THE
R
BA D
0F
BENGAL
indranath Tagore
The last two days a storm has been raging, similar to the description in my song—
Jhauro jhauro borishe baridhara [... amidst it] a hapless, homeless man drenched from top to
toe standing on the roof of his steamer [...] the last two days I have been singing this song
over and over [...] as a result the pelting sound of the intense rain, the wail of the wind, the
sound of the heaving Gorai [River, have assumed a fresh life and found a new language and I
have felt like a major actor in this new musical drama unfolding before me.
— Letter to Indira Devi.
The youngest of thirteen surviving children, Tagore (nicknamed "Rabi") Tagore
was born, according to the Gregorian calendar, on May 7 in 1861 - but according to the
Bengali calendar, it was the 25th of Baishakh.
Tagore's birth anniversary is widely celebrated by the Bengali community on Baisakh
25 - which coincides this year with May 9 - and 'Pachishe (25th) Baishakh' is an
important cultural occasion.
Also written Ravīndranātha Thākura, sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath
who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual
Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its
"profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse"
he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
Sometimes referred to as "the Bard of
Bengal", Tagore's poetry was viewed as
spiritual and mercurial; however, his
"elegant prose and magical poetry"
remain largely unknown outside Bengal
His novels, stories, songs, dance-
dramas, and essays spoke to topics
political and personal. Gitanjali (Song
Offerings), 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—or panned—for their
lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and
unnatural contemplation.
His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana
Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The Sri Lanka's National Anthem was
inspired by his work.
A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote
poetry as an eight-year-old.[At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems
under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary
authorities as long-lost classics. By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and
dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and
ardent anti-nationalist, he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from
Britain.
As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised
paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his
legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
Rabindra’s Family &
Life
Tagore was raised mostly by servants; his mother had
died in his early childhood and his father travelled
widely.
The Tagore family was at the forefront of the Bengal
renaissance. They hosted the publication of literary
magazines; theatre and recitals of Bengali and
Western classical music featured there regularly.
Tagore's oldest brother Dwijendranath was a philosopher and poet. Another brother,
Satyendranath, was the first Indian appointed to the elite and formerly all-European Indian
Civil Service. Yet another brother, Jyotirindranath, was a musician, composer, and
playwright.
His sister Swarnakumari became a novelist. Jyotirindranath's wife Kadambari, slightly older
than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence. Her abrupt suicide in 1884, soon
after he married, left him for years profoundly distraught.
Tagore learned drawing, anatomy, geography and history, literature, mathematics,
Sanskrit, and English—his least favourite subject.Tagore loathed formal education—his
scholarly travails at the local Presidency College spanned a single day. Years later he held
that proper teaching does not explain things; proper teaching stokes curiosity
After his upanayan (coming-of-age) rite at age eleven, Tagore and his father left Calcutta in
February 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. Rabindranath Thakur (Tagore) was the youngest of the
thirteen children born to Debendranath Tagore and Sarada
Devi. His father was a great Hindu philosopher and one of
the founders of the religious movement, ‘Brahmo Samaj’.
The Tagores were ardent art-lovers who were known
throughout the Bengal for their dominant influence over
Bengali culture and literature. Having been born in such a
family, he was introduced to the world of theatre, music
(both regional folk and Western) and literature from an early
age.
When he was eleven, he accompanied his father on a tour across India. While on this
journey, he read the works of famous writers, including Kalidasa, a celebrated Classical
Sanskrit poet. Upon his return, he composed a long poem in the Maithili style, in 1877.
In 1878, he moved to Brighton, East Sussex, England, to study law. He attended the
University College London for some time, following which he started studying the works of
Shakespeare. He returned to Bengal in 1880 without a degree, with the aspiration of fusing
the elements of Bengali and European traditions in his literary works.
In 1882, he wrote one of his most acclaimed poems, ‘Nirjharer Swapnabhanga’
Kadambari, one of his sisters-in-law, was his close friend and confidante, who committed
suicide in 1884. Devastated by this incident, he skipped classes at school and spent most of
his time swimming in the Ganges and trekking through the hills.
Political Opinion
Tagore’s political outlook was a little ambiguous. Though he censured imperialism, he
supported the continuation of British administration in India.
He criticized ‘Swadeshi Movement’ by Mahatma Gandhi in his essay "The Cult of the Charka",
published in September 1925. He believed in the co-existence of the British and the Indians
and stated that British rule in India was "political symptom of our social disease
He never supported nationalism and considered it to be one of the greatest challenges
faced by humanity. In this context he once said “A nation is that aspect which a whole
population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose”. Nevertheless, he
occasionally supported the Indian Independence Movement and following the Jallianwala
Bagh massacre, he even renounced his knighthood on 30 May 1919.
On the whole, his vision of a free India was based not on its independence from the
foreign rule, but on the liberty of thought, action and conscience of its citizens.
TRAVEL
Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five
continents.
Andrews joined Tagore at Santiniketan. In November 1912 Tagore began touring the
United States and the United Kingdom, staying in Butterton, Staffordshire with Andrews's
clergymen friends.
At the Majlis in Tehran, 1932.
Germany, 1931.
