, in his Fortnightly Review essay, described Gitanjali as a “series of spiritual lyrics” and compared it to “the Paradiso of Dante.” Yeats and Pound set the tone of Tagore criticism in the West, and Gitanjali came to be looked upon as his most characteristic work.

The publication of Gitanjali was followed by five major poetical works in English translation: The Gardener (1913), The Crescent Moon (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), Lover’s Gift and Crossing (1918), and The Fugitive and Other Poems (1919). The Gardener was a feast of love lyrics, though it also included mystical and religious poems, nature poems, and even a few poems with political overtones. The Crescent Moon , a book of songs about children, celebrated their beauty, innocence, charity, divinity, and primordial wisdom. Thompson called these poems a “revelation of a child’s mind, comparable to the best that any language had seen.” The combined Lover’s Gift and Crossing contained some of Tagore’s best lyrics, and The Fugitive and Other Poems included “Urvashi,” Tagore’s rapturous incantation of the Eternal Female, suggesting affinities with Shelley’s “ Hymn to Intellectual Beauty .” In “Urvashi,” observed Thompson, there was “a meeting of East and West indeed, a glorious tangle of Indian mythology, modern science, and legends of European romance.”

J.C. Ghosh noted in Bengali Literature that “the more substantial and virile side of [Tagore’s] work, such as his social, political, descriptive, and narrative poetry and his poetry of abstract thought, was either never presented at all or was presented in a terribly mutilated and emasculated form.” Reviewing Tagore’s literary reception in the West, Nabaneeta Sen in a Mahfil essay came to the conclusion that “Rabindranath only became a temporary craze, but never a serious literary figure in the Western scene. He was intrinsically an outsider to the contemporary literary tradition of the West, and after a short, misunderstood visit to the heart of the West, he again became an outsider.”

In 1916 appeared Balaka ( A Flight of Swans ), which pointed to the new direction Tagore’s poetry was to take. “The poems of Balaka,” wrote Lago in Rabindranath Tagore , “reflect a time of account-taking and of Tagore’s reactions to the turbulence of the past four years: the excitement surrounding the Nobel award and the knighthood that followed in 1915, the premonitions of political disaster, and the anxieties of the World War.” The flying swans symbolized, for the poet, movement, restlessness, a longing for faraway sites, an eternal quest for the unknown. “I am like a migratory bird having two homes—and my home on the other side of the sea is calling me,” he had written to William Rothenstein in 1915. Between 1916 and 1934, Tagore made five visits to America and traveled to nearly every country in Europe and Asia, delivering lectures, promoting his educational ideas, and stressing the need for a meeting of the East and the West. And wherever he went he was greeted as a living symbol of India’s cultural and spiritual heritage.

In the last decade of his life, as he became conscious of his approaching death, Tagore turned to radical experimentation in poetic techniques and to purely humanistic concepts dealing with the problems of life and death. This new trend was reflected especially in his later Bengali poems collected in Punascha (1932; Postscript ), Shesh Saptak (1935; Last Octave ), Patraput (1935; Cupful of Leaves ), Prantik (1938; The Borderland ), Semjuti (1938; Evening Lamp ), Nabajatak (1940; Newly Born ), Rogashajyaya (1940; From the Sickbed ), Arogya (1941; Recovery ), and Sesh Lekha (1941; Last Writings ). These poems “became increasingly terse, luminous and precise in the use of imagery,” wrote Amiya Chakravarty in A Tagore Reader. In The Later Poems of Tagore , Sisir Kumar Ghose said, “Full of dramatic discords, through alternate rhythms of intensity and exhaustion, the[se] poems unfold the history of a conflict, long and carefully concealed, at the heart of the Rabindrean imagination.” He concluded, “To accept the best among the later poems is to alter our total conception of Tagore’s poetry.” “But,” he added, “its hour is not yet. In order to do this as it should be done the ideal critic of Tagore needs to be as, if not more, sensitive than the poet himself. ... Such a critic we do not have, unless he is in hiding.”

Tagore also published more than 40 plays, most of which were written for production in the open air for his students at Santiniketan. He himself took part in their performance as actor, producer, director, composer, and choreographer. He “mocked the commercial Bengali theater, burdened with heavy sets and realistic decor, and created a lyrical theater of the imagination,” wrote Balwant Gargi in his Folk Theater of India. Though Tagore was influenced by Western dramatic techniques and his plays, as Mohan Lal Sharma pointed out in a Modern Drama essay, “have close affinity with the poetic or symbolist European drama of the present century typified in the works of such writers as Maurice Maeterlinck,” he upheld the classical Indian tradition of drama as the depiction of emotion or rasa rather than of action. He blended this classical element with the folk tradition of Bengali Jatra performance—a combination of group singing, dancing, and acting induced by a trance-like state—to achieve a synthesis of music, poetry, dance, drama, and costume. Consequently, most of Tagore’s plays are interspersed with songs and are either lyrical or symbolic with subtle emotional and metaphysical overtones. The main principle of his plays, as he said himself, was “the play of feeling and not of action.” Judged by the standards of Western drama, therefore, they seem static, ill-constructed, and unsuitable for commercial production.

Tagore’s experiments in dramatic forms extended from his earliest musical and verse dramas in the 1880s, through rollicking social comedies and symbolic plays in prose, to the highly imaginative and colorful dance dramas of the 1930s. Well known in the first category are Valmiki Pratibha (1881), Kal-Mrigaya (1882), Prakritir Pratisodh (1884; published in English as Sanyasi in 1917), Mayar Khela (1888), Raja O Rani (1889; The King and the Queen , 1917), Visarjan (1890; Sacrifice , 1917), Chitrangada (1892; published in English as Chitra in 1913), and Malini (1896; English translation, 1917). All of these, except Malini , are in blank verse, and most of them could be described in Tagore’s own words as “a series of dramatic situations ... strung on a thread of melody.” The social comedies include Goday Galad (1892), Vaikunther Khata (1897), and Chirakumar Sabha (1926); and the notable symbolic plays in prose are Raja (1910; The King of the Dark Chamber, 1914), Dak-Ghar (1912; The Post Office, 1914), Phalguni (1916; The Cycle of Spring, 1917), Mukta-dhara (1922; The Waterfall , 1922), and Rakta-karavi (1924; Red Oleanders , 1925). Among the famous dance dramas are Chandalika (1933), Nrityanatya Chitrangada (1936), Chandalika Nrityanarya (1938), and Syama (1939).

Thematically, Prakritir Pratisodh —which means “nature’s revenge” and which was published in English under the title Sanyasi —was Tagore’s first important play. “This Nature’s Revenge ,” he wrote in Reminiscences , “may be looked upon as an introduction to the whole of my future literary work; or, rather this has been the subject on which all my writings have dwelt—the joy of attaining the Infinite within the finite.” In his own words, “the hero was a Sanyasi (hermit) who had been striving to gain a victory over Nature by cutting away the bonds of all desires and affections and thus to arrive at a true and profound knowledge of self. A little girl, however, brought him back from his communion with the infinite to the world and into the bondage of human affection. On coming back the Sanyasi realised that the great is to be found in the small, the infinite within the bounds of form, and the eternal freedom of the soul in love. It is only in the light of love that all limits are merged in the limitless.” Allegorically, the play represented the turning point in the poet’s own life. “This was to put in a slightly different form,” he confessed, “the story of my own experience, of the entrancing ray of light which found its way into the depths of the cave into which I had retired away from all touch of the outer world, and made me more fully one with Nature again.” By 1884, the year of the play’s first publication, Rabindranath had married his child-bride, Mrinalini Devi. He was then 22 and she only 10.

Of these earliest plays, however, Visarjan ( Sacrifice ) is the best as a drama of conflict and ideas, as Chitrangada ( Chitra ) is the loveliest as poetry. Sacrifice is a powerful denunciation of violence, bigotry, and superstition. It expresses Tagore’s abhorrence of the popular Bengali cult of Kali-worship involving animal sacrifice. The characters of the play, as Thompson observed, are “swayed by the strong wind of their creator’s emotions—puppets in the grip of a fiercely felt idea.” “The theme of Sacrifice ,” Thompson added, “had been implicit in many an obscure page of Indian religious thought. But Rabindranath’s play first gave its protest a reasoned and deliberate place in art.” Chitra is a fascinating poetic play dealing with a romantic episode from the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahabharata: the love between Arjuna and Chitrangada, the beautiful daughter of Chitravahana, the king of Manipur. It seems to be modeled on Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, a romantic play that probably dated from the fourth century B.C., and it presents the evolution of human love from the physical to the spiritual. Thompson called it “a lyrical feast.” Krishna R. Kripalani, Tagore’s biographer, regarded it as “one of Rabindranath’s most beautiful plays, almost flawless as a work of art.” “The simple and bald episode” of the Mahabharata , he added, “was transformed by Rabindranath into a drama tense and vibrant with lyrical rapture and full of deep psychological insight.”

Among Tagore’s allegorical-philosophical-symbolic plays, Raja ( The King of the Dark Chamber ) is the most complex, written in the vein of Maeterlinck. The story is taken from a Buddhist Jataka , or story of reincarnation, but it undergoes a spiritual transformation in Tagore’s hands. The symbolic significance of the play has attracted the attention of many critics. In An Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore , Vishwarath S. Naravane wrote: “In this play, Queen Sudarshana represents the finite soul which longs for a vision of the Infinite” that is hidden in the dark, like “the true King, her real husband.” Radhakrishnan, in The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore , gave the following interpretation of the play: “An individual cannot reach the ideal so long as fragments of finiteness stick to him, so long as intellect and will are bound to the realm of finite nature.” As he explained in The Bengali Drama , P. Guha Thakurta regarded the theme of the play as the realization of truth through suffering and sorrow. Other critics have interpreted the play in terms of allegorical symbols: the real King is Truth or God or Life-Spirit; Queen Sudarshana is the individual soul; Suvama is Maya or illusion; Kanchi symbolizes the mind; and the maid Surangama represents self-surrender. Artistically, the play is a fine blending of the Jatra tradition and the classical form of Sanskrit drama.

Perhaps the most popular and the most frequently performed among Tagore’s plays is Dak-Ghar ( The Post Office ), which dramatizes the story of a lonely boy, Amal, confined to his sickroom, longing to be free. Day after day, he sits at the window, watching the colorful spectacle of life passing him by, until death brings him deliverance from earthly pain and confinement. The story presents Rabindranath’s own childhood experience of bondage and loneliness in a house governed by “servocracy.” As he wrote to Andrews, “I remember, at the time when I wrote it, my own feeling which inspired me to write it. Amal represents the man whose soul has received the call of the open road.”

The play was produced in 1913 by the Abbey Theatre Company in Dublin and in London. Kripalani reported that after attending a performance of the play in London, William Butler Yeats testified: “On the stage the little play shows that it is very perfectly constructed, and conveys to the right audience an emotion of gentleness and peace.” “Judged by a London standard,” wrote Ernest Rhys in Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study , “it may seem that all [Tagore’s] dramatic work is lacking in ordinary stage effect, but to this criticism one can only reply that his plays were written to attain a naturalness of style and a simplicity of mode which only Irish players have so far realised for us.” A reviewer for The Times called the play “dreamy, symbolical, spiritual ... a curious play, leaving to a certain extent a sense of incompleteness, since it ends before the climax, rich in poetical thought and imagery, as well as a kind of symbolism that must not be pressed too closely.” Since The Post Office can be read on two levels, the naturalistic and the symbolic, it has remained a special favorite with Tagore readers. In his book Rabindranath Tagore , Thompson paid the play a high compliment: “ The Post Office does what both Shakespeare and Kalidas failed to do. It succeeds in bringing on the stage a child who neither shows off nor is silly.”

Following the public controversy that broke out between Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore in 1921 over the poet’s opposition to Gandhi’s noncooperation movement and his cult of the charkha (spinning wheel), Tagore’s popularity suffered a steep decline and he found himself more and more publicly isolated. Gandhi, failing to enlist the poet’s support, remarked: “Well, if you can do nothing else for me you can at least ... lead the nation and spin.” Tagore immediately replied: “Poems I can spin, songs I can spin, but what a mess I would make, Gandhiji, of your precious cotton!” There the controversy stopped. But the churnings in the poet’s mind over the political situation in the country produced Mukta-dhara in January 1922, a symbolic play with political overtones. A distant echo of Prayaschitta (1909; Atonement ), the play has been regarded by several critics as a noble tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and his campaign of nonviolence. Kripalani called the ascetic central character Dhananjaya, who teaches the people of Shivtarai to defy the authority of their unjust ruler through nonviolent civil resistance, a “prototype of Mahatma Gandhi” and wrote, “Perhaps no other play of Tagore expresses his political convictions with such directness and vigour. ... His abhorrence of exploitation, whether by a foreign or a native tyrant, and his faith that tyranny can be effectively resisted by non-violence and evil redeemed by voluntary sacrifice.” Tagore was making preparations to stage the play, but when he heard the news of Gandhi’s arrest in March 1922, he abandoned the preparations and Mukta-dhara was never produced.

Like Gandhi, Tagore preached against and fought the Indian caste system that fostered the concept of untouchability. The first number of Gandhi’s weekly Harijan , issued in Poona on February 11, 1933, carried a poem by Tagore, “The Cleanser,” on its front page. The same year, Tagore wrote Chandalika ( The Untouchable Girl ), a drama based on the Buddhist legend of Sardulakarnavadana. This is the story of a young untouchable girl, Prakriti, who falls in love with a handsome Buddhist monk, Ananda, when the latter asks her to give him some water to drink. As Ananda drinks water from her hands, she feels redeemed, spiritually reborn, newly aware of herself as a woman, and emancipated from the bondage of her birth and caste. No one could have paid a better tribute to Gandhi’s cause of Harijan uplift than Tagore did in this poetic play. It remains a personal testament of Tagore the humanist, exemplifying his faith in the dignity of humanity.

Between 1883 and 1934 Tagore published 14 novels, several of which were translated into English during his lifetime: Ghare-Baire (1916; The Home and the World , 1919), Nauka Dubi (1906; The Wreck , 1921), and Gora (1910; published in English under same title, 1924). Others were translated after his death, including: Dui Bon (1933; Two Sisters , 1945), Sesher Kavita (1929; Farewell, My Friend , 1946), Malancha (1934; The Garden , 1956), and Nashtanir (1901; The Broken Nest , 1971). Most of these are fundamentally social novels, a few with strong political undercurrents. Among his translated novels, Chokher Bali (1903; Binodini , 1959), Gora , and The Home and the World are the best known in the Western world.

With Binodini, titled in the original Bengali Chokher Bali —literally, “Eyesore”—Tagore “paved the way for the truly modern novel in India, whether realistic or psychological or concerned with social problems,” wrote its English translator Krishna R. Kripalani in his foreword to the 1959 edition. The novel gives an intimate picture of domestic relations in an upper middle-class Bengali Hindu family at the turn of the century and portrays the plight of a young widow, Binodini, who “asserts her right to love and happiness.” In Kripalani’s view, “Of all women characters created by Tagore in his many novels, Binodini is the most real, convincing, and full-blooded. In her frustrations and suffering is summed up the author’s ironic acceptance of the orthodox Hindu society of the day.”

In Gora Tagore created a socio-political novel voicing the aspirations of the resurgent India. Published in 1910, the year of the Gitanjali series of poems, it represented the peak of his fictional career. “This work,” wrote Naravane in An Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore, “has everything that one might expect from a masterpiece: brilliant delineation of characters; a story which offers surprises till the very end; a fluent, powerful style interspersed with bursts of poetic imagery, and absolute serenity.” Though heavily filled with polemics reflecting the social, religious, and political issues of the time, the novel projected Tagore’s concept of liberal nationalism based on the ideal of vishwa-bandhutva or international brotherhood. In a March 13, 1921, letter to Andrews, Tagore declared, “All humanity’s greatest is mine. The infinite personality of man has come from the magnificent harmony of all races. My prayer is that India may represent the cooperation of all the people of the earth.” In the extraordinary character and personality of the protagonist Gourmohan or Gora, Tagore tried to bring about the fusion of the East and the West to exemplify his ideal of the Universal Man. In Rabindranath Tagore , Lago declared Gora “a study of the relation between Hindu orthodoxy and Indian nationalism.” Gora’s sudden discovery that he has no parents, no home, no country, no religion, brings him freedom from all barriers: “But today I am free—yes, am standing freely in the center of a vast truth. Only now do I have the right to serve India. Today I have truly become an Indian. For me there is no conflict between Hindu, Muslim and Christian.”

The subject of The Home and the World is the political agitation resulting from the partition of Bengal in 1905. Tagore was at the time deeply involved in the Indian National Movement. But when militant Hindu nationalism began to turn to violence and terrorist methods, he took a public stand against this development and openly condemned the excesses of the Swadeshi ( swa, self; deshi , national) movement, which advocated the use of goods made in India. This position made him so unpopular with the nationalist Hindu intelligentsia that, in utter disillusionment, he withdrew from active politics and retreated into what he called the “poet’s corner.” But to answer his critics who had accused him of desertion and to reaffirm his own faith in the principles of truth and nonviolence, he wrote The Home and the World , which, as Bhabani Bhattacharya noted in an article that appeared in Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume , “roused a storm of controversy when it first appeared in serial form in the literary magazine Subui Patra and harsh pens assailed it not only as ‘unpatriotic’ but ‘immoral.’”

E.M. Forster, in a review that first appeared in Athenaeum and was later reprinted in Abinger Harvest , admired the novel’s theme but was repelled by its persistent “strain of vulgarity.” He wrote, “throughout the book one is puzzled by bad tastes that verge upon bad taste.” He thought the novel contained much of “a boarding-house flirtation that masks itself in mystic or patriotic talk.” “Yet the plain fact is,” as Bhattacharya pointed out, “that in matters of sex Tagore always retained in him a conservative core that was near-prudery, and his moments of realism in the context of such relationships were a whole epoch apart from the trends which our modern literary idiom calls ‘naturalistic.’”

