Rabindranath Tagore's life for DSC...
Rabindranath
Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore ( 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali
poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter
of the Bengal Renaissance. 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, in
1913 Tagore became the first non-European and the first lyricist to win
the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's
poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; whereas his elegant prose
and magical poetry were widely popular in the Indian subcontinent. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
Referred to as "the Bard of
Bengal", Tagore was known by the sobriquets Gurudeb, Kobiguru,
and Biswokobi.
A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with
ancestral gentry roots
in Burdwan
district and 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 critic of nationalism, 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 also endures in his founding of Visva-Bharati University.
Tagore
modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting
linguistic strictures. 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 Lankan national anthem was
also inspired by his work. His song "Banglar Mati Banglar Jol" has been adopted as the state
anthem of West
Bengal.
Family background:
The name
Tagore is the anglicised transliteration of Thakur. The
original surname of the Tagores was
Kushari. They were Pirali
Brahmin ('Pirali' historically carried a stigmatized and
pejorative connotation) who originally belonged to a village
named Kush in the district named Burdwan in West Bengal. The
biographer of Rabindranath Tagore, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyaya wrote in the
first volume of his book Rabindrajibani O Rabindra Sahitya Prabeshak tha
The
Kusharis were the descendants of Deen Kushari, the son of Bhatta Narayana;
Deen was granted a village named Kush (in Burdwan zilla) by Maharaja Kshitisura,
he became its chief and came to be known as Kushari.
Early life: (1861–1878)
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 13 surviving children, Tagore (nicknamed "Rabi") was born on 7 May
1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta,[23] the
son of Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) and Sarada Devi
(1830–1875).
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 father invited several professional Dhrupad musicians
to stay in the house and teach Indian classical music to the children. 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
Devi, slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful
influence. Her abrupt suicide in 1884, soon after he married, left him
profoundly distraught for years.
Tagore largely
avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati, which the
family visited. His brother Hemendranath tutored and physically conditioned him—by
having him swim the Ganges or trek through hills, by gymnastics, and by
practising judo and wrestling. He 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. During
his 1-month stay at Amritsar in 1873 he was greatly influenced by
melodious gurbani and
Nanak bani being sung at Golden Temple for which both father and son were
regular visitors. He writes in his My Reminiscences (1912):
The
golden temple of Amritsar comes back to me like a dream. Many a morning have I
accompanied my father to this Gurudarbar of the Sikhs in the middle of the
lake. There the sacred chanting resounds continually. My father, seated amidst
the throng of worshippers, would sometimes add his voice to the hymn of praise,
and finding a stranger joining in their devotions they would wax
enthusiastically cordial, and we would return loaded with the sanctified
offerings of sugar crystals and other sweets.
He wrote 6 poems relating to
Sikhism
and several articles in Bengali children's magazine about Sikhism.
·
Poems
on Guru Gobind Singh: Nishfal-upahaar
(1888, translated as "Futile Gift"), Guru Gobinda (1899) and Shesh
Shiksha (1899, translated as "Last Teachings")
·
Poem
on Banda Bahadur: Bandi-bir
(The Prisoner Warrior written in 1888 or 1898)
·
Poem
on Bhai Torusingh: (prarthonatit
dan – Unsolicited gift) written in 1888 or 1898.
·
Poem
on Nehal Singh: (Nihal
Singh) written in 1935.
Tagore
returned to Jorosanko and completed a set of major works by 1877, one of them a
long poem in the Maithili style of Vidyapati. As a
joke, he claimed that these were the lost works of newly discovered
17th-century Vaiṣṇava poet
Bhānusiṃha. Regional experts accepted them as the lost works of the
fictitious poet. He debuted in the short-story genre in Bengali with
"Bhikharini"
("The Beggar Woman"). Published in the same year, Sandhya
Sangit (1882) includes the poem "Nirjharer Swapnabhanga"
("The Rousing of the Waterfall").
