Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore  (May 7, 1861 – August 7, 1941), also known by the sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali poet from India, Brahmo Samaj (syncretic Hindu monotheist) philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist whose avant-garde works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A celebrated cultural icon of Bengal, he became Asia’s first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tagore was born in Jorasanko in the city of Calcutta (now known as Kolkata). A Pirali Bengali Brahmin by birth, Tagore began writing poems at the age of eight; he published his first substantial poetry — using the pseudonym Bhanushingho ("Sun Lion") — in 1877 and wrote his first short stories and dramas at age sixteen. His home schooling, life in Shelidah, and extensive travels made Tagore a nonconformist and pragmatist ; however, growing disillusionment with the British Raj caused Tagore to back the Indian Independence Movement and befriend Mahatma Gandhi. Despite the loss of virtually his entire family and his regrets regarding Bengal’s decline, his life’s work — Visva-Bharati University — endured.

Tagore’s major works included Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World), while his verse, short stories, and novels — many defined by rhythmic lyricism, colloquial language, meditative naturalism, and philosophical contemplation — received worldwide acclaim. Tagore was also a cultural reformer and polymath who modernised Bangla art by rejecting strictures binding it to classical Indian forms. Two songs from his rabindrasangit canon are now the national anthems of Bangladesh and India: the Amar Shonar Bangla and the Jana Gana Mana.

Tagore (nicknamed "Rabi") was born the youngest of fourteen children in the Jorasanko mansion of parents Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. After undergoing his upanayan (the sacred thread ceremony, a coming-of-age) rite at age eleven, Tagore and his father left Calcutta on February 14, 1873 to tour India for several months, visiting his father’s Santiniketan estate and Amritsar before reaching the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie. There, Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kālidāsa. In 1877, he arose to notability when he composed several works, including a long poem set in the Maithili style pioneered by Vidyapati. As a joke, he initially claimed that these were the lost works of (what he claimed was) a newly-discovered 17th century poet. He also wrote "Bhikharini" (1877; "The Beggar Woman" — the Bangla language’s first short story) and Sandhya Sangit (1882) — including the famous poem "Nirjharer Swapnabhanga" ("The Rousing of the Waterfall").

Seeking to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, England in 1878; later, he studied at University College London, but returned to Bengal in 1880 without a degree, because his father had arranged a marriage for him. On 9 December 1883, he married ten-year-old, Mrinalini Devi; they had five children, four of whom later died before reaching full adulthood. In 1890, Tagore (joined in 1898 by his wife and children) began managing his family’s estates in Shelidah, a region now in Bangladesh. Known as "Zamindar Babu", Tagore traveled across the vast estate while living out of the family’s luxurious barge, the Padma, to collect (mostly token) rents and bless villagers; in exchange, he had feasts held in his honour. During these years, Tagore’s Sadhana period (1891–1895; named for one of Tagore’s magazines) was among his most fecund, with more than half the stories of the three-volume and eighty-four-story Galpaguchchha written. With irony and emotional weight, they depicted a wide range of Bengali lifestyles, particularly village life.

In 1901, Tagore left Shelidah and moved to Santiniketan (West Bengal) to found an ashram, which would grow to include a marble-floored prayer hall ("The Mandir"), an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, and a library. There, Tagore’s wife and two of his children died. His father also died on 19 January 1905, and he began receiving monthly payments as part of his inheritance; he also received income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of his family’s jewellery, his seaside bungalow in Puri, and mediocre royalties (Rs. 2,000) from his works. These works gained him a large following among Bengali and foreign readers alike, and he published such works as Naivedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) while translating his poems into free verse. On 14 November 1913, Tagore learned that he had won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. According to the Swedish Academy, it was given due to the idealistic and — for Western readers — accessible nature of a small body of his translated material, including the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. In addition, Tagore was offered knighthood by the British Crown in 1915; which he accepted but later renounced in 1919, in protest against the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (Jallianwala Bagh Massacre), in which colonial troops opened fire on unarmed civilians killing an estimated 379 people. In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the Institute for Rural Reconstruction (which Tagore later renamed Shriniketan — "Abode of Peace") in Surul, a village near the ashram at Santiniketan. Through it, Tagore sought to provide an alternative to Gandhi’s symbol- and protest-based Swaraj movement, which he denounced. He recruited scholars, donors, and officials from many countries to help the Institute use schooling to "free village[s] from the shackles of helplessness and ignorance" by "vitaliz[ing] knowledge". In the early 1930s, he also grew more concerned about India’s "abnormal caste consciousness" and Untouchability, lecturing on its evils, writing poems and dramas with Untouchable protagonists, and appealing to authorities at Kerala’s Guruvayoor Temple to admit Dalits.