Revolving around the three main characters—Nikhil, an aristocrat with noble ideals; his beautiful wife, Bimla; and his intimate but unscrupulous friend Sandip—the story is told in the first person singular by each one of these in the manner of Robert Browning ’s The Ring and the Book. Nikhil, the young protagonist, perhaps reflects Tagore’s own feelings and predicament at seeing the nationalist hostility against him simply “because I am not running amuck crying Bande Mataram. ” “Although a poet’s manifesto,” wrote Kripalani, “the novel is equally a testament of Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence, of love and truth, of his insistent warning that evil means must vitiate the end, however nobly conceived.”

Though Tagore was the first modern Indian writer to introduce psychological realism in his fiction, his novels were generally looked upon as old-fashioned in form. As Aronson noted in Rabindranath through Western Eyes , “At a time when writers, like Aldous Huxley, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, were experimenting with new forms of novel writing, at a time when the novel had reached its fullest maturity with the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russia, with Marcel Proust and Andre Gide in France, Rabindranath could not but strike his European contemporaries as belonging both in style and characterisation to a different order of artistic expression, which they had passed long ago, somewhere in the first half of the nineteenth century.”

From the artistic point of view, however, Tagore excelled in the art of short story writing. As Bhattacharya wrote, “The short story was intrinsically suited to Tagore’s temperament and it could carry the strongest echoes of his essentially poetic genius.” Tagore himself wrote in a letter from the Tagore family estate headquarters at Shileidah: “If I do nothing but write short stories I am happy, and I make a few readers happy. The main cause of happiness is that the people about whom I write become my companions: they are with me when I am confined to my room in the rains. On a sunny day they move about me on the banks of the Padma.”

Tagore wrote about 200 stories, the best of which appeared in English translation in four major collections during his lifetime: Broken Ties and Other Stories (1925), Mashi and Other Stories (1918), The Hungry Stones and Other Stories (1916), and The Glimpses of Bengal Life (1913). As a short story writer, Tagore was not only a pioneer in Bengali literature, but he also paved the way for modern writers like Premchand and such contemporary writers as Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and R.K. Narain. Bose acknowledged in An Acre of Green Grass that Rabindranath “brought us the short story when it was hardly known in England.” Naravane wrote in An Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore , “The modern short story is Rabindranath Tagore’s gift to Indian literature.”

A substantial amount of Tagore’s writing was in the form of nonfictional prose—essays and articles, religious and philosophical treatises, journals and memoirs, lectures and discourses, history and polemics, letters, and travel accounts. Of these, his philosophical writings— Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (1913), Nationalism (1917), Personality (1917), Creative Unity (1922), The Religion of Man (1931), and Towards Universal Man (1961)—were central to his thought. These writings were deeply influenced by the teachings of the Upanishads. In the preface to Sadhana, which was published in the Harvard lecture series, he confessed, “The writer has been brought up in a family where texts of the Upanishads are used in daily worship; and he has had before him the example of his father who lived his long life in the closest communion with God while not neglecting his duties to the world or allowing his keen interest in all human affairs to suffer any abatement.” What appealed to Tagore the most in the teachings of the Upanishads was the concept of God as positive, personal, and realizable through love. He was also attracted to the Vaishnava ideal of love as the basis of man-God relationship. He believed that the love-drama between man and God was being enacted in the sensible world of color, sound, and touch. He was not only conscious of man’s divinity but also of God’s humanity. In Sonar Tari he wrote, “Whatever I can offer to God I offer to man and to God I give whatever can I give to man. I make God man and man God.” Such philosophical wisdom was reflected in many of his lyrics and dramas.

Tagore dictated his last poem a few hours before his death on August 7, 1941. The leading newspapers of the world published editorials paying tribute to him as “India’s greatest man of letters,” “the soul of Bengal,” and “ambassador of friendship between East and West.” But the Washington Post provided perhaps the most telling of assessments: “Tagore believed that East and West do not represent antagonistic and irreconcilable attitudes of the human mind, but that they are complementary, and since Tagore’s own work and thought represented a fusion of East and West, the fate of his poems and dramas at the hands of later generations ... may be the test of whether the age-old gulf between Asia and Europe can ever be bridged.”

• Appeared in Poetry Magazine ("Amidst the rush and roar of life...")
• Appeared in Poetry Magazine (“Come as you are...”)

Crossing 16

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Common Core State Standards Text Exemplars

Poetry and music, from the archive: rabindranath tagore, “harriet monroe, poet, friend of poets”, “high priestess of poetry”, lena khalaf tuffaha and cindy juyoung ok on the renowned and rebellious palestinian poet zakaria mohammed.

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Bibliography

("amidst the rush and roar of life..."), (“come as you are...”), fruit-gathering lv, the gardener 38, the gardener 85, gitanjali 35, ("i asked of destiny..."), ("i found a few old letters..."), i will not let you go, (“keep me fully glad...”), ("keep me fully glad..."), the last bargain, ("leave off your works, bride..."), ("lest i should know you..."), ("my soul is alight..."), ("o you mad, you superbly drunk..."), on the seashore, ("over the green and yellow..."), ("sing the song of the moment...", song vii (“my song has put off her adornments”), ("tell me if this is all true..."), the temple of gold, ("we both live in the same village..."), ("with a glance of your eyes...").

Poems to integrate into your English Language Arts classroom.

Composed, produced, and remixed: the greatest hits of poems about music.

14 of this Indian poet's love poems, first published in Poetry magazine. 

The Business of Poetry

Women’s Rights and Spirituality at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair

On this week’s episode, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about the life and work of the renowned Palestinian poet and writer Zakaria Mohammed....

PUBLISHED IN INDIA IN BENGALI

• Kavi-Kahini (poetry), 1878.
• Bana-Phul (poetry), 1880.
• Valmiki Pratibha (play), 1881.
• Bhagnahriday (play), 1881.
• Rudrachanda (play), 1881.
• Europe-Pravasir Patra (letters), 1881.
• Kal-Mrigaya (play), 1882.
• Sandhya Sangit (poetry; title means Evening Songs ), 1882.
• Prabhat Sangit (poetry; title means Morning Songs ), 1883.
• Bau-Thakuranir Hat (novel), 1883.
• Vividha Prasanga (essays), 1883.
• Chhabi O Gan (poetry; title means Pictures and Songs ), 1884.
• Nalini (play), 1884.
• Saisav Sangit (poetry), 1884.
• Bhanusimha Thakurer Padavali (songs), 1884.
• Alochana (essays), 1885.
• Rabichchhaya (songs), 1885.
• Kari O Kamal (poetry; title means Sharps and Flats ), 1886.
• Rajarshi (novel), 1887.
• Chithipatra (essays), 1887.
• Samalochana (essays), 1888.
• Mayar Khela (play), 1888.
• Manasi (poetry; title means The Mind's Creation ), 1890.
• Europe Yatrir Diary (travel), Part 1, 1891, Part 2, 1893.
• Goday Galad (play), 1892, new edition published as Sesh Raksha, 1928.
• Sonar Tari (poetry; title means The Golden Boat ), 1894.
• Chhota Galpa (short stories), 1894.
• Vichitra Galpa (short stories), Parts 1 and 2, 1894.
• Katha-Chatushtay (short stories), 1894.
• Galpa-Dasak (short stories), 1895.
• Nadi (poetry), 1896.
• Chitra (poetry), 1896.
• Chaitali (poetry), first published in Kavya Granthavali, 1896.
• Vaikunther Khata (play), 1897.
• Panchabhut (essays), 1897.
• Kanika (poetry), 1899.
• Katha (poetry), 1900.
• Kalpana (poetry), 1900.
• Kshanika (poetry), 1900.
• Kahini (poetry and verse drama), 1900.
• Naivedya (poetry; title means Offerings ), 1901.
• Smaran (poetry), first published in Kavya-Grantha, 1903.
• Sisu (poetry), first published in Kavya-Grantha, 1903.
• Karmaphal (story), 1903.
• Atmasakti (essays), 1905.
• Baul (songs), 1905.
• Bharatvarsha (essays), 1906.
• Kheya (poetry; title means Ferrying Across ), 1906.
• Vichitra Prabandha (essays), 1907.
• Charitrapuja (essays), 1907.
• Prachin Sahitya (essays), 1907.
• Lokasahitya (essays), 1907.
• Sahitya (essays), 1907.
• Adhunik Sahitya (essays), 1907.
• Hasya-Kautuk (plays), 1907.
• Vyangakautuk (essays and plays), 1907.
• Prajapatir Nirbandha (novel), 1908.
• Raja Praja (essays), 1908.
• Samuha (essays), 1908.
• Svades (essays), 1908.
• Samaj (essays), 1908.
• Siksha (essays), 1908.
• Mukut (play), 1908.
• Sabdatattva (essays), 1909.
• Dharma (sermons), 1909.
• Santiniketan, Parts 1-8, 1909, Parts 9-11, 1910, Parts 12-13, 1911, Parts 14-15, 1915, Parts 15-16, 1916.
• Prayaschitta (play; title means Atonement ), 1909, new edition published as Paritran, 1929.
• Vidyasagar-Charit (essays), c. 1909.
• Galpa Chariti (short stories), 1912.
• Achalayatan (play), 1912, new edition published as Guru, 1918.
• Utsarga (poetry), 1914.
• Gitali (title means Songs ), 1914.
• Atati Galpa (short stories), c. 1915.
• Sanchay (essays), 1916.
• Parichay (essays), 1916.
• Galpasaptak (short stories), 1916.
• Palataka (poetry), 1918.
• Payla Nambar (short stories), 1920.
• Sisu Bholanath (poetry), 1922.
• Vasanta (play), 1923.
• Puravi (poetry), 1925.
• Grihapraves (play), 1925.
• Pravahini (songs), 1925.
• Chirakumar Sabha (play), 1926.
• Sodhbodh (play), 1926.
• Lekhan (epigrams), 1927.
• Rituranga (plays), 1927.
• Yatri (diary), 1929.
• Yogayog (novel), 1929.
• Tapati (play), 1929.
• Bhanusimher Patravali (letters), 1930.
• Navin (play), 1931.
• Vanavani (poems and songs), 1931.
• Sapmochan (play), 1931.
• Punascha (poetry; title means Postscript ), 1932.
• Parisesh (poetry), 1932.
• Kaler Yatra (play), 1932.
• Manusher Dharma (lectures), 1933.
• Vichitrita (poetry), 1933.
• Taser Des (play), 1933.
• Bharatpathik Rammohan Roy (essays and addresses), 1933.
• Sravan-Gatha (play), 1934.
• Shesh Saptak (poetry; title means Last Octave ), 1935.
• Sur O Sangati (letters), 1935.
• Vithika (poetry), 1935.
• Chhanda (essays), 1936.
• Nrityanatya Chitrangada (play), 1936.
• Japane-Parasye (travel), 1936.
• Sahityer Pathe (essays), 1936.
• Praktani (addresses), 1936.
• Khapchhada (rhymes), 1937.
• Kalantar (essays), 1937.
• Sey (stories), 1937.
• Chhadar Chhabi (poetry), 1937.
• Pathe O Pather Prante (letters), 1938.
• Banglabhasha Parichay (essays), 1938.
• Semjuti (poetry; title means Evening Lamp ), 1938.
• Prahasini (poetry), 1939.
• Akas-Pradip (poetry), 1939.
• Pather Sanchay (essays and letters), 1939.
• Nabajatak (poetry; title means Newly Born ), 1940.
• Sanai (poetry), 1940.
• Tin Sangi (short stories), 1940.
• Galpasalpa (stories and poetry), 1941.
• Janmadine (poetry), 1941.
• Asramer Rup O Vikas (essays), 1941.
• Chhada (poetry), 1941.
• Smriti (letters), 1941.
• Chithipatra I (letters), 1942.
• Chithipatra II (letters), 1942.
• Chithipatra III (letters), 1942.
• Atmaparichay (essays), 1943.
• Sahiryer Svarup (essays), 1943.
• Chithipatra IV (letters), 1943.
• Sphulinga (poetry), 1945.
• Chithipatra V (letters), 1945.
• Muktir Upay (comedy), 1948.
• Mahatma Gandhi (essays and addresses), 1948.
• Visvabharati (addresses), 1951.
• Baikali (songs and poetry), 1951.
• Samavayaniti (essays), 1954.
• Chitravichitra (poetry), 1954.
• Itihas (essays), 1955.
• Buddhadeva (essays and poetry), 1956.
• Khrishta (essays and poems), 1959.
• Chithipatra VI (letters), 1960.
• Chithipatra VII (letters), 1960.
• Chhinnapatravali (letters), 1960.

COLLECTED WORKS IN BENGALI

• Kavya Granthavali, Satyaprasad Gangopadhyaya, 1896.
• 1908-09 Galpaguchha, [India], Part 1, 1900, Part 2, 1901, enlarged edition in five parts, single volume edition, three parts, Visva-Bharati (Calcutta), 1960.
• 1903-04 Kavya-Grantha, nine volumes, Majumdar Library, published in ten volumes, Indian Press, Volumes 1-6, 1915, Volumes 7-10, 1916.
• Rabindra Granthavali, Hitavadi, 1904.
• 1907-09 Gadya-Granthavali, sixteen volumes, [India].
• Gitabitan (songs; title means Song Collection ), [India], Part 1, 1914, Parts 1 and 2, 1931, Part 3, 1932, single volume edition, three parts, Visva-Bharati, 1960.
• Ritu-Utsav, [India], 1926.
• Patradhara (letters), [India], 1938.
• 1939-48 Rabindra-Rachanavali, twenty-six volumes, Visva-Bharati.
• 1940-41 Rabindra-Rachanavali Achalita Sangraha, two volumes, Visva-Bharati.
• Rabindra-Rachanavali, Government of West Bengal, 1961.
• Chelebhulano chaora (selection of Bengali rhymes, including essays and articles), edited by Biasvanatha Racya, Ananda Pabaliasarsa (Kalakata), 1995.

POETRY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

• Gitanjali (title means Song Offerings ), [India], 1910, translation by the author, introduction by W. B. Yeats, India Society (London), 1912, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1913, Branden Press, 1978, translation by Brother James, University Press (Khaka, Bangladesh), 1983.
• The Gardener, translation by the author, Macmillan (New York), 1913.
• The Crescent Moon, translation by the author, Macmillan (London), 1913, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1916.
• Balaka, [India], 1916, translation by Aurobindo Bose published as A Flight of Swans: Poems from Balaka, foreword by S. Radhakrishnan, J. Murray, 1955.
• Fruit-Gathering, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1916.
• Stray Birds, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1916.
• Lover's Gift and Crossing, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1918.
• The Fugitive and Other Poems, Santiniketan Press, 1919.
• The Fugitive (poetry, songs, and plays), Macmillan (New York, NY), 1921.
• Lipika (poetry, allegories, and stories), [India], 1922, translation by A. Bose, Jaico Publishing House (Bombay), 1969.
• Poems from Tagore, introduction by C. F. Andrews, Macmillan (Calcutta), 1923.
• Rabindranath Tagore: Twenty-two Poems, translation by Edward J. Thompson, E. Benn, 1925.
• Fireflies, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1928, Collier Books, 1975.
• Sheaves, Poems, and Songs by Rabindranath Tagore, compiled and translated by Nagendranath Gupta, Indian Press (Allahabad), 1929, 2nd edition, Greenwood Press, 1971.
• The Child (originally published in English), Allen & Unwin, 1931.
• Patraput (title means Cupful of Leaves ), [India], 1935, translation by Sisir Chattopadhyaya, foreword by Kalidas Bhattacharya, Patrhikrit Prakashani (Calcutta), 1969.
• Syamali, [India], 1936, translation by Sheila Chatterjee and the author, Visva-Bharati, 1955.
• Prantik (title means The Borderland ), [India], 1938 [and] Rogashajyaya (title means From the Sickbed ), [India], 1940 [and] Arogya (title means Recovery ), [India], 1940 [and] Sesh Lekha (title means Last Writings ), [India], 1941, translated together by A. Bose as Wings of Death: The Last Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, foreword by Gilbert Murray, J. Murray, 1960.
• The Herald of Spring: Poems from Mohua, translation by A. Bose, J. Murray, 1957.
• Ode to a Parted Love, Jaico Publishing House (Bombay), 1959.
• Shesh Lekha: The Last Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translation by Pritish Nandy, Dialogue Publications (Calcutta), 1973.
• On the Shores of Eternity: Poems from Tagore on Death and Mortality , Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1999.
• Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems of Rabindranath Tagore , HarperCollins (New Delhi, India), 2000.
• Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems , George Braziller (New York, NY), 2001.
• Songs of Rabindranath Tagore: Translated in Rhyme , Shipra Publications (Delhi, India), 2002.

Translated poetry collected in numerous omnibus volumes, including Later Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translation and introduction by A. Bose, foreword by Yehudi Menuhin with assessment by Hermann Hesse, P. Owen, 1974, Funk, 1976, Minerva Press (New York, NY), 1976; Forty Poems of Rabindra Nath Tagore, edited by Sisir Kumar Ghose, Arnold-Heinemann (New Delhi), 1984; Some Songs and Poems from Rabindranath Tagore, translation by Pratima Bowes, Allied, 1984; and Selected Poems: Rabindranath Tagore, translation by William Radice, Viking Penguin, 1985.