Shilaidaha: (1878–1901)
Debendranath wanted his son to become a
barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, East Sussex, England
in 1878. He stayed for several months at a house that the Tagore
family owned near Brighton and Hove, in Medina Villas; in 1877 his nephew
and niece—Suren and Indira Devi, the children of Tagore's brother Satyendranath—were sent together with their mother, Tagore's
sister-in-law, to live with him.[46] He
briefly read law at University College London, but again left, opting instead for
independent study of Shakespeare's plays Coriolanus,
and Antony and Cleopatra and the Religio Medici of Thomas Browne. Lively
English, Irish, and Scottish folk tunes impressed Tagore, whose own tradition
of Nidhubabu-authored kirtans and tappas and Brahmo hymnody
was subdued. In 1880 he returned to Bengal degree-less, resolving to
reconcile European novelty with Brahmo traditions, taking the best from each. After
returning to Bengal, Tagore regularly published poems, stories, and novels.
These had a profound impact within Bengal itself but received little national
attention. In 1883 he married 10-year-old Mrinalini Devi,
born Bhabatarini, 1873–1902 (this was a common practice at the time). They had
five children, two of whom died in childhood.
In 1890 Tagore
began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha (today
a region of Bangladesh); he was joined there by his wife and children in 1898.
Tagore released his Manasi poems (1890), among his best-known
work.As Zamindar Babu,
Tagore criss-crossed the Padma River in
command of the Padma, the luxurious family barge (also known as
"budgerow"). He
collected mostly token rents and blessed villagers who in turn honoured him
with banquets—occasionally of dried rice and sour milk. He met Gagan Harkara,
through whom he became familiar with Baul Lalon Shah, whose
folk songs greatly influenced Tagore. Tagore worked to popularise Lalon's
songs. The period 1891–1895, Tagore's Sadhana period, named
after one of his magazines, was his most productive; in these years he
wrote more than half the stories of the three-volume, 84-story Galpaguchchha. Its
ironic and grave tales examined the voluptuous poverty of an idealised rural
Bengal.
Santiniketan: (1901–1932)
In 1901 Tagore
moved to Santiniketan to
found an ashram with a
marble-floored prayer hall—The Mandir—an
experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a library.There his wife and two
of his children died. His father died in 1905. He received monthly payments as
part of his inheritance and income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of
his family's jewellery, his seaside bungalow in Puri, and a derisory 2,000 rupees in book
royalties. He gained Bengali and foreign readers alike; he
published Naivedya (1901)
and Kheya (1906) and translated poems into free verse.
In
1912, Tagore translated his 1910 work Gitanjali into
English.
While on a trip to London, he shared these poems with admirers including William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound.
London's India
Society published the work in a limited edition, and the
American magazine Poetry published
a selection from Gitanjali. In November 1913, Tagore learned he
had won that year's Nobel Prize in Literature: the Swedish Academy appreciated
the idealistic—and for Westerners—accessible nature of a small body of his
translated material focused on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. He
was awarded a knighthood by King George V in the 1915 Birthday Honours, but Tagore renounced it after the
1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Renouncing the knighthood,
Tagore wrote in a letter addressed to Lord Chelmsford, the then British Viceroy
of India, "The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon
the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced,
are without parallel in the history of civilised governments...The time has
come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context
of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special
distinctions, by the side of my countrymen."
In 1919, he
was invited by the president and chairman of Anjuman-e-Islamia, Syed Abdul Majid to
visit Sylhet for the
first time. The event attracted over 5000 people.
In 1921,
Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the "Institute for Rural
Reconstruction", later renamed Shriniketan or "Abode of
Welfare", in Surul,
a village near the ashram. With it, Tagore sought to moderate Gandhi's Swaraj protests,
which he occasionally blamed for British India's perceived mental – and thus
ultimately colonial – decline. He sought aid from donors,
officials, and scholars worldwide to "free village[s] from the shackles of
helplessness and ignorance" by "vitalis[ing] knowledge". In
the early 1930s he targeted ambient "abnormal caste consciousness"
and untouchability.