In his last decade, Tagore remained in the public limelight, publicly upbraiding Gandhi for stating that a massive 15 January 1934 earthquake in Bihar constituted divine retribution for the subjugation of Dalits. He also mourned the incipient socioeconomic decline of Bengal and the endemic poverty of Calcutta; he detailed the latter in an unrhymed hundred-line poem whose technique of searing double-vision would foreshadow Satyajit Ray’s film Apur Sansar. Tagore also compiled fifteen volumes of writings, including the prose-poems works Punashcha (1932), Shes Saptak (1935), and Patraput (1936). He continued his experimentations by developing prose-songs and dance-dramas, including Chitrangada (1936), Shyama (1939), and Chandalika (1938), and wrote the novels Dui Bon (1933), Malancha (1934), and Char Adhyay (1934). Tagore took an interest in science in his last years, writing Visva-Parichay (a collection of essays) in 1937. He explored biology, physics, and astronomy; meanwhile, his poetry — containing extensive naturalism — underscored his respect for scientific laws. He also wove the process of science (including narratives of scientists) into many stories contained in such volumes as Se (1937), Tin Sangi (1940), and Galpasalpa (1941).

Tagore’s last four years (1937–1941) were marked by chronic pain and two long periods of illness. These began when Tagore lost consciousness in late 1937; he remained comatose and near death for an extended period. This was followed three years later in late 1940 by a similar spell, from which he never recovered. The poetry Tagore wrote in these years is among his finest, and is distinctive for its preoccupation with death; these more profound and mystical experimentations allowed Tagore to be branded a "modern poet". After extended suffering, Tagore died on August 7, 1941 (22 Shravan 1348) in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion in which he was raised; his death anniversary is still mourned in public functions held across the Bangla-speaking world.

Owing to his notable wanderlust, between 1878 and 1932, Tagore visited more than thirty countries on five continents;many of these trips were crucial in familiarising non-Bengali audiences to his works and spreading his political ideas. For example, in 1912, he took a sheaf of his translated works to England, where they impressed missionary and Gandhi protégé Charles F. Andrews, Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others. Indeed, Yeats wrote the preface to the English translation of Gitanjali, while Andrews joined Tagore at Santiniketan. On 10 November 1912, Tagore toured the United States and the United Kingdom, staying in Butterton, Staffordshire with Andrews’ clergymen friends. From 3 May 1916 until April 1917, Tagore went on lecturing circuits in Japan and the United States, during which he denounced nationalism — particularly that of the Japanese and Americans. He also wrote the essay "Nationalism in India", attracting both derision and praise (the latter from pacifists, including Romain Rolland). Shortly after returning to India, the 63-year-old Tagore visited Peru at the invitation of the Peruvian government, and took the opportunity to visit Mexico as well. Both governments pledged donations of $100,000 to the school at Shantiniketan (Visva-Bharati) in commemoration of his visits.  A week after his November 6, 1924 arrival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, an ill Tagore moved into the Villa Miralrío at the behest of Victoria Ocampo. He left for Bengal in January 1925. On 30 May 1926, Tagore reached Naples, Italy; he met fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Rome the next day. Their initially warm rapport lasted until Tagore spoke out against Mussolini on 20 July 1926. On 14 July 1927, Tagore and two companions went on a four-month tour of Southeast Asia — visiting Bali, Java, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Penang, Siam, and Singapore. The travelogues from this tour were collected into the work “Jatri”. In early 1930 he left Bengal for a nearly year-long tour of Europe and the U.S. On his return to the UK, while his paintings were being exhibited in Paris and London, he stayed at a Friends settlement in Birmingham. There, he wrote his Hibbert Lectures for the University of Oxford (which dealt with the "idea of the humanity of our God, or the divinity of Man the Eternal") and spoke at London’s annual Quaker gathering. There (addressing relations between the British and Indians, a topic he would grapple with over the next two years), Tagore spoke of a "dark chasm of aloofness". He later visited Aga Khan III, stayed at Dartington Hall, then toured Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany from June to mid-September 1930, then the Soviet Union. Lastly, in April 1932, Tagore — who was acquainted with the legends and works of the Persian mystic Hafez — was invited as a personal guest of Shah Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran. Such extensive travels allowed Tagore to interact with many notable contemporaries, including Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Romain Rolland. Tagore’s last travels abroad, including visits to Persia and Iraq (in 1932) and Ceylon in 1933, only sharpened his opinions regarding human divisions and nationalism.

Tagore’s literary reputation is disproportionately influenced by regard for his poetry; however, he also wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas, and thousands of songs. Of Tagore’s prose, his short stories are perhaps most highly regarded; indeed, he is credited with originating the Bangla-language version of the genre. His works are frequently noted for their rhythmic, optimistic, and lyrical nature. However, such stories mostly borrow from deceptively simple subject matter — the lives of ordinary people.