Rabindranath with Einstein in 1930
Music
Tagore was a prolific composer, with 2,230
songs to his credit. His songs are known as
rabindrasangit ("Tagore Song"),
Influenced by the thumri style of
Hindustani music, they ran the entire
gamut of human emotion, ranging from his
early dirge-like Brahmo devotional hymns
to quasi-erotic compositions.
which merges fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems or parts of novels, stories,
or plays alike—were lyricised.
the pathos of the purabi raga reminded Tagore of the evening tears of a lonely widow,
while kanara was the confused realization of a nocturnal wanderer who had lost his way.
In bhupali he seemed to hear a voice in the wind saying 'stop and come hither'.Paraj
conveyed to him the deep slumber that overtook one at night's end.
— Reba Som, Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and His Song."
Jana Gana Mana was written in shadhu-bhasha, a Sanskritised register of Bengali, and is
the first of five stanzas of a Brahmo hymn that Tagore composed. It was first sung in 1911
at a Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress[102] and was adopted in 1950 by the
Constituent Assembly of the Republic of India as its national anthem.
Paintings
At 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[103]—were held
throughout Europe.
Tagore was influenced by scrimshaw from northern New Ireland, Haida carvings from
British Columbia, and woodcuts by Max Pechstein.[94] His artist's eye for his handwriting
were revealed in the simple artistic and rhythmic leitmotifs embellishing the scribbles,
cross-outs, and word layouts of his manuscripts. Some of Tagore's lyrics corresponded in
a synesthetic sense with particular paintings.
Rabindra Chitravali, edited by noted art historian R. Siva Kumar, for the first time makes
the paintings of Tagore accessible to art historians and scholars of Rabindranth with
critical annotations and comments It also brings together a selection of Rabindranath's
own statements and documents relating to the presentation and reception of his
paintings during his lifetime.
Theatre
At sixteen, Tagore led his brother Jyotirindranath's adaptation of Molière's Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme.
At twenty he wrote his first drama-opera: Valmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki). In it
the pandit Valmiki overcomes his sins, is blessed by Saraswati, and compiles the
Rāmāyana.
Through it Tagore 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 play, Dak Ghar (The Post Office), describes the child Amal defying his stuffy and
puerile confines by ultimately "fall[ing] asleep", hinting his physical death. A story with
borderless appeal—gleaning 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".[118][119]
In the Nazi-besieged
Warsaw Ghetto, Polish
doctor-educator Janusz
Korczak had orphans in his
care stage The Post Office in
July 1942.
Novels
Tagore wrote eight novels and four novellas, among them Chaturanga, Shesher Kobita,
Char Odhay, and Noukadubi. Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)—through the lens of
the idealistic zamindar protagonist Nikhil—excoriates rising Indian nationalism, terrorism,
and religious zeal in the Swadeshi movement; a frank expression of Tagore's conflicted
sentiments, it emerged from a 1914 bout of depression. The novel ends in Hindu-Muslim
violence and Nikhil's—likely mortal—wounding.
Gora raises controversial questions regarding the Indian identity. As with Ghare Baire,
matters of self-identity (jāti), personal freedom, and religion are developed in the context of
a family story and love triangle.
In Jogajog (Relationships), the heroine
Kumudini—bound by the ideals of Śiva-
Sati, exemplified by Dākshāyani—is torn
between her pity for the sinking fortunes
of her progressive and compassionate
elder brother and his foil: her roue of a
husband. Tagore flaunts his feminist
leanings; pathos depicts the plight and
ultimate demise of women trapped by
pregnancy, duty, and family honour; he
simultaneously trucks with Bengal's
putrescent landed gentry.
Tagore's three-volume
Stories Galpaguchchha comprises eighty-four
stories that reflect upon the author's
surroundings, on modern and
fashionable ideas, and on mind
puzzles.
Tagore associated his earliest stories,
such as those of the "Sadhana"
period, with an exuberance of vitality
and spontaneity; these traits were
cultivated by zamindar Tagore's life in
Patisar, Shajadpur, Shelaidaha, and
other villages.
The Golpoguchchho (Bunch of Stories) was written in Tagore's Sabuj Patra period, which
lasted from 1914 to 1917 and was named for another of his magazines.
Haimanti assails Hindu arranged marriage and spotlights their often dismal domesticity, the
hypocrisies plaguing the Indian middle classes, and how Haimanti, a young woman, because
of her insufferable sensitivity and free spirit, foredid herself.
In the last passage Tagore blasts the reification of Sita's self-immolation attempt; she had
meant to appease her consort Rama's doubts of her chastity.
As do many other Tagore stories, Jibito o Mrito equips Bengalis with a ubiquitous epigram:
Kadombini moriya proman korilo she more nai—"Kadombini died, thereby proving that she
hadn't."
Poetry
Tagore's poetic style, which proceeds from a lineage established by 15th- and 16th-century
Vaishnava poets, ranges from classical formalism to the comic, visionary, and ecstatic.
He was influenced by the atavistic mysticism of Vyasa and other rishi-authors of the
Upanishads, the Bhakti-Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen.
Tagore's most innovative and mature poetry embodies his exposure to Bengali rural folk
music, which included mystic Baul ballads such as those of the bard Lalon.
During his Shelaidaha years, his poems took on a lyrical voice of the moner manush, the
Bāuls' "man within the heart" and Tagore's "life force of his deep recesses", or meditating
upon the jeevan devata—the demiurge or the "living God within".
This figure connected
with divinity through
appeal to nature and the
emotional interplay of
human drama. Such tools
saw use in his
Bhānusiṃha poems
chronicling the Radha-
Krishna romance, which
were repeatedly revised
over the course of
“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting
out the lamp because the dawn has come.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