PLAYS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

• Prakritir Pratisodh (verse drama), [India], 1884, translation by Edwin Lo-tien Fang published as Sanyasi, Commercial Press (Shanghai), 1936; also published as Sanyasi; or, The Ascetic in Sacrifice and Other Plays, Macmillan (New York), 1917.
• Raja O Rani (verse drama), [India], 1889, translation published as The King and Queen in Sacrifice and Other Plays, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917; translation by Shakuntala Rao Sastri published as Devouring Love, East West Institute (New York), 1961.
• Visarjan (verse drama), [India], 1890, translation published in Sacrifice and Other Plays, Macmillan (New York), 1917; new version edited and translated by R. K. Bamsal, published as Sacrifice, Uniteck Publications (Agra), 1971.
• Chitrangada (verse drama), [India], 1892, translation by Birenda Nath Roy, Sribhumi Publishing Co., 1957; translation by the author published as Chitra, the India Society (London), 1913, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1926.
• Viday-Abhisap (verse drama), [India], 1894, translation by Thompson published as The Curse at Farewell, Harrap, 1924; also published as Kach and Debjani in The Fugitive, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1921.
• Malini, first published in Kavya Granthavali, Satyaprasad Gangopadhyaya, 1896, translation published in Sacrifice and Other Plays, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917.
• Saradotsav (one-act), [India], 1908 (new edition published as Rinsodh, 1921), translation published as Autumn Festival, Brahmo Mission Press (Calcutta), 1919.
• Raja, [India], 1910 (new edition published as Arup Ratan, 1920), translation by the author published as The King of the Dark Chamber, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1914.
• Dak-Ghar, [India], 1912, translation by Devabrata Mukerjea published as The Post Office, preface by W. B. Yeats, Cuala Press (Ireland), 1914, T. M. MacGlinchey, 1971, new translation published as The Post Office, Macmillan (New York), 1914, Verry, 1978.
• Phalguni, [India], 1916, translation by Andrews and Nishi-Kanta Sen with revision by the author published as The Cycle of Spring, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917.
• Sacrifice and Other Plays, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917, Macmillan (London), 1963.
• Mukta-dhara, [India], 1922, translation published as The Waterfall in Modern Review, 1922 ; translation by Marjorie Sykes published in Three Plays, Oxford University Press (Bombay), 1950.
• Rakta-karavi, [India], 1924, translation published as Red Oleanders, illustrations by Gagendranath Tagore, in Visva-Bharati Quarterly, September, 1924, translation published as Red Oleanders, Macmillan (London), 1925, Macmillan (New York), 1926.
• Natir Puja, [India], 1926 (first produced at Santiniketan, May 7, 1926), translation by Sykes published serially in Visva-Bharati Quarterly, February-October, 1945 , published as Dancing Girl's Worship in Three Plays, Oxford University Press (Bombay), 1950.
• Chandalika, [India], 1933 (first produced in Calcutta at Madan Theatre, September 12, 1933), translation and introduction by Kripalani published in Visva-Bharati Quarterly, February, 1938, translation by Sykes published in Three Plays, Oxford University Press (Bombay), 1950.
• Chandalika Nrityanatya (dance drama), [India], 1938, translation by Shyamaree Devi published in Orient Review, January-February, 1956.
• 1955-56 Syama, [India], 1939 (first produced in Calcutta, October 10, 1936), translation by Bharatendu Chakravarti published in Eastern Post, winter, translation by P. K. Saha published in Thought, July 31, 1971.
• Bansari, Visva-Bharati, 1943, reprinted, 1948.
• Three Plays (contains Mukta-dhara, Natir Puja, and Chandalika ), translation by Sykes, Oxford University Press (Bombay), 1950, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1970.
• Three Riddle Plays (contains The Test, The Reception, and The Patron ), translation by Prithvindra Chakravarti, Ind-US, 1983.

NOVELS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

• Nashtanir, [India], 1901, translation by Mary M. Lago and Supriya Sen published as The Broken Nest, introduction by Lago, University of Missouri Press, 1971.
• Chokher Bali (first published serially in Bangadarsan, 1901), [India], 1903, translation by Surendranath Tagore published as Eyesore in Modern Review, January-December, 1914, translation by Kripalani published as Binodini, W. S. Heinman (New York, NY), 1959, revised edition, Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), 1968.
• Nauka Dubi (first published serially in Bangadarsan, 1903), [India], 1906, translation by J. G. Drummond published as The Wreck, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1921.
• Gora (first published serially in Pravasi, 1907-10), [India], 1910, translation by W. W. Pearson published serially in Modern Review, January-December, 1923, translation by the author with revision by Surendranath Tagore, Macmillan (London), 1924 , Macmillan (New York, NY), 1925; abridged and simplified edition by E. F. Dodd, Macmillan (London), 1963.
• Chaturanga, [India], 1916, translation published serially as A Story in Four Chapters in Modern Review, February-May, 1922, translation published as Broken Ties, Macmillan (London), 1925, translation by Asok Mitra published as Chaturanga, Sahitya Academi (New Delhi), 1963, Interculture Associates, 1974.
• Ghare-Baire, [India], 1916, translation by Surendranath Tagore published serially as At Home and Outside in Modern Review, January-December, 1918, translation with revision by the author published as The Home and the World, Macmillan (New York), 1919, Verry, 1978.
• Sesher Kavita, [India], 1929, translation by Kripalani published as Farewell My Friend, New India Publishing Co. (London), 1946.
• Dui Bon, [India], 1933, translation by Kripalani published as Two Sisters, Visva-Bharati, 1945.
• Malancha, [India], 1934, translation by Kripalani published with Sesher Kavita as Farewell My Friend [and] The Garden, Jaico Publishing House (Bombay), 1956.
• Char Adhyay, [India], 1934, translation published as Novelette of Young India: Four Chapters in Asia, December, 1936-April, 1937, translation by Surendranath Tagore published as Four Chapters, Visva-Bharati, c. 1950.

SHORT FICTION IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

• Glimpses of Bengal Life, translation and introduction by Rajani Ranjan Sen, G. A. Nateson & Co. (Madras), 1913.
• The Hungry Stones and Other Stories, translation by the author, Andrews, Thompson, Panna Lal Basu, Prabhat Kumar Mukerji, and Sister Nivedita, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1916, AMS Press, 1970.
• Mashi and Other Stories, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1918, Arno Press, 1978.
• Tota-Kahini, translation published as The Parrot's Training, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1918, published in Bengali in Lipika, 1922.
• The Trial of the Horse, Brahmo Mission Press (Calcutta), 1919, published in The Parrot's Training and Other Stories.
• Broken Ties and Other Stories, Macmillan (London), 1925, Arno Press, 1978.
• The Runaway and Other Stories, edited by Somnath Maitra, Visva-Bharati, 1958.

Translated short fiction collected in numerous omnibus volumes, including Collected Stories from Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan (Calcutta), 1970, and Collected Stories, Macmillan (New Delhi), 1974.

NONFICTION IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

• Jivansmriti (autobiography; first published serially in Pravasi, 1911), [India], 1912, translation by Surendranath Tagore published serially in Modern Review as My Reminiscences, January-December, 1916, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917, Gordon Press, 1978, published as Reminiscences, Macmillan (London), 1946, reprinted, 1971.
• Sadhana: The Realisation of Life, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1913, Omen Press (Tuscon, AZ), 1972.
• Personality, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917, Macmillan (Madras), 1970.
• Nationalism (lectures), Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917, Greenwood Press, 1973.
• Japan Yatri, [India], 1919, translation by Shakuntala Rao Sastri published as A Visit to Japan, edited by Walter Donald Kring, East West Institute, 1961.
• Greater India, S. Ganesan (Madras), 1921.
• Thought Relics, translation by the author, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1921, enlarged edition published as Thoughts from Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Andrews, 1929.
• Creative Unity, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1922, Gordon Press, 1978.
• Ethics of Destruction, Ganesh & Co. (Madras), 1923.
• Talks in China: Lectures Delivered in April and May, 1924, Visva-Bharati, 1925.
• The Religion of Man (lectures), Macmillan (New York, NY), 1931, AMS Press, 1981.
• India and the Pacific, Allen & Unwin, 1937.
• The True India: A Plea for Understanding, Allen & Unwin, 1939.
• Chhelebela, [India], 1940, translation by Sykes published as My Boyhood Days, Visva-Bharati (Santiniketan), 1940, 2nd edition, Visva-Bharati (Calcutta), 1941.
• Man (lectures), Kitabistan (Allahabad), 1946, Andhra University Press (Waltair), 1965.
• My Early Life, edited by Rajendra Verma, Macmillan (Madras), 1952, Macmillan (Bombay), 1955.
• Visva-Bharati and Its Institutions, Pulinbihari Sen (Santiniketan), 1956.
• Our Universe (first published as Visva-Parichaya 1937), translation by Indu Dutt, foreword by Malcolm MacDonald, Meridian Books (London), 1958, Interculture Associates, 1969.
• Towards Universal Man (essays), edited by Bhabani Bhattacharya, introduction by Humayan Kabir, Asia Publishing House (New York, NY), 1961.
• Pioneer in Education: Essays and Exchanges Between R. Tagore and L. K. Elmhirst, J. Murray, 1961.
• Rabindranath Tagore on Rural Reconstruction, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (New Delhi), 1962.
• The Cooperative Principle (essays and addresses), edited by Pulinhihari Sen, translation by Surendranath Tagore, Apurvakumar Chanda, Somnath Maitra, and Jitendranarayan Sen, Visva-Bharati, 1963.
• Mahatma Gandhi, compiled by Pulinbihari Sen, Visva-Bharati, 1963.
• Gagendranath Tagore (art criticism), edited by Pulinbihari Sen, Indian Society of Oriental Art (Calcutta), 1972.
• Selected Writings on Literature and Language , edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.
• Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings for Children , edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Translated nonfiction collected in numerous omnibus volumes, including Glorious Thoughts of Tagore, compiled by N. B. Sen, New Book Society of India (New Delhi), 1965; Upanishads in the Eyes of Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology of the Poet Tagore's Writings, Interpretative of and Related to Upanishadic Verse, compiled by Anil Kumar Mukherji, foreword by Saroj Kumar Das, Dasgupta (Calcutta), 1975; and Lectures and Addresses, Asia Book Corporation of America, 1988.

LETTERS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

• Chhinnapatra, [India], 1912, translation by Surendranath Tagore published as Glimpses of Bengal, Macmillan (London), 1911, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1921.
• Letters, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917.
• Letters from Abroad (first published serially in Modern Review, October, 1921-December, 1922), S. Ganesan (Madras), 1924, enlarged edition published as Letters to a Friend, edited by Andrews, Allen & Unwin, 1928.
• Paschim Yatrir Diary, [India], 1924, translation by Dutt published as The Diary of a Westward Voyage, Asia Publishing House (New York, NY), 1962, Greenwood Press, 1975.
• Russiar Chithi, [India], 1931, translation by Sasadhar Sinha published as Letters from Russia, Visva-Bharati, 1960.
• (With Mohandas Gandhi) Mahatmaji and the Depressed Humanity, Visva-Bharati Book Shop (Calcutta), 1932.
• (With Gilbert Murray) East and West, Allen & Unwin, 1935.
• (With Yone Noguchi) Poet to Poet, Visva-Bharati, 1939.
• Rolland and Tagore: Letters and Transcripts of Conversations, 1919-1930, translation by Indira Chaudhurani and Alex Aronson, edited by Aronson and Kripalani, Visva-Bharati, 1945.
• Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911-1941, edited with introduction and notes by Mary M. Lago, Harvard University Press, 1972.
• The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915-1941, compiled and edited with an introduction by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, National Book Trust (New Delhi, India), 1997.
• Tagore's works are collected in numerous general omnibus volumes, including The Golden Boat, translation by B. Bhattacharya, Allen & Unwin, 1932, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1933, 5th revised edition, Ind-US, 1980; The Housewarming and Other Selected Writings, edited and with an introduction by Chakravarty, translation by Mary Lago, Tarun Gupta, and Chakravarty, New American Library, 1965; Tripura's Ties with Tagore: A Compilation of Selected Letters and Songs of Tagore, translation by Chiranjiv Kaviraj, Directorate of Education, Government of Tripura Press (Agartala), 1969; Collected Works, Gordon Press, 1978; The Mystifying Songs by Tagore, Gloucester Art Press, 1988; Selected Short Stories, Viking Penguin, 1991; I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems, South Asia Books, 1992; The Collected Poems and Plays, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1993 and The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sisir Kumar Das, Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), 1994.
• Author of numerous songs, collected in such volumes as Gitimalya, [India], 1914, translation by Brother James published as Gitimalya: Garland of Songs, University Press (Dhaka, Bangladesh), 1984; Twenty-six Songs of Rabindranath Tagore, introduction and literal translation by Arnold A. Bake and Phillip Stern, free translation by R. Tagore, P. Geuthner (Paris), 1935; and Svaralipi: Anthology of One Hundred Songs of Rabindranath Tagore in Staff Notation, introduction by Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji, foreword by Kamaladevi Chattapadhyay, Sangeet Natak Akademi (New Delhi), Volume 1, 1961, Volume 2, 1967.
• Translator of numerous works, and contributor of works in a variety of genres to books and periodicals.

Further Readings

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

• Acyuiba, Abu Sacyaida, Modernism and Tagore, Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), 1995.
• Aronson, Alexander, Rabindranath through Western Eyes, Kitabistan (Allahabad), 1943.
• Aronson, Alexander and Krishna R. Kripalani, editors, Rolland and Tagore, Visva-Bharati (Calcutta), 1945.
• Basu, Sankar, Chekov and Tagore: A Comparative Study of Their Short Stories, Sterling Publishers, 1985.
• Bhattachaya, Bhabani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume, 1861-1961, Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), 1961.
• Bose, Abinash Chandra, Three Mystic Poets: A Study of W. B. Yeats, A. E., and Rabindranath Tagore, Folcroft, 1970.
• Bose, Buddhadeva, An Acre of Green Grass: A Review of Modern Bengali Literature, Orient Longmans (Calcutta), 1948.
• Bose, Buddhadeva, Tagore: Portrait of a Poet, University of Bombay, 1962.
• Chakrabarti, Mohit, Rabindranath Tagore: A Quest, Gyan (New Delhi), 1995.
• Chakravorti, Byomkesh Chandra, Rabindranath Tagore: His Mind and Art, Young India Publications (New Delhi), 1971.
• Chatterjee, Ramananda, editor, The Golden Book of Tagore, Golden Book Committee (Calcutta), 1931.
• Chatterjee, Bhabatosh, Rabindranath Tagore and Modern Sensiblity, Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Dutta, Krishna, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad -Minded Man, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1995.
• Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: A Modern Reader, St. Martin's Press, 1997.
• Elmhirst, Leonard, Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in Education, J. Murray, 1961.
• Forster, E. M., Abinger Harvest, Harcourt, 1964.
• Gargi, Balwant, Folk Theater of India, University of Washington Press, 1966.
• Ghose, Sisir Kumar, The Later Poems of Tagore, Asia Publishing House (London), 1961.
• Ghosh, Jyotis Chandra, Bengali Literature, Oxford University Press (London), 1948.
• Ghosha, aSacnkha, The Poet's Intention: The Writer, the Writing, the Reader, Papyrus (Calcutta), 1994.
• Hay, Stephen N., Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India, Harvard University Press, 1970.
• Henn, Katherine, Rabindranath Tagore: A Bibliography, Scarecrow, 1985.
• Joshi, R. G. , Myth in Indian Drama, B. R. Pub. Corp. (New Delhi), 1994.
• Kabir, Humayun, Studies in Bengali Poetry, Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan (Bombay), 1962.
• Khanolkar, Gangadhar Devarau, The Lute and the Plough: A Life of Rabindranath Tagore, Grove, 1962.
• Kripalani, Krishna R., Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography, Oxford University Press (London), 1962.
• Lago, Mary M., Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911-1941, Harvard University Press, 1972.
• Lago, Mary M., Rabindranath Tagore, Twayne, 1976.
• Leny, V., Rabindranath Tagore: His Personality and World, translation by Guy McKeever, Phillips, Allen & Unwin, 1939.
• Maitraye Devi, Rabindranath: The Man behind His Poetry, Writers Workshop (Calcutta), 1973.
• Manindranath, Jana, Education for Life: Tagore and Modern Thinkers, South Asia Books, 1985.
• Mukherjee, Sujit, Passage to America: The Reception of Rabindranath Tagore in the United States, 1912-1914, Bookland Private (Calcutta), 1964.
• Mukherji, Bhabani Charan, Vedanta and Tagore, M. D. Publications (New Delhi), 1994.
• Mukherji, Dhurjati Prasad, Tagore: A Study, Padma Publications (Bombay), 1944.
• Mukherji, Prabhat Kumar, Life of Tagore, translation by Sisirkumar Ghosh, Interculture Associates, 1975.
• Nagar, Anupam Ratan Shankar, Mysticism in Tagore's Poetry, Prakash Book Depot (Bareilly), 1995.
• Naik, M. K., Perspectives on Indian Prose in English, Humanities, 1982.
• Naik, M. K. and S. Mokashi-Punekar, editors, Perspectives on Indian Drama in English, Oxford University Press (Madras), 1977.
• Nandy, Ashis, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.
• Naravane, Vishwanath S., An Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan (Madras), 1977.
• Nehru, Jawaharlal, Discovery of India, John Day, 1946.
• Radhakrishan, Sarvepalli, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan (London), 1918.
• Raj, G. V., Tagore: The Novelist, South Asia Books, 1983.
• Ramaswami Sastri, Kadami Sundararama, Sir Rabindranath Tagore: His Life, Personality, and Genius, Ganesh & Co. (Madras), 1916.
• Ray, Nihar-Ranjan, An Artist in Life: A Commentary on the Life and Works of Rabindranath Tagore, University of Kerala (Trivandrum), 1967.
• Rhys, Ernest, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study, Macmillan (London), 1915.
• Roy, Basanta Koomar, Rabindranath Tagore: The Man and His Poetry, Dodd, 1915.
• Roy, Dilip Kumar, Among the Great, Jaico Publishing House (Bombay), 1950.
• Sen Gupta, Santosh Chandra, The Great Sentinel: A Study of Rabindranath Tagore, A. Mukherjee & Co. (Calcutta), 1948.
• Sheth, Nirumpama (with Ajita aSeotha), Tagore, Indian Film & Film Music, Pankaj Mullic Music Research Foundation (Bombay, India), 1994.
• Spiller, Robert E. and others, editors, Literary History of the United States, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1962, 4th edition, revised, 1974.
• Srinivasa Iyengar, Kodaganallur Ramaswami, Indian Writing in English, Asia Publishing House (New York, NY), 1962.
• Sykes, Marjorie, Rabindranath Tagore, Orient Longmans (Madras), 1943.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, Sonar Tari, [India], 1894.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, Gitanjali, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1913.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, My Reminiscences, Macmillan (New York), 1917.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, Letters to a Friend, edited by C. F. Andrews, Allen & Unwin, 1928.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, My Boyhood Days, translation by Marjorie Sykes, Visva-Bharati (Santiniketan), 1940.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, Binodini, translated by Krishna R. Kripalani, Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), 1959.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, A Tagore Reader, edited by Amiya Chakravarty, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1961.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, A Tagore Testament, translation by Indu Dutt, Jaico Publishing House (Bombay), 1969.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, Lectures and Addresses, Macmillan (New Delhi), 1970.
• Tagore, Rabindranath, Sadhana: The Realisation of Life, Macmillan (New York, NY), Omen Press (Tuscon, AZ), 1972.
• Tagore, Rathindranath, On the Edges of Time, Orient Longmans (Calcutta), 1958.
• Thakurta, P. Guha, The Bengali Drama: Its Origin and Development, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930.
• Thompson, Edward J., Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist, 2nd edition, revised, Oxford University Press (London), 1948.
• Thompson, Edward J. and Arthur Mariman Spencer, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work, YMCA Publishing House (Calcutta), 1921.
• Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Volume 3, Gale, 1980.
• Venma, Rajendra, Man and Society in Tagore and Eliot, Humanities, 1982.