He lectured against these, he penned Dalit heroes for his poems and his
dramas, and he campaigned—successfully—to open Guruvayoor Temple to
Dalits.
Twilight years: (1932–1941)
Dutta and
Robinson describe this phase of Tagore's life as being one of a
"peripatetic litterateur".
It affirmed his opinion that human divisions were shallow. During a May 1932
visit to a Bedouin encampment
in the Iraqi desert, the tribal chief told him that "Our Prophet has
said that a true Muslim is he by whose words and deeds not the least of his
brother-men may ever come to any harm ..." Tagore confided in his diary:
"I was startled into recognizing in his words the voice of essential
humanity."To the end Tagore scrutinized orthodoxy—and in 1934, he struck.
That year, an earthquake hit Bihar and killed
thousands. Gandhi hailed it as seismic karma, as divine retribution avenging
the oppression of Dalits. Tagore rebuked him for his seemingly ignominious
implications. He mourned the perennial poverty of Calcutta and the
socioeconomic decline of Bengal and detailed this newly plebeian aesthetics in
an unrhymed hundred-line poem whose technique of searing double-vision
foreshadowed Satyajit
Ray's film Apur Sansar. Fifteen new volumes appeared, among them
prose-poem works Punashcha (1932), Shes Saptak (1935),
and Patraput (1936). Experimentation continued in his
prose-songs and dance-dramas— Chitra (1914), Shyama (1939),
and Chandalika (1938)— and in his novels— Dui Bon (1933), Malancha (1934),
and Char Adhyay (1934).
Tagore's remit
expanded to science in his last years, as hinted in Visva-Parichay,
a 1937 collection of essays. His respect for scientific laws and his
exploration of biology, physics, and astronomy informed his poetry, which
exhibited extensive naturalism and verisimilitude. He wove the process of
science, the narratives of scientists, into stories in Se (1937), Tin
Sangi (1940), and Galpasalpa (1941). His last five
years 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 a time. This was followed in late 1940 by a similar spell, from which
he never recovered. Poetry from these valetudinary years is among his finest. A
period of prolonged agony ended with Tagore's death on 7 August 1941, aged 80.
He was in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion in which he grew up. The
date is still mourned. A. K. Sen, brother of the first chief election
commissioner, received dictation from Tagore on 30 July 1941, a day before a
scheduled operation: his last poem.
I'm
lost in the middle of my birthday. I want my friends, their touch, with the
earth's last love. I will take life's final offering, I will take the human's
last blessing. Today my sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had
to give. In return, if I receive anything—some love, some forgiveness—then I
will take it with me when I step on the boat that crosses to the festival of
the wordless end.
Travels:
Between 1878
and 1932, Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five continents.
In 1912, he took a sheaf of his translated works to England, where they
gained attention from missionary and Gandhi protégé Charles F. Andrews, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert
Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others. Yeats
wrote the preface to the English translation of Gitanjali; 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. From May 1916 until
April 1917, he lectured in Japan and the United States. He
denounced nationalism. His essay "Nationalism in India"
was scorned and praised; it was admired by Romain
Rolland and other pacifists.
Shortly after
returning home, the 63-year-old Tagore accepted an invitation from the Peruvian
government. He travelled to Mexico. Each government pledged US$100,000 to
his school to commemorate the visits. A week after his 6
November 1924 arrival in Buenos Aires, an ill Tagore shifted to the Villa
Miralrío at the behest of Victoria
Ocampo. He left for home in January 1925. In May 1926 Tagore reached
Naples; the next day he met Mussolini in
Rome. Their warm rapport ended when Tagore pronounced upon Il Duce's
fascist finesse. He had earlier enthused: "[w]without any doubt
he is a great personality. There is such a massive vigor in that head that it
reminds one of Michael Angelo's chisel." A "fire-bath" of
fascism was to have educed "the immortal soul of Italy ... clothed in
quenchless light".