Tagore was an accomplished musician and painter, writing around 2,230 songs. They comprise rabindrasangit, now an integral part of Bengali culture. Tagore’s music is inseparable from his literature, most of which — poems or parts of novels, stories, or plays alike — became lyrics for his songs. Primarily influenced by the thumri style of Hindustani classical music, they ran the entire gamut of human emotion, ranging from his early dirge-like Brahmo devotional hymns to quasi-erotic compositions.They emulated the tonal color of classical ragas to varying extents; while at times his songs mimiced a given raga’s melody and rhythm faithfully, he also blended elements of different ragas to create innovative works. For Bengalis, their appeal — stemming from the combination of emotive strength and beauty described as surpassing even Tagore’s poetry — was such that the Modern Review observed that "[t]here is in Bengal no cultured home where Rabindranath’s songs are not sung or at least attempted to be sung … Even illiterate villagers sing his songs". Music critic Arther Strangeways of The Observer first introduced non-Bengalis to rabindrasangit with his book The Music of Hindostan, which described it as a "vehicle of a personality … [that] go behind this or that system of music to that beauty of sound which all systems put out their hands to seize." Among them are two such works: Bangladesh’s Amar Sonaar Baanglaa and India’s Jana Gana Mana; Tagore thus became the only person ever to have written the national anthems of two nations. In turn, rabindrasangit influenced the styles of such musicians as sitar maestro Vilayat Khan, the sarodiya Buddhadev Dasgupta, and composer Amjad Ali Khan. At age sixty, Tagore took up drawing and painting; successful exhibitions of his many works — which made a debut appearance in Paris upon encouragement by artists he met in the south of France — were held throughout Europe. Tagore — who likely exhibited protanopia ("color blindness"), or partial lack of (red-green, in Tagore’s case) colour discernment — painted in a style characterised by peculiarities in aesthetics and colouring schemes. Nevertheless, Tagore took to emulating numerous styles, including that of craftwork by the Malanggan people of northern New Ireland, Haida carvings from the Pacific Northwest region of North America, and woodcuts by Max Pechstein. Tagore also had an artist’s eye for his own handwriting, embellishing the scribbles, cross-outs, and word layouts in his manuscripts with simple artistic leitmotifs, including simple rhythmic designs.

Tagore’s experience in theatre began at age sixteen, when he played the lead role in his brother Jyotirindranath’s adaptation of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. At age twenty, he wrote his first drama-opera — Valmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki) — which describes how the bandit Valmiki reforms his ethos, is blessed by Saraswati, and composes the Rāmāyana. Through it, Tagore vigorously explores a wide range of dramatic styles and emotions, including usage of revamped kirtans and adaptation of traditional English and Irish folk melodies as drinking songs. Another notable play, Dak Ghar (The Post Office), describes how a child — striving to escape his stuffy confines — ultimately "fall[s] asleep" (which suggests his physical death). A story with worldwide appeal (it received rave reviews in Europe), Dak Ghar dealt with death as, in Tagore’s words, "spiritual freedom" from "the world of hoarded wealth and certified creeds".

His other works — emphasizing fusion of lyrical flow and emotional rhythm tightly focused on a core idea — were unlike previous Bengali dramas. His works sought to articulate, in Tagore’s words, "the play of feeling and not of action". In 1890 he wrote Visarjan (Sacrifice), regarded as his finest drama. The Bangla-language originals included intricate subplots and extended monologues. Later, his dramas probed more philosophical and allegorical themes; these included Dak Ghar. Another is Tagore’s Chandalika (Untouchable Girl), which was modeled on an ancient Buddhist legend describing how Ananda — the Gautama Buddha’s disciple — asks water of an Adivasi ("untouchable") girl. Lastly, among his most famous dramas is Raktakaravi (Red Oleanders), which tells of a kleptocratic king who enriches himself by forcing his subjects to mine. The heroine, Nandini, eventually rallies the common people to destroy these symbols of subjugation. Tagore’s other plays include Chitrangada, Raja, and Mayar Khela. Dance dramas based on Tagore’s plays are commonly referred to as rabindra nritya natyas.