PERIODICALS

• American Quarterly, fall, 1962.
• Booklist, July, 1992.
• Books Abroad, Volume 46, number 3, 1972.
• Cornhill Magazine, spring, 1972.
• Encounter, January, 1974.
• Fortnightly Review, March, 1913.
• Indian Literature, Volume 9, number 5, 1976; September-October, 1980.
• Journal of Asian Studies, November, 1959.
• Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Volume 8, 1973.
• Journal of Indian Writing in English, Volume 6, number 1, 1978.
• Mahfil: A Quarterly of South Asian Literature, Volume 3, 1966.
• Modern Drama, May, 1970.
• New Statesman and Nation, August 16, 1941.
• New Statesman and Society, June 14, 1991.
• Review of National Literatures, Volume 10, 1979.
• Saturday Review of Literature, August 16, 1941.
• South Asian Review, Volume 5, number 2, 1981.
• Studies in Romanticism, Volume 31, 1963-64.
• Times (London), July 11, 1913.
• Town Topics, June 4, 1914.
• Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Volume 17, 1951; Volume 41, numbers 1-4, 1975-76.
• Washington Post, August 8, 1941.
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Rabindranath Tagore Essay

Essay On Rabindranath Tagore - Rabindranath Tagore was one of the legendary poets, novelists and social workers of his time. Here are 100, 200 and 500 word essays on Rabindranath Tagore. According to one of Rabindranath Tagore's poems, the person who brings light to another’s life the most sings to those still in darkness. Tagore always tried to encourage the Indian people and infuse a sense of unity and harmony among them through his writings and songs. Here are a few sample essays on Rabindranath Tagore

100 Words Essay On Rabindranath Tagore

200 words essay on rabindranath tagore, 500 words essay on rabindranath tagore, rabindranath tagore’s work and achievements.

Rabindranath Tagore, brought immense happiness into people’s lives. A poet, song composer, novelist, playwright, painter, teacher, and a great scholar born on 7th May’ 1861 at Jorasanko. Considered a Nobel laureate who was the son of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi.

Rabindranath Tagore is well known for composing 2232 beautiful songs, including the national anthem of India and Bangladesh, establishing Shantiniketan as a university and mesmerising everyone through his powerful yet subtle writing. He lost many loved ones in his entire life, and this grief enabled him to create magic through his songs. He passed away on 7th August 1941.

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7th May in Jorasanko, India. He was a great poet, writer, politician, philosopher, and novelist. Rabindranath Tagore was the son of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. He is known as “Kobiguru”, “Rabindranath Thakur”, and “Biswakabi”. Tagore married Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri in 1983 and had two sons.

Contributions | His works on art and literature continue to be encouraged to date. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1913 for his English version of Geetanjali, a collection of his Bengali poems. Tagore wrote several dramas, of which “Chitra” is a significant one. He also wrote many short stories. His collection of 85 short stories, named Golpoguccho, has also been one of his great works. Tagore wrote and composed the national anthem of India and Bangladesh.

After he returned to India, he opened his school named Shantiniketan, where he taught the poor. Due to his love and affection for his country, he made many social reforms. He also wrote numerous musical plays. His contribution to Indian Literature is considerable and unforgettable. Apart from all of these, Tagore also influenced the Indian Nationalist Movement and opposed British rule.

Before he could see India getting its independence, Tagore passed away at the age of 80 years in 1941.

Rabindranath Tagore was a mesmerising poet, a patriot, a painter, an eminent philosopher, a renowned novelist, and an educationalist. He was born on the 7th of May, 1861, in Jorasanko, Calcutta, to a Bengali Brahmin family. His birthday is also celebrated as Rabindra Jayanti. He did his early education at home itself. Later on, he went to England to complete his further studies.

Rabindranath Tagore, by his words, touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of absolute freedom for the Indians. He desired a country where the Indians could live with full dignity and respect. Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian to be awarded the Nobel prize. For his work, ‘Geetanjali’, Tagore was awarded the laurels.

Stories | Bhikarini is his first short story. His collection of Golpoguccho, a collection of 84 stories, has also been one of his great works, which he wrote from 1891 through 1895. He reshaped Bengali literature with a blend of modernism. Tagore also had excellent skills in drawing and painting. Tagore’s famous English poems included ‘Where the mind is without fear’, ‘Let Me Not Forget, Last Curtain’, and so on.

Songs | Tagore was also fond of writing songs. Through Rabindra Sangeet, one of the great works, he used to reflect the beautiful Indian culture. Rabindranath Tagore is the only person to write and compose the national anthems, Jana Gana Mana and Amar Sonar Bangla of India and Bangladesh, respectively. During the Bengal partition in 1905, Tagore wrote the song, Banglar Mati Banglar Jol, to reunite the people of Bengal.

One crucial dimension of Tagore’s life was his involvement with Shantiniketan. First, it was used as an ashram, a place for meditation. Then it was converted to Vishva Bharati University. Tagore helped the poor by educating them about freedom to be instilled among the Indian people regardless of caste and creed.

Rabindranath Tagore And Indian Independence

Tagore’s views on Independence were different from the other freedom fighters. On the one hand, he strongly opposed British rule, but on the other hand, he sidelined the Swadeshi movement by denouncing it. When the British announced the Bengal partition, he lectured on Swadeshi Samaj, proposing different alternative solutions to the scenario. After the Bengal partition took place in 1905, Rabindranath Tagore started the Rakhi Utsav where he tried to bond the Muslim and Hindu community together.

He regarded the British as a general symptom of the social ills of the masses. He believed that only by boycotting British products the idea of anti-colonialism cannot be achieved. He suggested incorporating western culture into Indian culture.

He believed that learning with nature was more important than conventional western knowledge. He followed this idea even after he laid the foundation of his university, Viswa Bharati. He named this place Shantiniketan. The educational reforms brought about by him are still being followed in some of the universities.

Rabindranath Tagore regarded the British as a general symptom of the social ills of the masses. After the formation of the Indian National Congress, Tagore shifted his focus to the National Freedom Movement. He spread the idea of national integrity among the Indians. He was often called “Biswakabi” because of his universal ideology.

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Essay On Rabindranath Tagore | Essay On My Favourite Poet Rabindranath Tagore in English for Students and Children

February 12, 2024 by Veerendra

Essay on Rabindranath Tagore: The National Anthem that we sing with such pride as written by Rabindranath Tagore, who was one of the most significant men and nationalists in India. He was a poet as well as a writer and had won the Nobel Prize for his piece known as “Gitanjali.” His writings are still studied by students all over the world. We have compiled some long and short essays for the use of the readers.

You can read more  Essay Writing  about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Long and Short Essays on Rabindranath Tagore in English Language for Kids and Children

Given below is an extended essay of approximately 400-500 words and is for the students of standards 7-10 and a short piece of nearly 100-150 words for the students of standard 1-6.

Essay On Rabindranath Tagore is for the use of students in classes 7,8,9 and 10.

Long Essay on Rabindranath Tagore in English 500 words

Rabindranath Tagore is the Bard of Bengal and is hailed as one of the most prominent Indian Poets. Tagore’s intense contribution to the world of Literature earned him the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature. His verses and proses are considered unique in their way that the readers can relate with their day to day lives.

Tagore was born in an elite family of Calcutta and was the youngest of the thirteen siblings. He was not the brightest of student during his school life, but there was always a creative spark in him, which made formal learning difficult for him, and he detested the concept of classroom schooling.

He received great classical music lessons from professional musicians, who were sent by his father. Tagore’s family had an educational bent of mind, which made him stand out of the rest.

His phenomenal talent in portraying the real state of Bengal attracted the mass. In his stories, he tried to reflect what he saw and felt instead of writing farfetched stories. He had used his writings as a weapon to break free from the shackles of the traditional society and helped to construct a modern and logical society. His work is liked and appreciated all over the world and has been translated into innumerable languages.

“Manasi” was one of his best works, which perfectly showcased who genius a writer he was. Many of his poems were a satire to the society and was written t. o raise voice against the dominating British rule. His works portray the humble life and miseries simultaneously. His genuineness was shown by the poignancy and poise writings.

Tagore was quite vocal about his views on different political movements. He was more in support of the intellectual upliftment, and his views often conflicted with Mahatma Gandhi and other eminent political leaders. Tagore was not in favor of the Swadeshi Movement, and Globalisation was something that had a significant impact on him even during the 19th century. He was so patriotic that he had returned the Honorary Knighthood award as a protesting act against the Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy.

You can read more Famous Personalities/People’s Essay writings over here.

Tagore was credited to have written the National Anthem of India. He had also written the National Anthem of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Aamar Shonar Bangla, and Sri Lanka Matha, respectively. He first wrote the Sri Lanka Matha and then was translated to Sinhala by his student, Ananda Samarakoon.

The dissatisfaction of the traditional education system in England inspired him to start the “Vishwabharati University” in Santiniketan, which was initially a school that offers a friendly environment for the students to study and explore their creativity. The ending of the legend’s life was painful. He was infested by 2 elongated attacks of sickness and was affected by an exhausting disorder.

Read More: Mahatma Gandhi Essay In English 150 Words

Short Essay on Rabindranath Tagore in English 250 words

Students in classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 can use this Essay On Rabindranath Tagore.

Rabindranath Tagore was a great Bengali poet who had upgraded Bengali Literature in commendable ways. He was the youngest son of the leader of Brahmo Samaj, Debendranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore wrote the National Anthem of India and two other countries. He had written famous Dramas like Visarjan and Valmiki Pratibha. Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories are the most appreciated ones, out of which The Kabuliwala is very renowned. He received the Nobel Prize for his work “Gitanjali: the song offerings.” He passed away on 8th august 1941 when the world mourned for him.

Read More: Essay On Rabindranath Tagore

10 Lines Essay on Rabindranath Tagore in English 150 words

• Rabindranath Tagore was born in the Tagore family in Mansion of Jorasanko, Calcutta, on 7th May 1861.
• Tagore was an extraordinary writer who was determined to bring concrete changes in society.
• During the freedom struggle, his ideologies did not match with Gandhi and many famous patriots.
• He had first started the ceremony of tying the “yellow thread” to promote the idea of the fraternity during the Partition of Bengal.
• Tagore was a true patriot; he had written poems and songs, which was a powerful weapon to raise voice against the British.
• He was an incredible painter, artist, humanist, nationalist, author, rationalist, writer, philanthropist, and an eminent academician.
• He wrote the National Anthem of India, which is Jana Gana Mana, Bangladesh, which is Aamar Shonar Bangla, and Sri Lanka which is Sri Lanka Matha.
• He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1913 for his much-celebrated work, “Gitanjali: the Song Offerings.”
• He was deeply disheartened about the traditional education system, which inspired him to build up an institution unlike others, and this is how the world-famous “Viswabharati University” was formed.
• Tagore died on 8th August 1941, leaving behind his dramatic works and ideologies, which are to date studied by students all around the globe.

Frequently Asked Questions Essay On Rabindranath Tagore

Question 1. What was Rabindranath Tagore famous for?

Answer: Rabindranath Tagore was famous for his paintings, short stories, novels, and poems. Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Literature.

Question 2. In which year was Rabindranath Tagore born?

Answer: The Bard of Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore, was born on 7th May 1861, Calcutta.

Question 3. What are Rabindranath Tagore’s most famous short stories?

Answer: Some of Tagore’s most celebrated short stories are the Kabuliwala, the postmaster, etc.

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Biography Online

Rabindranath Tagore

Poet, writer and humanitarian, Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and he played a key role in the renaissance of modern India. Tagore is most widely known for his poetry, but he was also an accomplished author of novels, short stories, plays and articles. He took an active interest in a widespread range of social, cultural and artistic endeavours. He has been described as one of the first Twentieth Century’s global man.

“So I repeat we never can have a true view of man unless we have a love for him. Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity.”

— Sadhana: The Realisation of Life, (1916)

Short Biography Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath began writing from an early age and impressed with his free-flowing style and spontaneous compositions. He mostly rejected formal schooling; he spent much time being taught at home. In 1878 he travelled to England and sought to study law at University College, London, but he left before finishing the degree.

After returning to India, in 1901, Tagore moved to Shantiniketan to found an ashram which became his focal point for writing and his view on schooling. He chose the name for the ashram – Shantiniketan meaning ‘Abode of Peace.’

“Love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment; it is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation.”

– Tagore, Sādhanā : The Realisation of Life (1916)

Friendship with Gandhi

Tagore was firm friends with Gandhi and admired him very much. But, despite this friendship, he could be critical of his views. For example, he disagreed with Gandhi’s views on Swaraj protests and upbraided Gandhi when Gandhi claimed an earthquake was ‘divine retribution for the mistreatment of Dalits in India.’ Yet despite the frequent divergence of opinions, they could admire each other. When Gandhi went on a fast unto death, it was Tagor who was able to persuade Gandhi to give up his fast and look after his health.

Nobel Prize for Literature 1913

In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his work ‘ Gitanjali ‘ This made his writings internationally known and his fame spread throughout the world.

“My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.” – Gitanjali

Rabindranath Tagore with Einstein

This gave Tagore the opportunity to travel extensively giving lectures and recitals in many different countries. He also became acquainted with many of the leading cultural contemporaries of the day; this included W.B.Yeats, George Bernard Shaw , Romain Rolland, Robert Frost and Albert Einstein .

Tagore had a great love for nature and many of his poems invoke the simple beauties of the natural world. For Tagore, his religion could be found in the wonders and mysteries of nature – as much as in temples and sacred books.

Tagore was a prolific composer of music. He composed over 2,000 songs which have been popularised and sung widely across Bengal. Like his literature, he broke away from classical constraints to offer a great emotive and spiritual appeal. Tagore is unique for being the official composer for the national anthem of two countries – India’s Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh’s Amar Shonar Bangla .

Tagore was an opponent of British imperialism, though he also felt Indians had a duty to improve their self-education; he said that British rule was partly due to the state India had fallen into. In particular, he was very denigrating about India’s obsession with caste.

‘the ultimate truth in man is not in his intellect or his possessions; it is in his illumination of mind, in his extension of sympathy across all barriers of caste and colour, in his recognition of the world, not merely as a storehouse of power, but as a habitation of man’s spirit, with its eternal music of beauty and its inner light of the divine presence.’ – Tagore, The Poet’s Religion’ in Creative Unity (1922) [ 1 ]

In 1919, Tagore returned his knighthood in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, in which many peaceful Indian protesters were killed.

Tagore was a polymath, and towards the end of his life he took up art and also pursued an interest in science. Tagore was also very much an internationalist, criticising nationalism, though also writing songs and articles in support of the general principle of the Indian independence movement.

“Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live. “

– Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore view on Religion

Tagore had mixed views on religion. He was brought up in a traditional Hindu family and taught to pray and meditate from an early age. He remembers the peace of mind he developed from chanting the Gayatri Mantra, but at the same time was detached from the more formalistic aspects of religion. He tended to see religion as not scriptures and places of worship but the life we lead. As he explained:

“My religion is my life – it is growing with my growth – it has never been grafted on me from outside.” ~ Tagore to Robert Bridges, 8 July 1914.

He was keen to avoid any fanaticism and saw the strength of his own Hindu religion as its ability to see more than one path to the goal. His life-long aspiration was to see a harmony of religions flourish in India – not from mere tolerance but an appreciation of the different merits other religions had.

‘The Idea of freedom to which India aspired was based upon realization of spiritual unity…India’s great achievement, which is still stored deep within her heart, is waiting to unite within itself Hindu, Moslem, Buddhist and Christian, not by force, not by the apathy of resignation, but in the harmony of active cooperation.’ ~ Tagore in Berlin, 1921.

However, he was also critical of the Hindu caste system.

Tagore’s poetry frequently hint at a mystical view of the world.

“In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless.” – Gitanjali “The human soul is on its journey from the law to love, from discipline to liberation, from the moral plane to the spiritual.” Sādhanā : The Realisation of Life (1916)

Tagore died on 7th August 1941, after a long and painful illness, aged 80. He died in his family home.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Rabindranath Tagore ”, Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net , 1st Jun. 2009. Last updated 1 March 2019.

Stories From Tagore

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The Essential Tagore

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• Short poems of Rabindranath Tagore 
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Essay on Rabindranath Tagore in English [500+ Words]

Essay on Rabindranath Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore was a great Indian poet. Furthermore, he was also a philosopher, patriot,  painter, and humanist. In this article, you are going to read an essay on Rabindranath Tagore in English (500+ words). This essay will be helpful for students from class 1 to class 12. So, let’s begin.

Biographical Sketch of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore: Essay

Introduction:.

Rabindranath Tagore was a phenomenon in the literary firmament not only of Bengal, but of India. Rarely has human civilisation been blessed with such a versatile genius. The soul of a nation expresses itself through him. Such was Valmiki in ancient India, Homer in Greece, Virgil in Rome, Dante in Italy, Goethe in Germany. Rabindranath is, in the words of Dr. Radhakrishnan, ‘the greatest figure in modern R Indian Renaissance’.

Early Life & Education:

Rabindranath was born on May 7, 1861 at Jorasanko, Kolkata. He was the youngest son of Maharshi Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. He had a great dislike for schooling of the orthodox kind. His schools-The Oriental Seminary and the Calcutta Normal School-could not detain him for long. In 1871, he was sent to England to study. He was in Brighton School for some time. But he could. not complete his education there and returned home.

