Rabidranath Tagore

THE GURU OF INDIAN poets, gurudev to his disciples, Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta on May 7, 1861, and went into a state of spiritual rest on August 7, 1941.
The budding poet went to England in 1878 and studied literature under Henry Morley at London University College. Initially a raconteur, his book Letters From A Sojourner In London, outspoken and discreet in its comments about life and times in London, was published in book form in 1881. And the year 1881 proved to be doubly creative: he wrote the play Valmiki Pratibha – it was a rare stage appearance when Tagore appeared in the title role.
Tagore’s genius entered a new phase when he composed the poems of Manasi, the musical play Mayar Khela and the drama Raja Rani.
Tagore captured the depth of nation’s feelings in his poem Into That Heaven Of freedom – a poem that moved many nationalist to tears.
Where the mind is without fear| And the head is held high,| where knowledge is free| where the world was not been broken up| into fragments by narrow domestic walls;| where words come out from the depth of truth;| where tireless striving| stretches its arm towards perfection;| Where the mind is led forward| by thee into ever-widening|thought and action –| into that heaven of freedom,| My father, | Let my country awake.
His bursting urge to express himself manifested itself in the monthly Sadhana, which soon became the sole organ of his self-expression – he utltimately published Sonar Tari and Panchabhuter in the same journal. He became its editor in 1894 but closed it down scarcely a year later.
Tagore had long-left need to set up a school, a different, spiritual kind of school that would integrate Indians with India. And in 1901 he founded one at Shantiniketan, which still remains unique – the only one of its kind in India. Among the famous, Mrs. Indira Gandhi went to Shantiniketan during her formative years.
He opposed the partition of Bengal and communal lines and resented the concept that would have his beloved state. He preached swadeshi, composed soul-stirring songs, wrote incisive essays, addressed meetings and led protest marches. On Tagore’s Hindu cultural roots Masud says, “In Tagore we have a culture going back 2000 years – it is what one can call the Hindu Culture. But a point that is often missed is that Tagore was a product of the Bengal Renaissance which in turn was a product of 19th century liberalism.”
Tagore gifted to India her national anthem, a prose paraphrase of which he read at over Town Hall as part of his world famous essay My Interpretation Of India’s History. The national anthem was composed for the Brahmo Samaj anniversary in 1912. The same year he sailed for the UK where the translation of the Gitanjali poems created a literary sensation among British poets, mainly Yeats.
Gitanjali established Tagore as a world poet with its translation into English and inevitable selection by the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Nobel Prize opened the sluice gates to fame: he was knighted in 1915 but gave up his knighthood in 1919 as a protest against British atrocities at Jallianwala Baug.
He experienced the poet’s vision which he immortalized in The Awakening Of The Waterfall. While his first poem Abhilash was published in Tattobodhini Patrika in 1874, his entire writings include 1000 poems, 2000 songs, and a large number of short stories.
Says commentator Iqbal Masud: “Tagore was not restricted to literature, he went on to painting, and each painting of his was very individualistic”