On 1 November
1926 Tagore arrived in Hungary and spent some time on the shore of Lake Balaton
in the city of Balatonfüred, recovering from heart problems at a sanitarium. He
planted a tree, and a bust statue was placed there in 1956 (a gift from the
Indian government, the work of Rasithan Kashar, replaced by a newly gifted
statue in 2005) and the lakeside promenade still bears his name since 1957.
On 14 July
1927, Tagore and two companions began a four-month tour of Southeast Asia. They
visited Bali, Java, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Penang, Siam, and Singapore. The
resultant travelogues compose Jatri (1929). In early 1930
he left Bengal for a nearly year-long tour of Europe and the United States.
Upon returning to Britain—and as his paintings were exhibited in Paris and
London—he lodged at a Birmingham Quaker settlement. He wrote his Oxford Hibbert
Lectures[c] and spoke at the annual
London Quaker meet. There, addressing relations between the British and
the Indians – a topic he would tackle repeatedly over the next two years –
Tagore spoke of a "dark chasm of aloofness". He visited Aga Khan
III, stayed at Dartington Hall, toured Denmark, Switzerland, and
Germany from June to mid-September 1930, then went on into the Soviet Union. In
April 1932 Tagore, intrigued by the Persian mystic Hafez, was hosted
by Reza Shah Pahlavi. In his other travels,
Tagore interacted with Henri
Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert
Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H. G.
Wells, and Romain Rolland.[102][103] Visits to Persia and Iraq (in
1932) and Sri Lanka (in 1933) composed Tagore's final foreign tour, and his
dislike of communalism and nationalism only
deepened. Vice-president of India M. Hamid
Ansari has said that Rabindranath Tagore heralded the cultural
rapprochement between communities, societies and nations much before it became
the liberal norm of conduct. Tagore was a man ahead of his time. He wrote in
1932, while on a visit to Iran, that "each country of Asia will solve its
own historical problems according to its strength, nature and needs, but the
lamp they will each carry on their path to progress will converge to illuminate
the common ray of knowledge."
Works:
Known mostly
for his poetry, Tagore wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues,
dramas, and thousands of songs. Of Tagore's prose, his short stories are
perhaps the most highly regarded; he is indeed credited with originating the
Bengali-language version of the genre. His works are frequently noted for their
rhythmic, optimistic, and lyrical nature. Such stories mostly borrow from the
lives of common people. Tagore's non-fiction grappled with history,
linguistics, and spirituality. He wrote autobiographies. His travelogues,
essays, and lectures were compiled into several volumes, including Europe
Jatrir Patro (Letters from Europe) and Manusher Dhormo (The Religion of Man). His brief chat
with Einstein, "Note on the Nature of
Reality", is included as an appendix to the latter. On the occasion of
Tagore's 150th birthday, an anthology (titled Kalanukromik Rabindra
Rachanabali) of the total body of his works is currently being published in
Bengali in chronological order. This includes all versions of each work and
fills about eighty volumes. In 2011, Harvard University Press collaborated
with Visva-Bharati University to
publish The Essential Tagore, the largest
anthology of Tagore's works available in English; it was edited by Fakrul
Alam and Radha Chakravarthy and marks the 150th anniversary of
Tagore's birth.
Drama:
Tagore's
experiences with drama began when he was sixteen, with his brother Jyotirindranath. He wrote his first original
dramatic piece when he was twenty – Valmiki
Pratibha which was shown at the Tagore's mansion. Tagore stated
that his works sought to articulate "the play of feeling and not of
action". In 1890 he wrote Visarjan (an adaptation of his
novella Rajarshi), which has been regarded as his finest drama. In
the original Bengali language, such works included intricate subplots and
extended monologues. Later, Tagore's dramas used more philosophical and
allegorical themes. The play Dak Ghar (The Post Office;
1912), 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". Another is
Tagore's Chandalika (Untouchable Girl), which was
modelled on an ancient Buddhist legend describing how Ananda, the Gautama
Buddha's disciple, asks a tribal girl
for water. In Raktakarabi ("Red" or
"Blood Oleanders") is an allegorical struggle against a kleptocrat
king who rules over the residents of Yaksha puri.