Also Read: Paragraph on Rabindranath Tagore

Literary Works:

Rabindranath was the doyen of Bengali’s cultural arena even in his early life. He composed his first poem at the age of twelve only. For nearly seventy years since then, this prolific genius penned poems, essays, dramas, short stories, and novels which attained the highest degree of splendour.

His Gitanjali won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. At once, the German scholars called him the ‘World Poet.’ Western poets like WB Yeats praised the sublime beauty of his poems. Many of his other works have been translated into a number of languages. Among his works, Balaka contains the greatest of his poems. Chitrangada is a fine lyrical drama. Sonar Tari is a great lyric in Bengali. The King of the Dark Chamber, Gora, Ghare-Baire, Naibedya etc. are some of his immortal works. His The Religion of Man is a monument of literary achievement.

Other Works:

Rabindranath expressed human moods, longings, love, joys, and sorrows in all their variations. He embellished, elevated and lighted up every aspect of Bengali literature. He created a new age in the history of Bengali literature which was known as the age of Rabindranath. But a writer’s life of an ivory tower was not for him.

Tagore had guided the Adi Brahmo Samaj for some time. He also edited the Bharati and Bangadarshana-the two Bengali magazines. He was also associated with the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad.

The partition of Bengal brought him out in to the streets. Rabindranath gave up his knighthood in protest against the Jallianwalla bagh massacre. He set up a school at Santiniketan to implement his own ideas about education. He passed away on August 7, 1941.

Conclusion:

Rabindranath is beyond praise, criticism, beyond comparison. One should bow to this radiant genius, the Gurudev of Mahatma Gandhi. He gives us inspiration in. our weakness, hope in our despair, solace in our sorrow, and light in our darkness.

Read More: 1. Essay on Mother Teresa 2. APJ Abdul Kalam Essay in English  3. Essay on Swami Vivekananda

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Rabindranath Tagore Essay for Kids and Students

Rabindranath Tagore was one of the most legendary Indian poets and novelists of all times. He was an eminent philosopher, patriot and rationalist. He started his journey as a writer at a very young age. He was popularly referred to as “Gurudev” by everyone. In this article, we shall look into Rabindranath Tagore essay for kids.

Rabindranath Tagore was a popular personality who wrote several poems and short stories. He was the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize for his literary works. He was actively involved in politics and totally supported the Indian nationalists’ fight against the British rule. He was a great motivator and patriot who strongly supported India’s struggle for Independence. Click on the link given below to download Rabindranath Tagore essay PDF provided in a printable format.

Download “Short Essay on Rabindranath Tagore for Kids” PDF for FREE

Rabindranath tagore essay in english.

“Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7th May 1861 at Jorasanko, Calcutta to a Bengali Brahmin family with ancestral roots at Burdwan and Jessore districts. Later his house, Jorasanko Thakur Bari became a part of the Rabindra Bharati University campus. He was the son of Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and Sarada Devi and belonged to one of the renowned families that played a major role during the Bengal Renaissance.

Rabindranath Tagore was an outstanding poet, philosopher, playwright, dramatist, composer, social reformer and a talented painter. He completed his higher education in England. He began writing poems and short stories from a tender age and wrote dramatic pieces such as Valmiki Pratibha.

Rabindranath’s best drama was Visarjan and his first short story was Bhikarini. He later formed a huge collection of 84 short stories called Galpaguchchha during the period 1891-1895.

Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his collection of beautiful poetry, Gitanjali. He was India’s first Nobel Laureate who created other significant poetry such as Sonar Tori, Manasi and Balaka. Apart from poetry and dramas, Tagore held the mighty reputation of writing more than two thousand songs, which are now popularly known as “Rabindra Sangeet”. His songs reflect the beautiful Indian culture.

Tagore was also very fond of drawing and painting. He drew several sketches, doodles and paintings which were put up in exhibitions at Paris and London. He therefore reshaped Bengali literature, art and music with a blend of Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tagore despised the rote learning method and conceived a new kind of university and named it Visva Bharati which was a connecting link between India and the world. He laid the foundation stone of Visva Bharati on 24th December 1918 at Santiniketan. He taught the students and contributed his Nobel Prize money towards the development of the university.

In 1919, Rabindranath Tagore repudiated his knighthood to protest the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Tagore wrote some patriotic and politically charged songs which gained mass appeal. The national anthem of India – Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh – Amar Shonar Bangla were Tagore’s finest compositions depicting his patriotic nature.

Rabindranath Tagore was popularly known as “Gurudev”, “Kobiguru” and “Biswakobi” by the people of India. He was a multi-talented personality and well-known for his noteworthy contribution to the field of literature, art, politics and music. The great poet, playwright and philosopher breathed his last on 7th August 1941 at his ancestral residence in Jorasanko.”

We hope the essay about Rabindranath Tagore will help students to get an insight into the life and works of this eminent personality. These few lines on Rabindranath Tagore will enlighten kids about the notable personality and help them to write a simple yet impressive essay on the topic. We have included all the essential details about his family, literary works, contributions in the field of art, music, literature and politics, etc.

Loved the above Rabindranath Tagore essay? Being the most frequently asked essay topic for students, writing a short essay on Rabindranath Tagore gives an opportunity to students of primary and higher classes to explore and research about the famous Indian personality. Want to explore more such intriguing essays for kids on other topics? BYJU’S offers you the most captivating essay topics for kids that will help them in their formative years of learning.

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Rabindranath Tagore Essay

Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath from India whose knowledge expanded over a wide number of areas including music, literature, art etc.  Born in West Bengal on 7 th May 1861, Tagore started writing poetry at an early age of eight. Tagore strongly denounced the British Raj and supported Indian Nationalists. Tagore was critical of Gandhi activism; however, he played a significant role in resolving the dispute between Gandhi and Ambedkar on the dispute over separate electorates for the untouchables.

Long and Short Essay on Rabindranath Tagore in English

We have provided below short and long essay on Rabindranath Tagore in English for your information and knowledge.

These lines have been written in simple and effective English language to make them easily memorable and presentable when needed.

After going through these Rabindranath Tagore essay you will know about the life and achievements of Rabindranath Tagore and his contribution to the Indian freedom struggle.

The essays will be helpful in your school/college events and essay writing or speech giving competitions. Students can select any of the essays given below:

Rabindranath Tagore Essay 1 (100 words)

Rabindranath Tagore was a great Indian poet. He was born on 7 th of May in 1861 at Jorasanka, Kolkata. His parents name was Maharsi Debendranath Tagore (father) and Sarada Devi (mother).

He took his education at home under private teachers for various subjects. He started writing poems in his very early age. He is still a famous poet as he wrote thousands of poems, short stories, songs, essays, dramas, etc. Both, he and his works are famous all around the world. He became the first Indian who received the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his great writing named “Gitanjali”. He was also a philosopher, a painter, and a great patriot who composed our National Anthem titled as, “Jana Gana Mana”.

Rabindranath Tagore Essay 2 (150 words)

Rabindranath Tagore was a great poet, patriot, philosopher, humanist, and painter. He was born in Jorasanka, Calcutta on 7 th of May in 1861 in his ancestral home to the Maharsi Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. He was 14 th child of his parents however different from others. He got his proper education and knowledge about various subjects at home by the private teachers. He was very young when started writing poems, some of them were published in the periodicals.

He went to England for his higher education but was not satisfied by the traditional system of education there. He returned to India and opened his own school named Santiniketan in Bolpur, Birbhum, Bengal. This school later became a college and then a university (Visva-Bharati). He was honored with the Nobel Prize for ‘Gitanjali’ in 1913. He was also awarded with Knighthood by the British Crown however he returned as a mark of protest against massacre in Jallianwalabagh.

Rabindranath Tagore Essay 3 (200 words)

Rabindranath Tagore was a great Indian poet and the youngest son of his parents. He was a leader of Brahmo Samaj in nineteenth-century, Bengal. He took his early education at home however higher education in England. He went to England at his seventeen for his formal schooling however could not complete. His interest and close touch with the common humanity draw his attention towards the country to do some social reforms. Then he started a school at Santiniketan where he followed the Upanishadic ideals of education.

He also involved himself in the Indian nationalist movement and followed his own non-sentimental and visionary ways. Gandhi Ji was a devoted friend of him. His immense love towards the country was seen when he returned the honor given by British Government in 1915 as a protest against British policies in the country.

He was a good writer and get success in writing in his native Bengal. His continuous success in writing made him able to become a famous voice of India’s spiritual heritage. Some of his odd volumes of poetry are like Manasi, Sonar Tari, Gitanjali, Gitimalya, Balaka, etc. Besides poetries, he was also famous in writing dance dramas, musical dramas, essays, travel diaries, autobiographies, etc.

Rabindranath Tagore Essay 4 (250 words)

Rabindranath Tagore was also known as Rabindranath Thakur and more popularly as Gurudev. He was a great Indian poet who has given many famous writings to the country. Undoubtedly, he was a greatest poet after Kalidas. Now, he is well known all over the world as a greatest Indian poets and writers of all ages.

He was born in a rich and cultured family in Jorasanko, Kolkata on 7 th of May in 1861 to the Maharshi Debendranath Tagore (father) and Sarada Devi (mother). He lost his mother at his fourteen in 1875. He developed the interest of writing poems in his early age. He was also a painter, a philosopher, a patriot, an educationist, a novelist, a singer, an essayist, a story writer, and a constructive worker.

His great writings in the form of novels and short stories indicate his wisdom, deep experience and understanding about human character. He was a poet who has given a nice national anthem “Jan Gana Mana”. Some of his important works are “Geetanjali”, “Amar Shonar Bangla”, “Ghare-Baire”, “Rabindra Sangeet”, etc. He has been awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his great English version writing of “Geetanjali”.

He was the first Indian and first Asian to get this award. He was the founder of Vishwabharati University at Santiniketan in 1902. His endless love towards his country and countrymen forced him to reject “Knighthood”, an award given by the British government, in 1919 in a protest against Jallianwala Bagh massacre. His great writings still inspire and encourage people of the country.

Rabindranath Tagore Essay 5 (300 words)

Rabindranath Tagore was a famous Indian poet who popularly known as Gurudev. He was born in Kolkata on 7 th of May in 1861 in a rich and cultural family. His parents were Maharishi Debendranath (father) and Sharda Devi (mother). He was very much interested in writing poem from his childhood. Together with being a great poet, he was also a humanist, patriot, painter, novelist, story-writer, educationist and philosopher. He was a cultural ambassador for the country who spread the knowledge of Indian culture all around the world. He was a talented and genius child of his time who did great works. He was like a rising sun in the field of poem writing.

He had shown well the mental and moral spirit of the people through his writings in poem or stories forms. His writings have also been proved to be path-breaking and revolutionary even for today’s people. He was full of sorrow because of the massacre tragedy at Jalianwala Bagh in which many innocent people including women and children were killed on 13 th of April in 1919 at Amritsar by the General Dyer and his soldiers.

He was a great poet however a patriot too who always believed in oneness of life and its expression. Through his writings, he tried his best to bring people much closer to unite them in order to maintain the love, peace, and brotherhood. He had described well about love and harmony through his poetry and stories. His whole life also provides the clear view of love and harmony to each other. His devotion towards his country is shown by the following statement, “My country that is forever India, the country of my forefathers, the country of my children, my country has given me life and strength.” And again, “I shall be born in India again.

Rabindranath Tagore Essay 6 (400 words)

Rabindranath Tagore, a great Indian poet, was born on 7 th of May in 1861 at Calcutta, India to Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. He was born in a rich and cultural Brahmin family. He took his early education at home under private teachers and never attended school however went to England for higher studies. He started writing poems at his early age of eight. His poetry was published under the pseudonym Bhanushingho (Sun Lion) when he was just sixteen. He went to England in 1878 to study law however returned India before completing to pursue the career as a poet and writer.

He translated his work Geetanjali into English during the long sea journey to England. He was awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature within the year his Geetanjali was published. He has mentioned the mysticism and sentimental beauty of Indian culture in his writing for which a non-westerner was honored with prestigious award first time. Together with being a renowned poet, he was also a genius, writer, novelist, visual artist, composer, playwright, and a philosopher. He knew well how to command over language while writing poem or stories. He was a good philosopher through which he influenced a huge range of Indian people during the freedom struggle.

His contribution towards the Indian literature is very vast and unforgettable. Two of the songs from his Rabindrasangeet are more famous as they have been national anthem of two countries such as “Amar Shonary Bangla” (national anthem of Bangladesh) and “Jana Gana Mana” (national anthem of India). His creative writings, whether in the form of poem or stories, are unchallenged even today. Perhaps he was the first who bridge the gap between west and east through his effective writings.

Another composition of him was Puravi in which he mentioned Evening Songs and Morning Songs under many subjects like social, moral, cultural, religious, political, etc. Manasi was written by him in 1890 in which he collected some social and poetical poems. Most of his writings were based on the life of people of Bengal. Another writing named Galpaguccha was a collection of stories based on the poverty, backwardness, and illiteracy of the Indian people.

Other poetry collections are like Sonar Tari, Kalpana, Chitra, Naivedya, etc and novels are like Gora, Chitrangda and Malini, Binodini and Nauka Dubai, Raja and Rani, etc. He was very religious and spiritual man which helped him a lot in the days of crisis. He was a great educationist thus he founded an abode of peace, a unique university named Santiniketan. He died on 7 th of August in 1941 in Kolkata before seeing the India’s independence.

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• Remembering Rabindranath Tagore: A Poet, Philosopher, and Visionary

Remembering Rabindranath Tagore: A Poet, Philosopher, and Visionary  Blogs Home

• 08 May 2024

Introduction

There have been many exemplary leaders, visionaries, artists, poets, philosophers, and politicians born to the pious soil of India. Their lives have been a benchmark in the nation’s history and their work is a testimony to the extraordinary excellence that India represents. The most eminent and mundane parts of such stalwarts’ lives are inspirational and substantial to learn from. One of these great personalities was Rabindranath Tagore , who played an instrumental role in shaping India’s culture and socio-political history. His birth anniversary is celebrated on the 8 th of May every year, to commemorate his invaluable contribution to poetry, literature, philosophy and educational fortes of independent India.

Youth and Background

Rabindranath Tagore, born in 1861 , hailed from a distinguished Bengali family in Calcutta, a part of British India then. His upbringing was a blend of tradition and modernity . His father, Debendranath Tagore, was a leader of the Brahmo Samaj , a reformist Hindu sect believing firmly in reason and social justice. This was a reason for a deep spirituality and questioning mind in Tagore since his youth.

Despite attaining his formal education in England, Tagore felt a strong connection to his Bengali roots. His youth was filled with artistic pursuits - poetry, music, and theater, as described in his autobiography, ‘Boyhood Days’. He began writing prolifically at a young age. By his teenage years he had published several volumes of poetry, establishing himself as a rising literary star.

Tagore's early life was marked by privilege and loss. He experienced the loss and grief of his mother and several siblings, shaping his sensitive nature. These experiences would later infuse his work with profound themes of love, loss, and the human condition.

An Eclectic Career: Development as a Poet and Philosopher

Rabindranath Tagore's literary career was a symphony of poetic genius and philosophical inquiry. He was a sculptor of language, shaping Bengali poetry into a vibrant and expressive form. He defied traditional structures, weaving together colloquial Bengali with classical imagery , creating a voice that resonated with both the common man and the intellectual elite. His poems, like " Gitanjali, " captured the beauty of nature, the complexities of love and loss, and the yearning for the divine with a profound simplicity that transcended language barriers. This masterpiece, translated by Tagore himself, became a bridge between East and West, earning him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

Tagore’s literary pursuits ventured into the realm of philosophy, questioning societal constraints and championing the freedom of the individual. He believed in a universal humanity that transcended cultural boundaries. His novels, essays, and plays explored love and social justice themes. "Ghare-Baire" (The Home and the World) grappled with the clash between tradition and modernity, while "Chitra" (Chitraangada) reinterpreted ancient myths to explore themes of women empowerment.

Tagore's philosophy drew deeply from India's rich spiritual heritage, but he didn't shy away from Western ideals. He believed in a holistic education that nurtured both the intellect and the spirit, a philosophy that found expression in his establishment of Visva-Bharati University. Through his writings, Tagore became a voice for a resurgent India, one that looked both inwards to its rich traditions and outwards to engage with the world.

Contribution to the Freedom Struggle

Rabindranath Tagore's contribution to India's freedom struggle was unique and multifaceted. While not an active political leader, he wielded immense power through his words and actions . He championed the revival of India's rich cultural heritage, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and economic empowerment. His writings awakened a sense of national pride, particularly through his songs like "Jana Gana Mana" (later adopted as India's national anthem) and "Bangla Mata" (Mother Bengal). These songs became rallying cries for unity during times of political unrest, fostering a sense of shared identity among Indians.

Tagore wasn't afraid to confront British injustices. He vehemently opposed the brutal Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. He believed that education was key to achieving self-governance. He established Visva-Bharati University, a unique institution that was beyond national boundaries. This emphasis on education empowered Indians with the knowledge and skills necessary to challenge British dominance.

While Tagore supported the cause of freedom, he didn't advocate for violent resistance . He believed that true freedom required a moral and spiritual awakening, a vision that resonated with many Indians seeking a peaceful path to independence. Through cultural revival, symbolic protests, and educational initiatives, Rabindranath Tagore left an indelible mark on India's freedom struggle. His legacy reminds us that the fight for liberation can be waged on multiple fronts, with the power of words and ideas playing a crucial role alongside political action.

Impactful Memories and Incidents

These are the more popular and impactful memories and incidents involving Tagore during India's freedom struggle:

1. Renouncing the Knighthood: In 1919, the brutal Jallianwala Bagh massacre shook India. British troops fired upon a peaceful crowd of protestors, killing hundreds. In response, Tagore, a knighted recipient of the prestigious title from the British crown , returned his knighthood in a powerful public statement. This act of defiance resonated deeply with Indians, symbolizing the growing anger towards British rule and Tagore's unwavering commitment to justice.

2. "Jana Gana Mana" Becomes a Rallying Cry: Tagore's composition, "Jana Gana Mana," originally penned in 1910, transcended its origins as a poem to become a powerful anthem during the freedom struggle. Its lyrics, celebrating the "Eternal Charioteer of India's destiny," resonated with a yearning for national unity and self-determination. Public gatherings and protests often featured renditions of "Jana Gana Mana," solidifying its place as a symbol of India's fight for freedom and ultimately becoming the nation's national anthem after independence.

