Rabindranath_Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali poet, novelist, musician, painter ,thespian,educationist and playwright who reshaped Bengali literature and music. As author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he was the first non-European who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 A Pirali Brahmin from Kolkata, Tagore was born on 7 may 1861 in Calcutta, Bengal presidency British India. He was already writing poems at age eight. At age sixteen, he wrote his first short stories and dramas in 1877. Tagore denounced the British Raj and supported independence. His efforts endure in his vast canon and in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University. Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to political and personal topics. Gitanjali , Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and contemplation. Tagore was perhaps the only litterateur who penned anthems of two countries - Jana Gana Mana, the Indian national anthem and Amar Shonar Bangla, the Bangladeshi national anthem. He died on 7 august 1941 at the age of 80 in Bengal Province, British India. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), ‘As a writer he is now largely unread and forgotten in everything but name’. Yet Tagore, a multifaceted genius, a darling of versatility, was the most respected name in the literary-cultural world during his lifetime, in both the East and West. He was not only the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913) ‘but also only the second writer in English to receive it’. Fondly dubbed ‘Gurudev’ (venerable teacher) by Mahatma Gandhi (whose title ‘Mahatma,’ or ‘the great soul’ was suitably given by Tagore) and ‘eagle-sized lark’ by Romain Rolland, his exquisite poetic power and gifted musical sensibility made him the author of the national anthems of three countries – Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India – a feat still unmatched in history. He was knighted by King George V of England in 1915 (which he renounced in protest of the heinous massacre at Jalianwalla Bagh, Amritsar in 1919) and awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford in 1940, for which Oxford had to travel to the poet’s doorstep because of his ill health. When Tagore was alive, he played on the heartstrings of many with his wizard fingers and breathtaking creativity. On reading Tagore’s Gitanjali, a volume of poetry that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, W.B. Yeats was so moved by the ‘simplicity’ and ‘abundance’ of his work that he instantaneously hailed Tagore as founder of a ‘new Indian Renaissance,’ and said in an extraordinary tribute to the poet: Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years … These lyrics … display in their thought a world I have dreamed all my life … Rabindranath Tagore … is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural, or in need of defence. These verses will not die in little well-printed books upon ladies’ tables … or be carried about by students at the university to be laid aside when the work of life begins, but as the generations pass, travellers will hum them on the highway and men rowing upon rivers. Lovers, while they await one another, shall find, in murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their own more bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth Tagore’s reputation far exceeded the boundary of the literary-cultural world. Albert Schweitzer called him ‘the Goethe of India’ and Romain Rolland described a meeting between him and Gandhi as a ‘meeting between… a St. Paul and a Plato’. Tagore has aptly said, ‘poetry is… a matter of taste’. Tagore was a poet-philosopher and the world simply chose not to tread the path that he sought to pave. According to him “Facts are many, but the truth is one.’’ Tagore’s vision of universal human unity, of ‘living bonds in society’; of ‘spontaneous expression of man as a social being’; of ‘wholeness and wholesomeness of human ideals’, proved too good for a world that believed in the ‘bondage of the dust,’ the tyranny of matter, machine and money, and in the fetish of nationalism. According to Tagore, such ‘ideals’ replace the true identity of the self with a blend of corporate identity, rooted not in truth, beauty, sympathy or moral welfare of mankind but in a ‘spirit of conflict and conquest’ and a whirlwind of greed, jealousy and suspicion, reducing mankind, Tagore poignantly suggests, to ‘a pack of predatory creatures’ or ‘band of robbers’.