Chitrangada, Chandalika, and Shyama are
other key plays that have dance-drama adaptations, which together are known
as Rabindra Nritya Natya.
Short stories:
Tagore began
his career in short stories in 1877—when he was only sixteen—with "Bhikharini"
("The Beggar Woman"). ] With this, Tagore effectively invented the
Bengali-language short story genre. 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
particular, such stories as "Kabuliwala" ("The Fruitseller
from Kabul",
published in 1892), "Kshudita Pashan" ("The Hungry Stones")
(August 1895), and "Atithi" ("The Runaway", 1895) typified
this analytic focus on the downtrodden. Many of the other Galpaguchchha stories
were written in Tagore's Sabuj Patra period from 1914 to 1917,
also named after one of the magazines that Tagore edited and heavily
contributed to.
Novels:
Tagore wrote
eight novels and four novellas, among them Nastanirh (1901), Noukadubi (1906), Chaturanga (1916) and Char Adhyay (1934). In Chokher Bali (1902-1903), Tagore
inscribes Bengali society via its heroine: a rebellious widow who would live
for herself alone. He pillories the custom of perpetual mourning on the part of
widows, who were not allowed to remarry, who were consigned to seclusion and
loneliness.
Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1916), 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.
His longest
novel, Gora (1907-1910), 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 it an Irish boy orphaned
in the Sepoy Mutiny is raised by Hindus as the
titular gora—"whitey". Ignorant of his foreign origins,
he chastises Hindu religious backsliders out of love for the indigenous Indians
and solidarity with them against his hegemon-compatriots. He falls for a Brahmo
girl, compelling his worried foster father to reveal his lost past and cease
his nativist zeal. As a "true dialectic" advancing "arguments
for and against strict traditionalism", it tackles the colonial conundrum
by "portray[ing] the value of all positions within a particular
frame [...] not only syncretism, not only liberal orthodoxy but the
extremist reactionary traditionalism he defends by an appeal to what humans
share." Among these Tagore highlights "identity [...] conceived
of as dharma."
In Jogajog (Yogayog, Relationships,
1929), 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
roué of a husband. Tagore flaunts his feminist leanings; pathos depicts
the plight and ultimate demise of women trapped by pregnancy, duty, and family
honor; he simultaneously trucks with Bengal's putrescent landed gentry. The
story revolves around the underlying rivalry between two families—the
Chatterjees, aristocrats now on the decline (Biprodas) and the Ghosals
(Madhusudan), representing new money and new arrogance. Kumudini, Biprodas'
sister, is caught between the two as she is married off to Madhusudan. She had
risen in an observant and sheltered traditional home, as had all her female
relations.
Others were
uplifting: Shesher Kabita (1929) — translated twice
as Last Poem and Farewell Song — is his most
lyrical novel, with poems and rhythmic passages written by a poet protagonist.
It contains elements of satire and postmodernism and has stock characters who
gleefully attack the reputation of an old, outmoded, oppressively renowned poet
who, incidentally, goes by a familiar name: "Rabindranath Tagore".
Though his
novels remain among the least-appreciated of his works, they have been given
renewed attention via film adaptations, by Satyajit
Ray for Charulata (based on Nastanirh) in 1964
and Ghare Baire in 1984, and by several
others filmmakers such as Satu Sen for Chokher Bali already in 1938, when
Tagore was still alive.
Poetry:
Title page of the 1913 Macmillan edition of Tagore's GitanjaliPart
of a poem written by Tagore in Hungary, 1926
Internationally, Gitanjali (Bengali: গীতাঞ্জলি) is Tagore's best-known collection
of poetry, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
Tagore was the first non-European to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature and
the second non-European to receive a Nobel Prize after Theodore Roosevelt.
Besides Gitanjali,
other notable works include Manasi, Sonar Tori ("Golden
Boat"), Balaka ("Wild Geese" – the title being
a metaphor for migrating souls).