Impact on Contemporary Literature and Philosophy

Even today, Rabindranath Tagore's influence ripples through contemporary literature and philosophy, a testament to the enduring power of his themes and ideas. Tagore's innovative use of language continues to inspire writers. His ability to bridge the gap between the personal and the universal resonates with contemporary authors exploring themes of identity, belonging, and the human condition. Writers like Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri acknowledge his influence in their explorations of national identity and the immigrant experience. His emphasis on nature as a source of spiritual connection finds echoes in the works of eco-poets like Mary Oliver.

Tagore's questioning of societal norms and his critique of colonialism resonates with postcolonial writers grappling with issues of cultural identity and the legacy of oppression . His call for a universal humanity is echoed by contemporary philosophers working in areas like intercultural dialogue and global ethics . His belief in holistic education that fosters both intellectual and spiritual growth continues to inspire educational reform movements that emphasize creativity and critical thinking.

Rabindranath Tagore's impact isn't limited to the literary world. His musical compositions, infused with Bengali folk traditions and devotional themes, continue to inspire musicians across genres. His vision of intercultural understanding finds expression in initiatives promoting global citizenship and peace education.

Eternal Flame of Legendariness

Rabindranath Tagore remains a towering figure, reminding us of the power of literature and philosophy to transcend borders and speak to the human condition across generations. His influence is a testament to the enduring relevance of his message of love, unity, and the pursuit of truth . His legacy remains a testament to his multifaceted genius, a poet who sang of love and loss, and a philosopher who championed a world united by a shared humanity.

1. https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Boyhood_Days/UWhnwlQyplEC?hl=en

2. https://www.idiaspora.org/en/contribute/blog-entry/rabindranath-tagore-world-poet

3. https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2017/02/rabindranath-tagore-a-great-indian-poet-and-writer/

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Enfances Familles Générations

Revue interdisciplinaire sur la famille contemporaine

Accueil Numéros 27 Through the Ages of Life: Rabindr...

Through the Ages of Life: Rabindranath Tagore -- Son, Father, and Educator (1861-1941)

Research Framework : This essay attempts to reclaim Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the “Myriad-Minded Man” from colonial India, through his “ages of life” – as a son, father, and educator – and his conceptualization of an alternate education and masculinity. Tagore’s critique of colonial education, his experiments with institutions, and his curriculum emphasizing arts and moral aesthetics over muscular nationalism challenged the dominant culture of masculinity. His paternalism embraced a “manliness” privileging moral and spiritual sustenance over economic and political considerations.

Objectives : By focusing on Rabindranath Tagore, an iconic figure of Indian modernity, the essay attempts to demonstrate the tangled relationship between his domestic reality and his public commitment to social justice and pedagogy.

Methodology : It deploys the method of contextualized textual analysis by examining a variety of literary sources -- personal narratives, correspondence, lectures, and essays.

Results: Foregrounding the importance of family in its enabling and restrictive capacities, the essay explores connections between one family’s life and the Bengali understanding of age, gender, and class in late colonial India.

Conclusions: The essay contends that Tagore’s position as a biological father and the transference of his affective concern to a larger body of children, in whom he inculcated a new sense of freedom, were inflected with an alternate sense of masculinity.

Contribution: The essay contributes to our understanding that the role of “fathers,” biological and metaphorical, attained heightened significance among the educated, affluent community in colonial Bengal. An examination of the interminable connection between Tagore’s personal and public life disrupts the separation between the home and the world and establishes the centrality of the domestic in Indian nationalist politics. As a father and a reformer, Tagore challenged existing notions of masculinity through his reformed and secular model of education.

Cadre de la recherche : Cet essai présente Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), « l’homme d’esprits innombrables » de l’Inde coloniale, à travers ses « âges de vie » – l’âge du fils, celui du père, celui de l’éducateur – et sa conception d’une éducation et d’une masculinité alternatives. La critique de Tagore de l’éducation coloniale, ses expériences auprès d’institutions, et son curriculum où les arts et l’esthétique morale primaient sur le nationalisme musclé défiaient la culture masculine dominante. Son paternalisme saisissait une « virilité » qui plaçait la subsistance morale et spirituelle au-dessus de toute considération économique ou politique.

Objectifs  : En étudiant Rabindranath Tagore, figure iconique de la modernité indienne, l’essai montre la relation entremêlée de sa réalité domestique avec son engagement public dans la justice sociale et l’éducation.

Méthodologie  : L’article déploie la méthode de l’analyse textuelle contextualisée et examine une variété de sources littéraires – narrations personnelles, correspondance, conférences, essais.

Résultats  : En mettant au premier plan l’importance pour Tagore de la famille, de par ses capacités habilitantes et restrictives, l’essai considère les liens entre la vie familiale du philosophe et la compréhension bengali de l’âge, du genre et de la classe à la fin de l’ère coloniale.

Conclusions  : L’essai affirme que la position de Tagore en tant que père biologique et le transfert de son souci affectif sur un groupe plus large d’enfants, auquel il a inculqué un nouveau sens de la liberté, étaient modulés par un sens alternatif de la masculinité.

Contribution  : L’essai contribue à notre compréhension du fait que dans un contexte socioculturel et politicoéconomique précis, le rôle des « pères », biologiques et métaphoriques, a atteint une signification accrue en Inde coloniale. Tagore a articulé une masculinité à travers une éducation réformée et laïque. L’observation de la vie de penseurs influents comme Tagore remet en cause la séparation entre privé et public, et fait ressortir la centralité de la sphère domestique dans la politique nationaliste indienne.

Entrées d’index

Mots-clés : , keywords: , texte intégral.

1 Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the “Myriad-Minded Man” and the first Asian poet to win the Nobel Prize in literature, was a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, composer, painter, philosopher, and pioneering educator from colonial India. Tagore’s vision and philosophy, either ignored or shrouded by his image of the mystical poet from the east, are now being addressed to restore his salience as a thinker of universal reach and significance, one who defied national-imperial and elite-subaltern binaries (Collins, 2012, p. 3). His legacy -- vast literary output and educational institutions he founded -- persists in a new conceptualization of humanity that transcended boundaries of the home and the world. An iconic figure of Indian modernity, his well-documented life conveys intersections of personal experiences with his public endeavors for the common good. The trajectory of Tagore’s life-works, common yet unique, reveals complicated notions of age and gender characteristic of the specific historical conjuncture in India.

2 This essay attempts to reclaim Rabindranath Tagore through his “ages of life” – as a son, father, and educator – and his envisioning of an alternate education and masculinity. Historians in different fields have identified the connection between masculinity and fatherhood (Laqueur, 1990; Tosh, 2007 [1999]). The quest for fatherhood as moral guardians or biological fathers, although hardly addressed in South Asian literature, was a crucial component of Indian masculinity as well. Different “psychic and social investments” constituted gendered identities of men in the precolonial and colonial contexts (O’Hanlon, 1997). Colonial masculinity was constitutive of a symbiotic relationship between the “manly” Englishman and “effeminate” Bengalis/Indians (Sinha, 1995), a perception fostered by the official British community and internalized by the colonized Indian literati (Rosselli, 1980). British officials and Bengali men, the latter being the main target of attack, forged their manliness in relation to one another, not through opposition but through shared values as well. Educated Indians resisted their stereotypes by incorporating hegemonic forms of masculinity such as body-building and muscular strength (Alter, 1994; Chowdhury, 2001) and infused them with imagined cultural myths of “warrior monks” and “Hindu soldiers” drawn from India’s ancient past (Banerjee, 2005; Banerjee & Basu, 2006). Moreover, nineteenth-century educational reforms promoted a masculinity that crystalized religious-communal identities (Sengupta, 2011). But in the late colonial era, Indian “fathers,” biological and metaphorical, articulated a masculinity through a reformed education that was secular in nature. Visionaries like Rabindranath Tagore envisaged a new pedagogy that would prepare the future generation for a world where its “head is held high” and the “mind is without fear” (Tagore, 1912). Further exploration of masculinity thus demands investigation of familial and filial relationships that traversed the private-public domains of politics and culture.

3 Rabindranath Tagore has been often criticized by fellow Bengalis for his bourgeois effeminacy. What got elided is his radical critique of colonial education and his daily practices that defied conventional notions of masculinity. His experiments with institutions that transcended the geopolitics of the nation, and a curriculum that emphasized arts, moral aesthetics, and “public poetry” (Nussbaum, 2007) over muscular nationalism, challenged the dominant culture of masculinity. His paternalism embraced a “manliness” privileging moral and spiritual sustenance over economic and political considerations. Drawing on Tagore’s everyday experiences captured in his personal writings, essays, and correspondence, this essay demonstrates the tangled relationship between his domestic reality and his public commitment to social justice and education. As a global-historical actor, Rabindranath has been described as a product of the nineteenth century who displayed sensibilities informed by post-Enlightenment European philosophies (Kumar, 1991; Chatterjee, 2001; Collins 2012; Sen 2014). Scholars disagreeing with such a view have explained Tagore’s distinctive thinking drawing from indigenous roots and environment in addition to the European ideological influences (Sarkar, 2009; Bandyopadhyay, 2013). The familial context that was integral to colonial modernity (Chakrabarty, 2000; Chatterjee, 1993; Sarkar, 1992) and was especially critical for Rabindranath’s pedagogic endeavors still awaits investigation. Even a recent examination of Rabindranath’s meditations on love and interiority relies solely on his novels and poems, at the exclusion of his intimate experiences (Kaviraj, 2015). By foregrounding the importance of the family as an enabler and restrictive force, my study explores connections between one family’s life and the Bengali understanding of age, gender, and class in late colonial India.

4 “Age” was a contentious public issue in British India. The colonial state backed by its Western-educated native elites, driven by a “liberal” progressive agenda to eradicate oppressive social customs, passed several Acts related to the “right” age for marriage and its consummation (Forbes, 2007; Tambe, 2009). In 1929, the Child Marriage Restraint Act declared “the child as a person who, if a male, is under 18 years of age, and if a female, is under 14 years of age,” thus establishing an “incontrovertible definition of the “child,” mapped along the axes of sex and age” (Pande, 2012, p. 205). The controversies revolved around a specific age for a girl and a boy, both covered by a blanket term, “children,” in which the category of youth was conspicuous by its absence (Banerjee, 2014). Unlike the majority of the Indian population for whom the boundaries of age and the stages of life were blurry, Rabindranath, as a male from a privileged background, enjoyed distinct “ages of life” evident in his self-writings. Rabindranath’s stages of life as a boy, youth, and adult intersected with his public practices as an educationist, a father, and a reformer who created an edifice for the modern Bengali “child” of the bhadralok (respectable middle class) community. In the prime of his life he assumed a moral guardianship and positioned himself as the “father” to his diverse body of students who looked up to him as the “mentor,” Gurudev (literally, teacher-god).

5 Associating Rabindranath with an “imaginary” fatherhood, I point out his affective connections as a father and a public leader. I n Indian culture, family and fatherhood are polysemic in nature and are not solely determined by biological connections (Chatterjee, 2004). The oldest male member, married or single, held the highest patriarchal authority in multigenerational, patrilineal, patrilocal households. Families subscribing to monastic lineages and religious associations even attributed fatherhood to the spiritual gurus (Chatterjee, 2013). Although paternity in India was determined by property relations and control over family resources, claims to fatherhood were not tied to possession of individual private property as John Locke conceptualized it in the modern West. One of the many ways life was imagined and practiced by the reform-minded Indian patriarchy was through the enactment of fatherhood. The Lockean notion of “possessive individualism” based on the political death of paternal or parental authority never took roots in the Indian soil (Chakrabarty, 2000, pp. 217-218). Rather, the reformed Hindu patriarchy forged their national identity through a natural bond of fraternity and, I argue, through an assumption of fatherhood and propagation of a new pedagogy displacing the colonial system. Contingent on specific socio-cultural and political-economic context, the role of fathers attained heightened significance in late colonial India. Fatherhood, albeit unstable and plural, constituted the subjective identity of men, particularly of those belonging to the “respectable” middle class. I contend that Rabindranath’s position as a biological father and the transference of his affective concern to a larger body of children, in whom he tried to inculcate a new sense of selfhood through his unique education, were inflected with an alternate sense of masculinity. The focus on fatherhood and children, by investigating lives of influential natives like Tagore’s, disrupts the separation between the private and the public and brings out the centrality of the domestic in the larger politics of late colonial India.

6 The omnipresence of fathers in Indian culture and their simultaneous image as distant and removed from the daily lives of children (Kakar, 1981) possibly naturalized them and explain their lack of inclusion in current scholarship. In the course of the nineteenth century, “fathers” from the educated middle class ( bhadralok ), both in their biological capacity and as ideologues, engaged in reform movements to make their women and children part of a progressive modernity. They emerged as an emotional community displaying altered sensibilities in setting up home, providing economic support, ensuring protection, and training their progeny with “appropriate” virtues of femininity and masculinity – similar to, yet different from, those of the Victorian middle class (Tosh, 2007 [1999]). Rabindranath’s intervention in educational movements and his embeddedness in family offer us an opportunity to explore the role of fathers as mentors and interrogate notions of masculinity that were not connected to gender-specific sex-roles as parents but as “constitutive of social relationships” and an emerging patriarchal ideology (Sinha, 1999, p. 446). To trace the interminable connection between the home and the world, it is in order here to situate Rabindranath in his familial surroundings and the colonial environment.

The “Ages” of Childhood: Family and Colonial Education

7 Born into one of the wealthiest families of colonial Calcutta, Rabindranath came from a strong patriarchal culture. His grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath (1794–1846), a “business tycoon” partnering with the British, and his father Debendranath (1817-1905), a leader of the new monotheistic, religious movement called Brahmoism, held immense power in the Bengali socio-cultural milieu. Rabindranath’s brothers held important government posts and contributed to various branches of arts and literature. Active involvement in nationalist, cultural, and educational movements made the Tagores the architects of a new colonial modernity (Kling, 1976). Rabindranath was knighted by King George V in 1915, a knighthood that he renounced in the wake of British atrocities in Jallianwala Bagh, Punjab, in 1919. Rabindranath’s accomplishments determined his reception, particularly in the West, as a humanist and a critic. But his personal narratives, letters, and essays unveil his more “radical” side, as a boy/son and then as an adult –husband/father (Dasgupta, and al. , 2013).

8 Rabindranath’s distaste for and rejection of colonial education was evident in his memoirs. His Boyhood Days opens up with the bustle and scurry that characterized his multigenerational urban household in “old Kolkata,” but he presents his childhood as full of ennui and languor during his regular study hours under the home-tutor (Tagore, 1940, p. 6). It is difficult to ascertain if it was customary for affluent Bengali families to hire private tutors for training their children so early in life. But informal training at home, particularly for boys, was part of the colonial culture. By the time Rabindranath was growing up, primary schools were set up by the colonial administration. The three reports by William Adam (1868 [1835; 1836; 1838]), a Unitarian missionary and ardent abolitionist, who was encouraged by the pioneering Indian social reformer Rammohun Roy to inquire into the status of education, indicated that the number of students under domestic instruction was almost nine times higher than those attending public schools. The average age of admission to a public elementary school was eight years and that of leaving was fourteen years (Nurullah & Nayak 1951: 23). But female education was almost non-existent. Like other male children of the time, Rabindranath went to Normal School and his earliest experience there, “not the least sweet in particular” (Tagore, 1917:33), was that of singing verses, whose meaning was inscrutable to him: “Unfortunately the words were English and the tune quite as foreign, so that we had not the faintest notion what sort of incantation we were practising;…” (Tagore, 1917, p. 33). Rabindranath’s woes over learning were further compounded by his inability to “associate with the other boys” whose manners and habits he found intolerable. Neither did he cherish the memory of the teachers; he found their language so “foul” that out of sheer contempt, he refused to answer any questions they asked (Tagore, 1917, p. 34).

9 Rabindranath’s critical recollections of his school days brought home the nature and purpose of colonial education. The education system developed by missionaries, colonial administrators, and indigenous leaders was fraught with a struggle between the effort “by non-Indians to impose a cheap imitation of the British educational system on India and the desire of the people of the country to create a new system to meet their own peculiar needs and problems” (Nurullah & Naik, 1951, p. xiv). The Charter Act of 1813, the earliest British intervention in Indian education, advocated revival and promotion of the knowledge of science and literature and was aimed at the encouragement of the learned natives in India. The earliest schools, however, were set up by the Christian missionaries in the presidencies of Bengal and Bombay, and in the Punjab. The missionaries had to rely on the knowledge of the native experts for translation and writing of textbooks. The Act thus provided the native intellectuals in Bengal and elsewhere an opportunity to actively engage with the educational movement through literary endeavors (Banerjee, 2007).

10 Matters came to a head with the British politician and writer Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous Minute of Education in 1835 that replaced Persian with English as the official language of instruction in India. With a strong Utilitarian justification denouncing Indian languages and literature, Macaulay claimed that “of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects” (Macaulay, 1835). Backed by a sizeable section of the native population who realized the importance of promoting western-style learning, Macaulay’s Minute was followed by two other official proclamations, Wood’s Despatch (1854) and the Hunter Commission (1882), that laid the blueprint for the colonial education system.

11 Intending to spread Western Knowledge and Science at all levels, Wood’s Despatch introduced schemes of grants-in-aid to schools and training of all teachers for schools receiving government aids. This allowed colonial government the right to inspect and assert greater control over education. After the Rebellion of 1857-58 and the transfer of power from the Company Raj to the British Crown (1858), the colonial government became increasingly wary of missionary education verging on conversion. It launched the first Education Commission under Sir William Hunter in 1882 and its Report announced that the government would not delegate western-style education to the missionaries; rather, it would create its own department of education with state subsidies (Topdar, 2015).

