Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali poet, writer, composer, philosopher and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1913 he became the first non-European and first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare-Baire are his best-known works.

About Rabindranath Tagore in brief

Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali poet, writer, composer, philosopher and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1913 he became the first non-European and first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare-Baire are his best-known works. 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 inspired by his work. Tagore was the youngest of 13 surviving children, born Robindronath Thakur on 7 May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta. 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 were Rarhi Brahmins and originally belonged to a village named Kush in the district named Burdwan in West Bengal. They hosted the publication of literary magazines; theatre and recitals of Bengali and Western classical music featured there regularly. His brother Hemendranath was the first Indian appointed to the elite and formerly all-European Indian Civil Service.

His sister Swarnakumari became a novelist. His wife, slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence. Her suicide in 1884, soon after he married, left him profoundly distraught for years. He avoided schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur. He learned drawing, geography and history, literature, mathematics, Sanskrit and English at his loathing of formal education. He also practised judo, gymnastics, and practising judo by trekking through the Ganges or Ganges hills, by having him swim or swim through the hills, and physically conditioned by gymnastics. He wrote his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha, 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. He advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs. His legacy also endures in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University. The original surname of the Tagores was Kushari. The descendants of Deen Kushari, the son of Bhatta Narayana, was granted a village called Kush by Maharaja Kshitisura, he became its chief and came to be known as Kushari; Deen was the chief of Kush.

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