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• Rabindranath Tagore - Biographical

Rabindranath Tagore

Biographical.

R abindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads . He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities, he managed the family estates, a project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He also started an experimental school at Shantiniketan where he tried his Upanishadic ideals of education. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way; and Gandhi, the political father of modern India, was his devoted friend. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India.

Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution.

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; and in spite of its title, Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), the most acclaimed of them, contains poems from other works besides its namesake. 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 a number of 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.

Rabindranath Tagore died on August 7, 1941.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel . It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures . To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

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Who was Rabindranath Tagore?

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Rabindranath Tagore

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• Victoria and Albert Museum - Rabindranath Tagore: Poet And Painter
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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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Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941): A Biographical Sketch

The Renaissance man of modern India, Rabindranath Tagore put his country on the literary map of the world when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Though known primarily as a poet and writer, Tagore was also a painter, musical composer and radical thinker, an educationist and rural reformer. My paper is a brief biographical sketch which hopes to connect with Tagore's life and his work.

Related Papers

Beyond Boundaries: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore

Mohammad A. Quayum

Kavya Bharati

Neeti Singh

My reflections on the relevance of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), circle around three mantras that underlie and harness a good deal of the work that Tagore did as poet-playwright, artist, ambassador and educationist. A close look at his life and actions along with his writings unfolds before us a legacy from which there is much to learn and benefit. The methods he adopted appeared quite ordinary and indigenous, their strength lay however in their guiding vision and corrective impact. The contributions come to us through his engagement with i) translation ii) Shantiniketan and iii) his innate sense of beauty. Tagore chose to translate (rather than write) his poems/plays into English, thereby subscribing translation as a means to producing literature in English. His school Shantiniketan combined the merits of both the Vernacular and English curriculum. It was the one means of recovering a nation divided by education into two major sections – the English and non English speaking Indians. The third gift as I see it lies in Tagore's cultivation of an inner 'sense of beauty'. A sense of beauty he affirmed, was the most effective way to refine, discipline and reform human character. Through his writings, his art, music, through Shantiniketan and through theatre Tagore shared with the world his unique vision; a sense of beauty furnished with enchantment and wisdom runs through all his endeavours and creative expression. The sense of regard I have for Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), is therefore compounded by a keen awareness of the fact that he rendered to India, Indian literature and culture, a precious amount of service. He was a exemplary role model both as writer and educationist. At a time when most Indians writing in English had eyes only for the wealth of poets abroad and had little to do with the literatures and traditions of their own soil, we find in Tagore's work a strong unbroken link with Classical, Bhakti and Baul traditions of writing. Tagore gives voice to the life around him, in an idiom that is his own and yet

Asiatic (6.1)

DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHYAY

Categorized research-works of Debaprasad-27

History and Theory, Theme issue 53, December 2015, Wesleyan University

Ranjan Ghosh

This article, through a close reading of Rabindranath Tagore's writings on history, tries to develop his theory of history and establish the character of his historical consciousness. Tagore's philosophy of history is distinguished from Western models of historical thinking and is resistant to aligning with nationalist and revivalistic narratives that speak only of one culture, one nation, and one community. The article works out a theoretical premise based on Tagore's engagement with time, historical distance, the everyday, history as life-view, historical fiction, historicality in literature, and the notion of the historical-now or presentism. Substantiated by the notion of a "poet-historian," Tagore's historical theory works at the limits of "global history," which is now often misappropriated through the principles of unifocality and bounded rationality. The article develops Tagore's sense of itihasa that frees history from the univocality of world history, creates its own "worlding," its historicality, enriching and disturbing our notions of global history.

Available online: http://academic.udayton.edu/monishchatterjee/tagore/sadhaka.html

Monish Chatterjee

Dr. Abha Shukla Kaushik

Rabindranath Tagore – the most eminent icon of the nineteenth century Bengal Renaissance was the first Asian to get the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. He was a polymath in his own right – a poet, a fiction writer, a dramatist, a painter, an educator, a political thinker, a philosopher, an advocate of science – the list is endless, not only in Asia but also the world over. In today’s world of specialization, it is important to remember such multifarious talents. He was a prolific genius who wrote over a hundred books of verse, about fifty plays, about forty volumes of novels, short stories and essays besides dabbling in painting and music. He was an ‘intellectual colossus’ with clear views on a whole range of issues like literature, politics, culture, social change, religion, independence, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, education, philosophy, international relations and much else expressed in his works especially the essays.

Rabindranath Tagore Beyond His Language

Imre Bangha

This volume presents Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for literature, as a global figure who rose above divides and spoke to people distant both in time and space. No Indian writer in a regional language has ever managed to reach out to so many people worldwide as did Tagore. The volume presents how he was able to cross the boundaries of language to connect to various literary cultures, how his activities are related to the meta-linguistic domains of the psychological and the mythical, and how his paintings were linked to his textual experiments. Tagore scholars from East, West, Central and Northern Europe, Indian public figures, writers and artists combine various approaches in their contributions.

Dr.Prakash Bhadury

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Rabindranath Tagore

• Born: 7th May, 1861
• Death: 8th August, 1941
• Country: India

About this author

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861, in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India. He was a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter.

He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful” poetry of Gitanjali, he became 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as “the Bard of Bengal” India’s National Gallery of Modern Art lists 102 works by Tagore in its collections.

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3745 The English Writings Of Rabindranath Tagore (1996)

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Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.244337

dc.date.accessioned: 2015-07-17T14:24:52Z dc.date.available: 2015-07-17T14:24:52Z dc.date.digitalpublicationdate: 2010/11/14 dc.identifier.barcode: 99999990863273 dc.identifier.origpath: /data58/upload/0064/990 dc.identifier.copyno: 1 dc.identifier.uri: http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/244337 dc.description.scanningcentre: C-DAC, Noida dc.description.main: 1 dc.description.tagged: 0 dc.description.totalpages: 1016 dc.format.mimetype: application/pdf dc.language.iso: Urdu dc.publisher.digitalrepublisher: Digital Library Of India dc.rights: Not Available dc.source.library: Jamia Millia Ishlamia dc.subject.classification: Generalities dc.title: 3745 The English Writings Of Rabindranath Tagore (1996) dc.type: Print - Paper dc.type: Book

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