12 Education from the early nineteenth century thus became a pathway for educated native men to work hand-in-hand with the missionaries and the colonial government. This also gave them the opportunity to create their epistemic space as moral guardians of the younger generation (Banerjee, 2007). By 1880-90, the native literati started taking initiative on their own. In 1881-82, Indians conducted the majority of the secondary and primary schools in British India (except Burma): 1341 secondary schools and 54,662 primary schools were administered by Indian managers as opposed to 757 secondary and 1842 primary schools run by non-Indians (Nurullah & Naik, 1951, p. 260). In Bengal, for example, Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, along with other votaries of modern education, made significant donations for the promotion of schools and institutions, including the establishment of the Calcutta Medical College (Sengupta, 2011). Towards the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the schools were endowed with state power and education became the site of “colonial governmentality” (Seth, 2006). The schools were not only designing curricula and introducing new subjects, they were bent on creating subjectivities and regulating native populations through a range of disciplinary practices. The school’s main subjects of reform were males, with age unspecified, and dissemination of education among women followed a different trajectory (Forbes, 2007). Rabindranath reacted to colonial schools both for their pedagogic practices as well as their stifling regimen. As he himself recorded: “So long as I was forced to attend school, I felt an unbearable torture.” Later on, he realized that what weighed on his mind was the “unnatural pressure of a system of education which prevailed everywhere” (Tagore, 1925, p. 94).

13 The disciplinary regime of school was matched by an equally strong patriarchal domain at home. Raised predominantly under the “auspices” and “abuses” of manservants, “servocracy,” as Rabindranath described it (Tagore, 1917), the most awe-inspiring male figure in Rabindranath’s life was his pitrideb (Father-god), Debendranath Tagore, whose influence continued through his adult life. Debendranath’s itinerant life-style as a social reformer, his solemn personality, his sweeping command over family matters were testament to the traits of the time; yet, he was very different from the “meddlesome tyrant of middle-class patriarchy,” often described in the Western context (Sen, 2014, p. 70). Child Rabi (nickname) hardly knew his father: “He would now and then come back home all of a sudden, and with him came foreign servants […] when my father came, we would be content with wandering round about his entourage and in the company of his servants. We did not reach his immediate presence.” Rabindranath’s first close encounter with his father was at age eleven when they both traveled to the Himalayas. A commanding personality with a meticulous eye to details, Debendranath carefully chose and ordered for his son a “full suit of clothes” with a “gold embroidered velvet cap.” Rabindranath reflected: “[….] Though nothing would induce him to put obstacles in the way of my amusing myself, he left no loophole in the strict rules of conduct which he prescribed for me in other respects” (Tagore 1917, p. 68).

14 Rabindranath’s experience with his father was unique. Very few children, male or female, in colonial households enjoyed the opportunity of traveling alone with their fathers and receiving the rigorous training that Debendranath enforced on his children. Likewise, when Debendranath entrusted eleven-year-old Rabi with the responsibility of his cash-box, it was exemplary by the standard of his time. By bestowing a significant responsibility on Rabi, Debendranath enhanced the agency of his child. Yet, any negligence on Rabi’s part would earn him serious consequences. As much as Rabi enjoyed his freedom from his school in Calcutta, his trip to the mountains followed a “rigorous regime” when he would wake up before sunrise to learn his Sanskrit declensions, shower in ice-cold water, hike up the mountain ridges with his father, sing devotional songs for him, and pursue lessons in English, Bengali, and Astronomy (Tagore, 1917:68). It was not Debendranath alone; fathers of aristocratic background wielded tremendous influence in training their sons through different stages of life. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, recorded in his autobiography the commanding personality of his father and how he shaped his childhood experience. Daughters, including the ones in the Tagore family, however, were subjected to a different treatment and upbringing.

15 Rabindranath’s evolving relationship with Debendranath attested to the archetypes of manliness that also prevailed in Victorian England: absent, distant, and intimate (Tosh, 2007 [1999]). The distance that Rabi, as a child, felt with his father was bridged in later life through mutual affection and favor. Rabindranath’s son Rathindranath noted, “My grandfather loved his youngest son and was delighted to discover unusual talent in him while still a boy. Probably for this reason he was very generous to him” (Tagore,1958, p. 148). Debendranath also entrusted Rabindranath with the management of his estates but he was such a “strict disciplinarian” that on the second of every month he wanted the accounts to be read out to him. “He [Debendranath] would remember every figure, and ask awkward questions whilst the report was being read.” Rabindranath was “afraid of this day of trial, like a school-boy going up for his examination” (Tagore, 1958, p. 148). As Rabindranath expressed so succinctly, his father “held up a standard, not a disciplinary rod” (Tagore, 1917, pp. 96-98). The so-called tyrannical aspect of Victorian fatherhood, in Rabindranath’s recollection, was missing in Debendranath, the reformed father of a minority religious community.

16 The strong influence of the father stood in contrast with the distant and short-lived relationship between Rabindranath and his mother Sarada Devi (Banerjee, 2005). Rabindranath reminisced:

when my mother died I was quite a child […] On the night she died, we were fast asleep in our room downstairs. […] Only when her body was taken out by the main gateway, and we followed the procession to the cremation ground, did a storm of grief pass through me […] The day wore on, we returned from the cremation, and as we turned into our lane I looked up at the house towards my father’s rooms […] He was still in the front veranda sitting motionless in prayer” (Tagore, 1917, pp. 255-56).

17 The God-like image of his father always prevailed over Rabindranath. His venerable portrait of Debendranath was emblematic of a masculinity associated with fatherhood that protected children and gave them moral guidance to grow and develop as individuals. Despite his authoritarianism, Debendranath was broad-minded enough to let his son experiment and explore. He demanded obedience but also granted freedom: the relationship did not thrive on coercion; instead, it fostered independence and individualism among his male children (Sen, 2014, p. 71).

18 As a rebel child, Rabindranath refused to comply with the demands of a colonial education system. After dropping out of successive institutions, he finally gave up school at age fourteen, the year his mother died, and it was “through the joy” of his freedom that he “felt a real urge to teach himself” (Das Gupta, 2006, p. 69). Shorn of the restrictiveness of the formal school system, Rabindranath was nourished by the strong cultural environment at home. As a “living university,” the Tagore household of Jorasanko exposed him to a confluence of European and Indian thoughts and literature – classical and popular, drawing on folk literature and music through nursery rhymes, baul songs, and Vaishnava literature and lyrics (O’Connell, 2002, pp. 44-45).

19 Although unique and versatile, the cultural environment of the Tagore household was still heavily gendered, with different expectations and roles for male and female children. Rabindranath’s elder sister Swarnakumari Devi (1855-1932) was an equally prolific figure in nineteenth-century Bengal. Following the custom of the time, she was home-schooled; but she wrote novels, poetry, plays, songs, scientific essays, edited a leading journal, Bharati and engaged in social work (Chaudhuri, 2016). As Teresa Hubel pointed out, Swarnakumari Devi’s family connections and gender stood in the way of recognition of her literary contribution and leadership (Hubel, 2010). Rabindranth himself harbored a dismissive and condescending attitude towards her as he wrote in a letter to his English friend: he had given Swarnakumari Devi no encouragement and had failed to make “her see things in proper light.” Rabindranath dismissed Swarnakumari as someone having “more ambition than ability;” “just enough talent to keep her alive for a short period” (Hubel, 2010, p.170). The statement testifies to Rabindranath’s patriarchal bias. He grew up in the presence of strong women, yet his was a culture that favored male children.

Rabindranath Attains Adulthood: The Father and The Educator

• 1 The Tagores had the practice of renaming their brides who usually came from humble social backgroun (...)
• 2 Upanayan , a rite of passage for Brahmins, introduced boys to the daily practice of chanting Gayatri (...)

20 Discriminatory practices by gender and age continued to manifest themselves in the course of Rabindranath’s adult life. An emerging star in the Bengali literary firmament and well-exposed to the Western ideas of Romanticism and Victorianism through his travel to England, Rabindranath at age twenty-two married eleven-year old Bhabatarini aka Mrinalini Devi 1 (1872-1902), selected by his father Debendranath following strict caste rules (Dasgupta and al ., 2013, p. 3). Rabindranath’s coming of age in every phase was intervened by his father. At eleven, Debendranath made him go through the caste-specific practice of upanayan , a rite of passage for Brahmin boys, that introduced him to the gayatri mantra (Tagore, 1917, p. 72). 2 Likewise, Debendranath consecrated Rabindranath’s attainment of manhood through the marriage he arranged for him. At every stage of his career, he reckoned with his father’s authority without confronting him. If Rabindranath’s awe and deference to his father could be explained by bhakti (devotion), that Chakrabarty invoked for analyzing Bengali nationalist patriarchy (Chakarbarty, 2001, pp. 217-31), in his personal life he registered a shift in his dealings with wife and children.

3 Of his five children, eldest son Rathindranath and youngest daughter Mira Devi only survived.

21 As a “modern” man, Rabindranath’s masculinity characterized a closeness in his conjugal relationship. His correspondence with his wife reveals tenderness and intimacy that ran contrary to his father’s distance with his mother. Rabindranath’s deepest emotions as a husband and father were best expressed in his letters to his wife when he traveled. In these letters to Mrinalini Devi, he expressed his longing for her and deliberated on matters about their children. He discussed their well-being, happiness, and marriage. His hands-on parenting and playful connection with children inverted the image of his detached yet overbearing father. Rabindranath straddled a contested terrain in his family life: on the one hand, he conformed to the gendered practices of his times in raising his male and female children; on the other, he challenged the gendered stereotypes of parenting as he continued to engage with his children through every step of their lives. Following the death of his wife in 1902, he single-handedly took care of his five children and often their spouses. 3 As Rathindranath recalled, his father was a “down-to-earth man” and his “august personality” did not stand in the way with his children:

Father never treated any of his children harshly, nor did he…lavish sentimental affection upon them. I do not remember any occasion when Father subjected any of us to physical punishment. Temperamentally it was impossible for him to use violence. (Rathindranath Tagore, 1958, p. 148).

22 Rabindranath’s parenting defied distinct gender roles based on perceived differences between fathers and mothers. Neither temperamental nor effusive, Rabindranath was also a strict disciplinarian like his father. He too subjected his son Rathindranath to rigorous training and hardship (Mira Devi, 1968). His youngest daughter Mira Devi’s correspondence with him reveals how close she was with her father since she was a little girl (Banerjee, 2015). Moreover, Rabindranath as a public intellectual was equally committed to the causes of children envisioning new educational curriculum that he enshrined in his school and university in Santiniketan, a small town west of Calcutta in the Birbhum district of West Bengal . Rabindranath’s vast repertoire of children’s literature, consisting of poems, plays, short stories, primers, and essays, let loose his imaginings of an idealized childhood. But his imaginings were also rooted in a colonial reality and frustration that he experienced as a child. Rabindranath’s special relationship with the child commenced from “his own lived experiences” and it was his “poetic words” that acted as the primary site of the relationship between the adult and the child (Sarkar, 2009, p. 271).

23 As his commitment to social justice deepened, Rabindranath increasingly saw his family members “less as individuals than as part of the greater cause to which he felt his life was dedicated” (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 45). His natural impatience with formalism led him to formulate a new prose-form and invent new institutional structures that privileged nature over artificial boundaries and constructions. He produced his collection of poetry for children, Shishu, while taking care of his ailing daughter Renuka (aka Rani) during the last days of her life. His joyous approach to learning resonated with the progressive spirits of the literary movements of the late nineteenth century that emphasized reading for pleasure (Sarkar, 2009). It is this new spirit and vitality that Rabindranath attempted to infuse in his new pedagogy that commenced in his family estate and thrived with the active support of his family members.

24 Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827-94), a conservative social critic from colonial Bengal who served as a head master and worked for the Department of Public Instruction, regretted that in India, there was “very little effort to encourage mutual affection and understanding between fathers and sons.” In his teacher training manual Bhudev urged schoolteachers to take on the role of an understanding and affectionate father: the behavior between the teacher and the students “should be the same as between fathers and sons” (Sengupta, 2011, p. 81). Rabindranath’s lifeworks merged the roles of father and teacher through his new educational experiments.

25 Rabindranath’s manliness, manifested in his role as a dear husband and a close parent, bolstered his critique of colonial education. As an adult his first formal intervention in educational movements corresponded with his life as a family man. An aristocratic man in his thirties, a husband, and a father, he pushed educational reforms that were not far removed from his family. His zeal for reforms was part of a larger social experiment in India in which other leaders, including his predecessors, played an active part. With pre-existing family connections to eminent reformers, Rabindranath in later life developed his own link with leaders dedicated to education. He joined the National Education Movement in the early 1890s to actively champion vernacular education (Mukherjee, 2013; O’Connell, 2002; Seth, 2007).

26 His speech, “ Shikshar Herpher” (“Vicissitudes of Education,” 1892), delivered in the Rajshahi district in eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh), contained his most scathing critique of colonial education. Reflecting on his boyhood experience when he felt the disconnect with rote English learning, he argued that the failure of the Bengalis to communicate their ideas and opinions effectively like an adult ( sabalok) could be explained by the lack of connection they felt with Western-style education imparted in schools and colleges. Echoing the sentiment of the time he blamed the enfeeblement of the Bengalis on the colonial system, a point that Tanika Sarkar emphasized in a different context (Sarkar, 2001). He stressed that being forced to master English, the children neither learned nor played: they did not have the leisure to enter the “true-land” ( satyarajya ) of nature; the doors to the imaginary lands of literature were sealed. The only way to strike a balance between thought and expression, between education and life, was by promoting vernacular language and literature and not English (Tagore, 1892).

27 When requested to write the Constitution for the National College founded by the nationalist leader Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), he authored the essay “Shiksha Samasya ” (“Problem with Education”) that again addressed the key issues of colonial education. For Rabindranath, the problem lay in the unfathomable distance between Western-style education mechanically disseminated in schools and the experiences of common people in India (Tagore, 1906). In his proposal for the National College as well as in his own school (Brahmacharyashram) in Santiniketan, he rejected the popular “gallery model” championed by the Scottish educator David Stow and adopted by early Bengali educators like Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (Sengupta, 2011, p. 84). To promote his idea of freedom for children he advocated a spatio-structural transformation of the classroom. He moved the classroom to the heart of nature and he stripped it of any furniture. For him, students and teachers sitting on floors and preferably holding classes in natural surroundings would be the most effective way of lowering costs of education (Tagore, 1906). By the time he was engaging with these questions, the vernacularization of education was already underway under the initiatives of nationalist-reformers and missionaries. They all shared a Western model and their demand was infused with strong religious overtones (Sengupta, 2011; Goswami, 2004). But Tagore’s pedagogy, creative and secular, offered an alternative, drawing on the best of both the East and the West. Open to ideas of European thinkers like Pestalozzi and Rousseau and with ties to the Unitarian movement, Rabindranath’s model, however, differed from that of the missionaries and the early reformers.

28 Family continued to be Rabindranath’s major arena of play and support in every project he undertook. He launched his initial educational experiments in his family estates in eastern Bengal. As early as the 1890s, hoping to alleviate the hunger and poverty of his tenants, he tried, without much success, to educate the adult villagers in collective farming. Around the same time, he also started experimenting with his children’s education. Confronted with a school system that belied his vision, it was in eastern Bengal that Rabindranath started home-schooling his three children -- Bela (thirteen), Rathindranath (eleven), and Renuka (nine) – a practice that he encountered in his own life but for different reasons. As his son noted, fully aware of the ill-effects of the stereotyped school-teaching, Rabindranath was “anxious that his own children should be spared such unhealthy and stifling influences (Tagore, 1958, p. 20).” The children were taught English by a British tutor who lived with them; they also learned Mathematics, and Sanskrit; Bengali was taught by Rabindranath himself. When imparting basic education to his children he did not make a distinction between daughter and son. He wrote texts for his children, but the children never learned grammar. He insisted that the children read the two Indian epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata , and being unhappy with the existing printed editions, he entrusted his wife to translate from Sanskrit an abridged version of The Ramayana , left unfinished due to Mrinalini’s untimely death (Tagore, 1958, pp. 21-22). The responsibility for translating The Mahabharata fell to his nephew, Surendranath Tagore. In Rabindranath’s enterprise everyone in his family was included.

29 As a father-cum-educator, Rabindranath extended his pedagogical experiments far beyond his immediate family. His major educational reforms were launched in the thick of political controversies and nationalist upheavals. On 22 nd December 1901, with permission and assistance from Debendranath, he inaugurated his school in Santiniketan with less than ten students, including his son. Departing from a Western model, Rabindranath invoked the ancient Indian ideal of brahmacharya (a life-stage prescribed for males) where disciples studied in the secluded areas of the guru’s house restraining themselves through strict rules and hardship. All clothed in long yellow robes, the students rose at four in the morning, bathed, meditated, prayed, and chanted Vedic hymns. Rabindranath’s son Rathindranath noted that with the “ideal of brahmacharya ” as the “keynote,” both students and teachers led not only simple but an austere life (Tagore, 1958, pp. 44-45).

30 This school suffered from an acute shortage of funds since it did not collect any fees from students at first and provided them with food, lodging, and often clothing as well. The school was funded by a Trust set up by Debendranath, the money gained from selling his wife’s jewelry, and his own meager resources. Rabindranath hoped to realize his ideal of democracy and self-reliance by reaching out to the wider public and transgressing class-caste and religious boundaries. Through his conception of the ashram (hermitage), the ancient Indian institution, Rabindranath “sought to imagine a space where his ideas of self-reliance and democracy could be translated into praxis” (Chandra, 2014). In his new school, modeled after the ancient Indian system of tapovan (forest schools), Rabindranath attempted to establish “ real swaraj” in his ashram (Tagore, 1934), where students were tied in a bond of fraternity underscored by a devotion to the guru and the new order.

31 Rabindranath approximated the environment of the ashram by imparting spiritual training to all his students: he insisted on understanding and chanting Gayatri mantra, an ancient hymn, that he learned as a child. According to Rabindranath, the mantra made the connection between individual consciousness and external reality, linking the inner self with its deepest aspects and transcending boundaries of race, class, nationality, and religion. Displaying the influence of the Father as the god-head Absolute, he reminded children that “God is our father, and like a father always gives us lessons of wisdom. The teachers are only the vehicles, but the real knowledge comes from our universal father” (O’Connell, 2002, p. 67). Rabindranath’s strong enunciations testified to his own authoritarianism and control, a streak akin to his father’s, but he expressed himself in a different idiom for an imaginary public. His invocation of God as “Father” displayed Christian (Unitarian) influence that his father publicly denied yet enigmatically upheld in the faith he propounded. While Father for Rabindranath might not have been a sexist symbol, it represented an all-pervading masculinity as a sovereign source of power.