The four years from 1891 to 1895 are known as Tagore’s "Sadhana" period (named for one of Tagore’s magazines). This period was among Tagore ‘s most fecund, yielding more than half the stories contained in the three-volume Galpaguchchha, which itself is a collection of eighty-four stories. Such stories usually showcase Tagore’s reflections upon his surroundings, on modern and fashionable ideas, and on interesting mind puzzles (which Tagore was fond of testing his intellect with). Tagore typically associated his earliest stories (such as those of the "Sadhana" period) with an exuberance of vitality and spontaneity; these characteristics were intimately connected with Tagore’s life in the common villages of, among others, Patisar, Shajadpur, and Shilaida while managing the Tagore family’s vast landholdings.There, he beheld the lives of India’s poor and common people; Tagore thereby took to examining their lives with a penetrative depth and feeling that was singular in Indian literature up to that point. In "The Fruitseller from Kabul", Tagore speaks in first person as town-dweller and novelist who chances upon the Afghani seller. He attempts to distil the sense of longing felt by those long trapped in the mundane and hardscrabble confines of Indian urban life, giving play to dreams of a different existence in the distant and wild mountains: "There were autumn mornings, the time of year when kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it … I would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the mountains, the glens, the forest …. ". Many of the other Galpaguchchha stories were written in Tagore’s Sabuj Patra period (1914–1917; also named for one of Tagore’s magazines).

Tagore’s Golpoguchchho (Bunch of Stories) remains among Bangla literature’s most popular fictional works, providing subject matter for many successful films and theatrical plays. Satyajit Ray’s film Charulata was based upon Tagore’s controversial novella, Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). In Atithi (also made into a film), the young Brahmin boy Tarapada shares a boat ride with a village zamindar. The boy reveals that he has run away from home, only to wander around ever since. Taking pity, the zamindar adopts him and ultimately arranges his marriage to the zamindar’s own daughter. However, the night before the wedding, Tarapada runs off — again. Strir Patra (The Letter from the Wife) is among Bangla literature’s earliest depictions of the bold emancipation of women. The heroine Mrinal, the wife of a typical patriarchical Bengali middle class man, writes a letter while she is traveling (which constitutes the whole story). It details the pettiness of her life and struggles; she finally declares that she will not return to her husband’s home with the statement Amio bachbo. Ei bachlum ("And I shall live. Here, I live"). In Haimanti, Tagore takes on the institution of Hindu marriage, describing the dismal lifelessness of married Bengali women, hypocrisies plaguing the Indian middle classes, and how Haimanti, a sensitive young woman, must — due to her sensitiveness and free spirit — sacrifice her life. In the last passage, Tagore directly attacks the Hindu custom of glorifying Sita’s attempted self-immolation as a means of appeasing her husband Rama’s doubts. Tagore also examines Hindu-Muslim tensions in Musalmani Didi, which in many ways embodies the essence of Tagore’s humanism. On the other hand, Darpaharan exhibits Tagore’s self-consciousness, describing a young man harboring literary ambitions. Though he loves his wife, he wishes to stifle her own literary career, deeming it unfeminine. Tagore himself, in his youth, seems to have harbored similar ideas about women. Darpaharan depicts the final humbling of the man via his acceptance of his wife’s talents. As many other Tagore stories, Jibito o Mrito provides the Bengalis with one of their more widely used epigrams: Kadombini moriya proman korilo she more nai ("Kadombini died, thereby proved that she hadn’t").

Tagore’s poetry — which varied in style from classical formalism to the comic, visionary, and ecstatic — proceeds out a lineage established by 15th- and 16th-century poets. Tagore was also influenced by the mysticism of the rishi-authors who — including Vyasa — wrote the Upanishads, the Bhakta-Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad.Yet Tagore’s poetry became most innovative and mature after his exposure to rural Bengal’s folk music, which included ballads sung by Bāul folk singers — especially the bard Lālan Śāh. These — which were rediscovered and popularised by Tagore — resemble 19th-century Kartābhajā hymns that emphasize inward divinity and rebellion against religious and social orthodoxy. During his Shelidah years, his poems took on a lyrical quality, speaking via the maner manus (the Bāuls’ "man within the heart") or meditating upon the jivan devata ("living God within"). This figure thus sought connection with divinity through appeal to nature and the emotional interplay of human drama. Tagore used such techniques in his poems (which chronicle the romanticism between Radha and Krishna), which he repeatedly revised over the course of seventy years.

Later, Tagore responded to the (mostly) crude emergence of modernism and realism in Bengali literature by writing experimental works in the 1930s. Examples works include Africa and Camalia, which are among the better known of his latter poems. He also occasionally wrote poems using Shadhu Bhasha (a Sanskritised dialect of Bangla); later, he began using Cholti Bhasha (a more popular dialect). Other notable works include Manasi, Sonar Tori (Golden Boat), Balaka (Wild Geese — the title being a metaphor for migrating souls), and Purobi. Sonar Tori’s most famous poem — dealing with the ephemeral nature of life and achievement — goes by the same name; it ends with the haunting phrase ("Shunno nodir tire rohinu poŗi / Jaha chhilo loe gêlo shonar tori" — "all I had achieved was carried off on the golden boat — only I was left behind."). However, internationally, Gitanjali  is Tagore’s best-known collection, winning him his Nobel Prize. Song VII of Gitanjali:

"My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers."

"My poet’s vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music."