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. These, rediscovered and re-popularized by Tagore,
resemble 19th-century Kartābhajā hymns that emphasize inward divinity and
rebellion against bourgeois bhadralok religious and social
orthodoxy. 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 was repeatedly revised over seventy years.
Later, with
the development of new poetic ideas in Bengal – many originating from younger
poets seeking to break with Tagore's style – Tagore absorbed new poetic
concepts, which allowed him to further develop a unique identity. Examples of
this include Africa and Camalia, which are among
the better-known of his latter poems.
Songs (Rabindra Sangeet):
Tagore was a
prolific composer with around 2,230 songs to his credit. His songs are
known as rabindrasangit ("Tagore Song"),
which merges fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems or parts of
novels, stories, or plays alike—were lyricized. 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. They emulated the tonal color of
classical ragas to
varying extents. Some songs mimicked a given raga's melody and rhythm
faithfully, others newly blended elements of different ragas. Yet
about nine-tenths of his work was not bhanga gaan, the body of
tunes revamped with "fresh value" from select Western, Hindustani,
Bengali folk and other regional flavors "external" to Tagore's own
ancestral culture.
In 1971, Amar Shonar Bangla became the national
anthem of Bangladesh. It was written – ironically – to protest
the 1905 Partition of Bengal along
communal lines: cutting off the Muslim-majority East Bengal from
Hindu-dominated West Bengal was to avert a regional bloodbath. Tagore saw the
partition as a cunning plan to stop the independence movement, and he aimed to
rekindle Bengali unity and tar communalism. Jana
Gana Mana was written in shadhu-bhasha,
a Sanskritised form of Bengali, and is the first of five stanzas of the
Brahmo hymn Bharot Bhagyo Bidhata that Tagore
composed. It was first sung in 1911 at a Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and was
adopted in 1950 by the Constituent Assembly of the Republic of India as its
national anthem. Sri Lanka's National Anthem was inspired by
his work.
For Bengalis,
the songs' 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". Tagore influenced sitar maestro Vilayat
Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad
Ali Khan.
Art works:
Tagore's
Bengali-language initials, the letters র
and ঠ, are worked into this "Ro-Tho" (of
RAbindranath THAkur) wooden seal, stylistically similar to designs used in
traditional Haida carvings from the Pacific
Northwest region of North America. Tagore often embellished his
manuscripts with such art.
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 Francewere held throughout Europe. He was likely red,
green color
blind, resulting in works that exhibited strange color schemes and off-beat
aesthetics. Tagore was influenced by numerous styles, including scrimshaw by
the Malanggan people
of northern New Ireland, Papua
New Guinea, Haida carvings from the Pacific
Northwest region of North America, and woodcuts by the German Max
Pechstein. His artist's eye for handwriting was 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.
Surrounded
by several painters Rabindranath had always wanted to paint. Writing and music,
playwriting and acting came to him naturally and almost without training, as it
did to several others in his family, and in even greater measure. But painting
eluded him. Yet he tried repeatedly to master the art and there are several
references to this in his early letters and reminiscence. In 1900 for instance,
when he was nearing forty and already a celebrated writer, he wrote to Jagadish
Chandra Bose, "You will be surprised to hear that I am sitting with a
sketchbook drawing. Needless to say, the pictures are not intended for any
salon in Paris, they cause me not the least suspicion that the national gallery
of any country will suddenly decide to raise taxes to acquire them. But, just
as a mother lavishes most affection on her ugliest son, so I feel secretly
drawn to the very skill that comes to me least easily." He also realized
that he was using the eraser more than the pencil, and dissatisfied with the results
he finally withdrew, deciding it was not for him to become a painter.
In 1937,
Tagore's paintings were removed from Berlin's baroque Crown
Prince Palace by the Nazi regime and five were included in the
inventory of "degenerate art" compiled by the Nazis in
1941–1942.