32 Rabindranath publicly abandoned his nationalist agenda when the anti-partition Swadeshi movement (1905-08) against Lord Curzon’s plan to divide Bengal gave way to Hindu-Muslim antagonism, self-aggrandizement, and violence. Disassociating himself from the movement to which he gave active leadership, he critiqued parochial patriotism and shifted his focus to ideas of universalism and rural reconstruction. He then took the unprecedented step of admitting six girls to his school in 1908-9. By 1920, the school became both co-residential as well as coeducational.

33 Ironically, despite including girls in his school, in his personal life Rabindranath yielded to the practices of his aristocratic family, class, and era. He had home-schooled his daughters with tutors specially selected and mentored by him. Like his sister from the previous generation, his daughters were not expected to go to public schools. Just as he had married an 11-year old girl, he arranged the marriages of two of his daughters, Bela (14), and Rani (10), both in 1901, the same year he founded his school. Through the nineteenth century age of marriage for girls was heavily debated among the social reformers and colonial administration. The Age of Consent Act (1891) sanctioned consummation of marriage with brides below twelve as a punishable offense. Even earlier, the Brahmo community split into three factions over Act III of the Marriage Act of 1871 that aimed to formalize Brahmo marriages by designating the specific age of marriage, fourteen for girls and eighteen for boys (Majumdar, 2009, pp. 167-205). Surely, those Acts had little relevance for the Tagores. Rabindranath justified the early marriages of his daughters by arguing that it would allow them to quickly adjust and identify with their in-laws. After leaving Bela at her husband’s home for the first time, he expressed his parting pains in a letter to his wife: “We must forget our own joy and sorrow where our children are concerned. […] We must make room for them so that they can mould their lives in their own way” (Tagore, 1901, pp. 11-12). Incidentally, Rani, the younger daughter, died of tuberculosis (1903) before she turned thirteen.

34 That Rabindranath was committed to his educational endeavors despite inconsistencies in personal life was beyond doubt. As the War broke out in 1914, he became more convinced of his message of universalism. His reaction against parochial nationalism was expressed in his condemnation of Western education. He claimed that his countrymen would gain their India by “fighting against the education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity” (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 99). For him, “the highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.” He believed that “the object of education is the freedom of mind […] though freedom has its risk and responsibility as life itself has” (Tagore, 1916). In his ashram the “guiding spirit” of children was “personal love” and life was “fully awake” in its activities:

[w]here boys’ minds are not being perpetually drilled into believing that the ideal of the self-idolatry of the nation is the truest ideal for them to accept; where they are bidden to realize man’s world as God’s Kingdom, to whose citizenship they have to aspire; where the young and the old, the teacher and the student, sit at the same table to partake of their daily food and the food of their eternal life (Tagore, 1916).

35 Rabindranath, as a father-teacher, evolved through the ages of his life, transcending nationalistic limits and extending his moral and pedagogic leadership over a larger body of pupils. In 1918 the establishment of Visva-Bharati, an international university, crowned his educational experiments. Based on a multi-racial network, Visva-Bharati emphasized a non-sectarian and aesthetic curriculum that included fine arts, music, Indian folk culture, and literature to understand the psychology of Indian people (Nussbaum, 2009).

36 Rabindranath’s daring educational experiments (like his literary and philosophical works) remained restricted to his close followers. Scholars have blamed the lack of success on his elitist background. His aesthetic moralism did not provide a viable model for mass education (Chatterjee, 2011). However, what is missed in this assessment is Rabindranath’s paternalistic concern for common people as evidenced by his efforts to educate the peasantry. His last major experiment was the establishment of Sriniketan in 1922 with the help of Leonard Elmhirst, the British agro-economist, and twelve of his former students. Based on international cooperation since its inception, Sriniketan’s objective was rural reconstruction to make the villagers “self-reliant and self-respectful, acquainted with the cultural traditions of their country and competent to make use of modern resources for improvement of their physical, intellectual and economic conditions” (O’Connell, 2002, p. 195). Organizing boys and girls in ways that were modeled on the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and the 4-H movement of America, village children were trained in practical skills and were made to overcome caste prejudices through group participation.

37 Rabindranath delegated the main responsibility of Sriniketan to his son, Rathindranath, who was sent to study Agriculture at the University of Illinois, US, and Göttingen University, Germany. Upon his return from the West, Rathindranath served on his family estates training poor farmers in the art of scientific farming. For the next four decades, he worked for Visva Bharati and became its first Vice-Chancellor when it became a central university. Rabindranath arranged Rathindranath’s marriage with seventeen-year-old Pratima Devi, a child-widow, in 1910. Later, he trained and educated her to be part of his educational schemes. Again, Rabindranath exerted his paternal authority, like that of his father, in arranging his son’s marriage; but his choice of a widow for his son was consonant with the legislation, the Widow Remarriage Act (1856), passed in the previous century. His closeness with Pratima Devi defied the conservatism that his father displayed. He signaled a change from the domineering father like Debendranath to a more self-confident, engaging father in his own right. Through the ages of life Rabindranath relied on the strength and support of his family, abided by family rules and customs, but also offered resistance to the limitations imposed by them.

38 Rabindranath’s masculinity rested on an assumption of fatherhood that he experienced with his father and older brothers (Sen, 2014). The sense of freedom he inculcated among the future generation was restrained by his authority as the paterfamilias in the geographical locale of the ashram . He actualized the dreams of the earlier educators like Bhudev who wanted to train the teachers so that “they could relate to [their] students as fathers relate to their sons” (Sengupta, 2011, p. 81). He achieved this first by training the teachers; second, by positioning himself as a father-cum-educator and becoming a role model for the teachers. His rigorous training of teachers for his school at Santiniketan is best captured in a series of essays written between 1936 and 1941, “Ashram-er Rup o Bikash” (Tagore,1941). As one commentator later reflected, Rabindranath “succeeded in establishing a cordial atmosphere of mutual understandability and warmth of sympathy as a teacher-father - Gurudev of the Ashrama [School]” (Chakrabarti, 1990, p. 94).

39 Committed to nineteenth-century values of liberal individualism, the entanglements of Rabindranath’s familial side with his pioneering educational experiments reveal in him an insurgent consciousness that challenged both colonial oppression and native injustices. While in his imaginings, the child, mostly male, was “Indian but not orthodox, modern but not mimic [sic],” and its “rebelliousness was contained within a formalized context and limited authority,” it will be delimiting to understand Rabindranath only within the post-Enlightenment analytic (Sen, 2014, p. 60). By focusing on the ages of his life, I have endeavored to foreground his experiential reality and familial context from which he drew sustenance.

40 Rabindranath’s reforms were a culmination of the Tagore family’s long involvement in education over four generations. Rabindranath’s pedagogical enterprise was a family project. Neither he nor his family superseded prevailing caste, class, and gender norms, but the family as a whole, and Rabindranath’s meditations and activism on social ills, gender norms, and education, gestured towards a radicality that set the Tagores apart as trend-setters and culture-builders in colonial India. The novelty lay in Rabindranath’s new pedagogic model, irrespective of age, gender, sex, caste, class, or religion. As a father-cum-educator he transcended the home ( ghar ) and reached out to the world ( bahir ). While his experiments, localized and limited, failed in the long run, his critique still remains salient for understanding colonial modernity.

41 Rabindranath’s enactment of masculinity can be tracked along interconnected trajectories: as a rebellious thinker, Rabindranath rejected the authoritarianism of British institutions. He blamed colonial education for the emasculation of Indians. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, including his own niece Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, he did not participate in a movement for body-building and wrestling that would strengthen the “weak” body of the Indians. His masculinity encompassed a fatherhood, traits of which he chiefly inherited from his predecessors: a fatherhood that commanded compliance but also nurtured freedom. Through the ages of his life, his model Pitridev (father-god) evolved into his own archetype as the “Gurudev” (teacher-god), the father-cum-teacher that the early native educators emphasized. His “empire” of fatherhood extended beyond his immediate familial and religious domain. He encouraged the independent spirit of his students as world citizens but did not subscribe to the Enlightenment notion of private individuals entrenched in property rights and predicated on a separation with the father (Chakrabarty, 2001). Mutual deference ( bhakti) that sustained the relationship between him and his disciples did not undermine the autonomy of either but fostered a culture of creativity unfettered by the “technologies of power” (Chatterjee, 2011:126). The micropolitics of everyday life shaped by many competing forces reconstituted his fatherhood in its nurturing, care-giving roles both within home and outside, thus giving a new meaning to masculinity that was not just an expression of physical might but also an “education in emotional literacy” (Broughton & Rogers, 2007, p. 22). Identifying imperialism as the principal enemy, the drafting of alternate educational strategies suggested an overturning of the colonial model and a refusal to be treated like enfeebled children by the colonial state.

42 Samir Dayal has argued that the “fulcrum” of Rabindranath’s universal humanism was “an erotic economy of love” that could be best identified in the notion of sahridayata or empathy, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argued in a different context (Chakarbarty, 2000). Dayal writes: “Tagore’s preferred version of patriotism was couched in the rhetoric of love, rather than the received modality of aggressive nationalist self-affirmation” (Dayal, 2007, p. 78). If “Tagore’s counternarrative was calculated to destabilize the hegemony of a hypermasculinist discourse of nationalism” (Dayal, 2007, p. 79), I suggest that his counternarrative could be traced to his pedagogical experiments in which his family played a central role. His “love” for humanity (including children) was not confined to the microcosm of the home but became a blueprint for his public action. By taking care of a larger community of children as dependents, by protecting them through training and education, by giving them a home in his ashram outside of home, by nurturing deeply spiritual, yet secular, democratic principles, Rabindranath displayed his larger concern as a modern father endowed with altered sensibilities.

43 As an imperial subject of international stature, Rabindranath felt a bigger onus of freeing children’s minds and preparing them with skills and knowledge as autonomous, independent subjects of the modern world. Beset with ambivalence and contradictions, his sensibility was also conditioned by his contextual reality as a son and father. Through the ages of his life, family played an important role through its enabling and restrictive presence. By focusing on the private and the quotidian aspects that are subsumed under his more popular image of a benign, universalist poet, I have attempted to establish the link between the history of a notable family and more widespread notions of the life course, gender, and masculinity. While one aspect of Rabindranath’s masculinity was anchored in everyday acts of reformed fatherhood, his other aspect of masculinity de-linked itself from maleness and acquired its meaning through enunciation of education programs that challenged colonial forms of domination.

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1 The Tagores had the practice of renaming their brides who usually came from humble social backgrounds. Bhabatarini, Rabindranath’s wife, was given the name Mrinalini.

2 Upanayan , a rite of passage for Brahmins, introduced boys to the daily practice of chanting Gayatri mantra from the RigVeda. Monier Monier-Williams translated the mantra in 1882: “Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine vivifying Sun, May he enlighten our understandings.” (2010) (2016) were2 Press, 2005sof the mantra come from an Orientalist scholar Monier Williams: rn and revivalist Hindu movemen(2010) (2016) were2 Press, 2005sof the mantra come from an Orientalist scholar Monier Williams: rn and revivalist Hindu movemen

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Swapna M. Banerjee , «  Through the Ages of Life: Rabindranath Tagore -- Son, Father, and Educator (1861-1941)  » ,  Enfances Familles Générations [En ligne], 27 | 2017, mis en ligne le 31 août 2017 , consulté le 17 juillet 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/efg/1508

Swapna M. Banerjee

Endowed Chair, Women's & Gender Studies, Associate Professor, History Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, [email protected]

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Rabindranath Tagore: Biography

Last updated on July 11, 2024 by ClearIAS Team

Rabindranath Tagore was an iconic figure in the Indian cultural renaissance. He was a polymath poet, philosopher, musician, writer, and educationist.

Rabindranath Tagore became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his collection of poems, Gitanjali.

He was called Gurudev, Kabiguru, and Biswakabi affectionately and his songs are popularly known as Rabindrasangeet.

The national anthems of India and Bangladesh – the Jana Gana Mana and the Amar Shonar Bangla respectively are from the Rabindrasangeet.

Table of Contents

The early life of Rabindranath Tagore

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Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 th May 1861 in Calcutta as the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi.

His grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore was a rich landlord and social reformer. His father, Debendranath Tagore was a leader of the Brahmo Samaj , a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads.

The Tagore family was a treasure trove of talent in every field. They hosted the publication of literary magazines; theatre and recitals of Bengali and Western classical music featured there regularly. Tagore’s father invited several professional musicians to stay in the house and teach Indian Classical music to the children.

Tagore’s oldest brother Dwijendranath was a philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first Indian appointed to the formerly all-European Indian Civil Service. Another brother, Jyotitindranath, was a musician, composer, and playwright. His sister Swarnakumari became a novelist.

Also read: Modern Indian Sculpture

Rabindra Nath Tagore had his initial education in Oriental Seminary School. But he did not like the conventional education and started studying at home under several teachers. He was mostly trained by his siblings both in literary as well as physical activities like gymnastics and martial arts.

Tagore was a child prodigy when it comes to writing as he has started writing and publishing poetry by the age of eight.

In 1873, at the age of eleven, Tagore and his father left Calcutta to tour India for several months. He visited his father’s Santiniketan estate and Amritsar before reaching the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie where he read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kalidasa.

At the age of seventeen, he was sent to England for formal law schooling but he did not finish his studies there. He rather took up independent studies of Shakespeare.

He returned from England in 1880 and regularly published poems, stories, and novels in Bengali, slowly starting to transform Bengali literature.

In 1883, he married Mrinalini Devi, a child bride as was the tradition in those times.

Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan

Tagore moved to Santiniketan ashram in 1901, where he started an experimental school based on traditional guru-shishya teaching methods from the Upanishads. He hoped that the revival of the ancient methods of teaching will be more beneficial than the British imparted modern education system.

His wife and two of their children died during this time which left him distraught.

After his return from England and during his stay in Santiniketan, Tagore wrote several literary works of poetry, stories, and novels. His works had started gaining immense popularity in India as well as abroad.

In 1909, Rabindranath Tagore started writing Gitanjali. In 1912, Tagore went to Europe for the second time. On the journey to London, he translated some of his poems/songs from Gitanjali to English. He met William Rothenstein, a noted British painter, in London who was impressed by the poems, made copies, and gave to Yeats and other English poets. Yeats was enthralled and later wrote the introduction to Gitanjali when it was published in September 1912 in a limited edition by the India Society in London. And in 1913, this collection of poems won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first non-European to receive the prestigious award.

In 1915, he was awarded a knighthood by King George V.

Rabindranath Tagore in Independence movement

Tagore participated in the Indian nationalist movement from time to time, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way; and Gandhi, the political father of modern India , was his devoted friend. Tagore came to be recognized as one of the architects of modern India.

India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru , wrote in  Discovery of India , “Tagore and Gandhi have undoubtedly been the two outstanding and dominating figures in the first half of the twentieth century. Tagore’s influence over the mind of India, and especially of successive rising generations has been tremendous. Not Bengali only, the language in which he wrote, but all the modern languages of India have been molded partly by his writings. More than any other Indian, he has helped to bring into harmony the ideals of the East and the West, and broadened the bases of Indian nationalism.”

In 1905, Viceroy Curzon decided to divide Bengal into two parts. Rabindranath Tagore strongly protested against this decision. Tagore wrote many national songs and attended protest meetings. He initiated the Rakhibandhan ceremony, symbolizing the underlying unity of undivided Bengal.

In 1919, following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre , Tagore renounced his knighthood condemning the act. He was a supporter of Gandhiji but he stayed out of politics. He was opposed to nationalism and militarism as a matter of principle, and instead promoted spiritual values and the creation of a new world culture founded in multi-culturalism, diversity, and tolerance.

Tagore the educationalist

1n 1921, Rabindranath Tagore established Viswabharati University and gave all his money from Nobel Prize and royalty money from his books to this University.

Tagore was quite knowledgeable of Western culture, especially Western poetry and sciences. Tagore had a good grasp of modern – post-Newtonian – physics and was well able to hold his own in a debate with Einstein in 1930 on the newly emerging principles of quantum mechanics and chaos. His meetings and tape-recorded conversations with his contemporaries such as Albert Einstein and H.G. Wells, epitomize his brilliance.

In 1940 Oxford University arranged a special ceremony in Santiniketan and awarded Rabindranath Tagore with a Doctorate of Literature.

Literary works of Rabindranath Tagore

Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he was, first of all, a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are:

Manasi  (1890) (The Ideal One),  Sonar Tari  (1894) (The Golden Boat),  Gitanjali (1910) (Song Offerings), Gitimalya  (1914) (Wreath of Songs), and  Balaka  (1916) (The Flight of Cranes).

The English renderings of his poetry, which include  The Gardener  (1913),  Fruit-Gathering  (1916), and  The Fugitive  (1921), do not generally correspond to particular volumes in the original Bengali.

Tagore’s major plays are  Raja  (1910) [The King of the Dark Chamber],  Dakghar  (1912) [The Post Office] ,   Achalayatan  (1912) [The Immovable],  Muktadhara  (1922) [The Waterfall], and  Raktakaravi  (1926) [Red Oleanders].

He is the author of several volumes of short stories and many novels, among them Gora  (1910),  Ghare-Baire  (1916) [ The Home and the World ], and  Yogayog  (1929) [Crosscurrents].

Besides these, he wrote musical dramas, dance dramas, essays of all types, travel diaries, and two autobiographies, one in his middle years and the other shortly before his death in 1941. Tagore also left numerous drawings and paintings, and songs for which he wrote the music himself.

He also played the title role in his first original dramatic piece- Valmiki Pratibha.

After an extended period of suffering, Tagore died on August 7, 1941, in the same mansion in which he was brought up.

Legacy of Rabindranath Tagore:

Rabindranath Tagore changed the way Bengali literature was perceived as he left an everlasting impression on the readers.

Many countries have his statues erected and host many yearly events to pay tribute to the legendary writer.

Many of his works have been made global, thanks to a host of translations by many famous international writers.

There are five museums dedicated to Tagore. While three of them are situated in India, the remaining two are in Bangladesh. The museums’ house his famous works, and are visited by millions every year.

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