Political views of Rabindranath Tagore:
Tagore
opposed imperialism and supported Indian nationalists, and
these views were first revealed in Manast, which was mostly
composed in his twenties. Evidence produced during the Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial and
latter accounts affirm his awareness of the Ghadarites and stated that he sought
the support of Japanese Prime Minister Terauchi
Masatake and former Premier Ōkuma Shigenobu. Yet he lampooned the Swadeshi
movement; he rebuked it in The Cult of the Charkha, an acrid 1925
essay. According to Amartya
Sen, Tagore rebelled against strongly nationalist forms of the independence
movement, and he wanted to assert India's right to be independent without
denying the importance of what India could learn from abroad. He urged the
masses to avoid victimology and instead seek self-help and education, and he
saw the presence of British administration as a "political symptom of our
social disease". He maintained that, even for those at the extremes of poverty,
"there can be no question of blind revolution"; preferable to it was
a "steady and purposeful education".
So I repeat we never can have a true view of man
unless we have a love for him. Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by
the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given
expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity.
— Sādhanā: The Realisation
of Life, 1916.
Such views
enraged many. He escaped assassination—and only narrowly—by Indian expatriates
during his stay in a San Francisco hotel in late 1916; the plot failed when his
would-be assassins fell into an argument. Tagore wrote songs lionizing the
Indian independence movement. Two of Tagore's more politically charged
compositions, "Chitto Jetha Bhayshunyo" ("Where
the Mind is Without Fear") and "Ekla
Chalo Re" ("If They Answer Not to Thy Call, Walk Alone"),
gained mass appeal, with the latter favored by Gandhi. Though somewhat
critical of Gandhian activism, Tagore was key in resolving a Gandhi–Ambedkar dispute
involving separate electorates for untouchables, thereby mooting at least one
of Gandhi's fasts "unto death".
Repudiation of knighthood:
Tagore
renounced his knighthood in response to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
In the repudiation letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, he
wrote.
The
time has come when badges of honor make our shame glaring in the incongruous
context of humiliation, and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special
distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called
insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.
Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati:
Tagore
despised rote classroom schooling, as shown in his short story, "The
Parrot's Training", wherein a bird is caged and force-fed textbook
pages—to death. Visiting Santa Barbara in 1917, Tagore conceived a new
type of university: he sought to "make Santiniketan the connecting thread
between India and the world [and] a world center for the study of humanity
somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography."The school, which he
named Visva-Bharati,had its foundation stone
laid on 24 December 1918 and was inaugurated precisely three years later. Tagore
employed a brahmacharya system: gurus gave
pupils personal guidance—emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Teaching was
often done under trees. He staffed the school, he contributed his Nobel Prize
monies,and his duties as steward-mentor at Santiniketan kept him busy: mornings
he taught classes; afternoons and evenings he wrote the students' textbooks. He
fundraised widely for the school in Europe and the United States between 1919
and 1921.
Theft of Nobel Prize:
On 25 March
2004, Tagore's Nobel Prize was stolen from the safety vault of the
Visva-Bharati University, along with several other of his belongings. On 7
December 2004, the Swedish Academy decided to present two replicas of Tagore's
Nobel Prize, one made of gold and the other made of bronze, to the
Visva-Bharati University. It inspired the fictional film Nobel Chor.
In 2016, a baul singer named Pradip Bauri, accused of sheltering the thieves,
was arrested.
Impact and legacy:
Every year,
many events pay tribute to Tagore: Kabipranam, his birth
anniversary, is celebrated by groups scattered across the globe; the annual
Tagore Festival held in Urbana, Illinois (US); Rabindra Path Parikrama walking
pilgrimages from Kolkata to Santiniketan; and recitals of his poetry, which are
held on important anniversaries. Bengali culture is fraught with this
legacy: from language and arts to history and politics. Amartya Sen deemed
Tagore a "towering figure", a "deeply relevant and many-sided
contemporary thinker".Tagore's Bengali originals—the 1939 Rabīndra
Rachanāvalī—is canonized as one of his nation's greatest cultural
treasures, and he was roped into a reasonably humble role: "the greatest
poet India has produced".
Tagore was
renowned throughout much of Europe, North America, and East Asia. He
co-founded Dartington Hall School, a progressive
coeducational institution; in Japan, he influenced such figures as Nobel
laureate Yasunari Kawabata. In colonial
Vietnam Tagore was a guide for the restless spirit of the radical
writer and publicist Nguyen An Ninh Tagore's works were widely
translated into English, Dutch, German, Spanish, and other European languages
by Czech Indologist Vincenc
Lesný,[173] French
Nobel laureate André Gide, Russian poet Anna
Akhmatova, former Turkish Prime Minister Bülent
Ecevit, and others. In the United States, Tagore's lecturing circuits,
particularly those of 1916–1917, were widely attended and wildly acclaimed.
Some controversies involving Tagore, possibly fictive, trashed his
popularity and sales in Japan and North America after the late 1920s,
concluding with his "near total eclipse" outside Bengal. Yet a
latent reverence of Tagore was discovered by an astonished Salman
Rushdie during a trip to Nicaragua.
By way of
translations, Tagore influenced Chileans Pablo
Neruda and Gabriela
Mistral; Mexican writer Octavio
Paz; and Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset, Zenobia Camprubí, and Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the period 1914–1922, the
Jiménez-Camprubí pair produced twenty-two Spanish translations of Tagore's
English corpus; they heavily revised The Crescent Moon and
other key titles. In these years, Jiménez developed "naked poetry". Ortega
y Gasset wrote that "Tagore's wide appeal [owes to how] he speaks of
longings for perfection that we all have [...] Tagore awakens a dormant
sense of childish wonder, and he saturates the air with all kinds of enchanting
promises for the reader, who [...] pays little attention to the deeper
import of Oriental mysticism". Tagore's works circulated in free editions
around 1920—alongside those of Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, and Tolstoy.
Tagore was
deemed over-rated by some. Graham
Greene doubted that "anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his
poems very seriously." Several prominent Western admirers—including Pound
and, to a lesser extent, even Yeats—criticized Tagore's work. Yeats,
unimpressed with his English translations, railed against that "Damn
Tagore [...] We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then,
because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great
poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore
does not know English, no Indian knows English." William
Radice, who "English" his poems, asked: "What is their place
in world literature? He saw him as "kind of counter-cultur [al]",
bearing "a new kind of classicism" that would heal the
"collapsed romantic confusion and chaos of the 20th century." The
translated Tagore was "almost nonsensical", and subpar English
offerings reduced his trans-national appeal:
“Anyone
who knows Tagore's poems in their original Bengali cannot feel satisfied with
any of the translations (made with or without Yeats's help). Even the
translations of his prose works suffer, to some extent, from distortion. E.M.
Forster noted [of] The Home and the World [that] '[t]he theme is so
beautiful,' but the charms have 'vanished in translation,' or perhaps 'in an
experiment that has not quite come off.'’
— Amartya
Sen, "Tagore and His India".
|
Rabindranath Tagore |
|
|
|
|
|
Native
name |
রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর (Bengali) |
|
Born |
7
May 1861 |
|
Died |
7
August 1941 (aged 80) |
|
Pen
name |
Bhanusimha |
|
Occupation |
|
|
Language |
|
|
Citizenship |
|
|
Period |
|
|
Literary movement |
|
|
Notable works |
|
|
Notable awards |
|
|
Spouse |
(m. 1883; died 1902) |
|
Children |
5, including Rathindranath Tagore |
|
Relatives |
|
|
Signature |
|
|
|
|
But one can see that Tagore’s memory still dominates
life on the university campus. The following poem from Gitanjali [Song
offerings] brings together the ideals the poet kept before the nation, before
mankind, and before his educational institutions.
Where the mind is without fear,
and the heart is held high,
Where the world is not broken up into
fragments
by narrow domestic walls,
Where the words came out from
the depths of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its
arms
towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has
not lost its
way into the dreary desert sand of
dead habits,
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.
Comments
Post a Comment