Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
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,he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1913.In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant
prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.[Tagore 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 the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded
as the outstanding creative artist of the modern Indian subcontinent.
A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as
an eight-year-old. At age 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 strident 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.
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 lyrics and music for the original song of Sri Lanka's
National Anthem were also the work of Tagore.
Tagore was raised mostly by servants; his mother had died in his early childhood and his
father travelled widely. 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 largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or
nearby Bolpur and Panihati, idylls 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 to draw, 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.
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 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 focussed on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. In 1915,
the British Crown granted Tagore a knighthood. He renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala
Bagh massacre.
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 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 deceptively simple subject matter: commoners. 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.
Music
Tagore was a prolific composer with 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 lyricised. 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 flavours "external" to Tagore's
own ancestral culture.[ Scholars have attempted to gauge the emotive force and range of
Hindustani ragas:
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.
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—were held throughout Europe. He was likely red-green color blind, resulting in
works that exhibited strange colour schemes and off-beat aesthetics. Tagore was influenced
by scrimshaw from northern New Ireland, Haida carvings from British Columbia, and
woodcuts by Max Pechstein. 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.
Theatre
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 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 extremest reactionary traditionalism he defends by an appeal to what humans share."
Among these Tagore highlights "identity [...] conceived of as dharma."
Others were uplifting: Shesher Kobita—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 Ray
and others: Chokher Bali and Ghare Baire are exemplary. In the first, 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. Tagore wrote of it: "I have always
regretted the ending".
Stories
Tagore's three-volume 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. Seeing the common and the poor, he examined
their lives with a depth and feeling singular in Indian literature up to that point. In "The
Fruitseller from Kabul", Tagore speaks in first person as a town dweller and novelist
imputing exotic perquisites to an Afghan seller. He channels the lucubrative lust of those
mired in the blasé, nidorous, and sudorific morass of subcontinental city life: for distant
vistas. "There were autumn mornings, the time of year when kings of old went forth to
conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander
over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it [...] I
would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the mountains, the glens, the forest."
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. These yarns are
celebrated fare in Bengali fiction and are commonly used as plot fodder by Bengali film and
theatre. The Ray film Charulata echoed the controversial Tagore novella Nastanirh (The
Broken Nest). In Atithi, which was made into another film, the little Brahmin boy Tarapada
shares a boat ride with a village zamindar. The boy relates his flight from home and his
subsequent wanderings. Taking pity, the elder adopts him; he fixes the boy to marry his own
daughter. The night before his wedding, Tarapada runs off—again. Strir Patra (The Wife's
Letter) is an early treatise in female emancipation. Mrinal is wife to a Bengali middle class
man: prissy, preening, and patriarchal. Travelling alone she writes a letter, which
comprehends the story. She details the pettiness of a life spent entreating his viraginous
virility; she ultimately gives up married life, proclaiming, Amio bachbo. Ei bachlum: "And I
shall live. Here, I live."
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. Musalmani Didi eyes recrudescent Hindu-Muslim tensions and, in
many ways, embodies the essence of Tagore's humanism. The somewhat auto-referential
Darpaharan describes a fey young man who harbours literary ambitions. Though he loves his
wife, he wishes to stifle her literary career, deeming it unfeminine. In youth Tagore likely
agreed with him. Darpaharan depicts the final humbling of the man as he ultimately
acknowledges his wife's talents. 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.[127][128] These, rediscovered and repopularised by
Tagore, resemble 19th-century Kartābhajā hymns that emphasise 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 were repeatedly revised over the
course of seventy years
Politics
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 Charka", an acrid 1925 essay. 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
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 honour 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.
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.
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his love of nature and his homeland. RabindranathTagore’s poem, ‘Where the Mind is
Without Fear’ ,included in the volume called Naibedya, later published in English
‘Gitanjali’ is a prayer to a universal father-figure, presumably, God to elevate his country
into a free land. Here Tagore defines Freedom as a fundamental system of reasoning of a
sovereign state of mind, established or accepted as a guide for governing the man in a
nutshell. A freedom fixes the limits and defines the relations of the moral, ethical and
powers of the state of mind, thus setting up the basis for life.
The first line of the poem is one of the most significant sub clauses which go to build up
the poem. The ‘World of Freedom’, which Tagore envisions for his countrymen, can only
be attained if we possess a fearless mind. Only a fearless mind can hold its head upright.
So attain true freedom one has to have a mind which is ‘Without fear’. Thus, the poet
wishes to be awakened to a heaven where the mind can work fearlessly and the spirit can
hold its head high and again its knowledge is crystal clear reasoning:
A free country means where one can acquire knowledge in all freedom of choice. The big
world of man is fragmented or restricted to small mutually exclusive compartments. The
poet preaches that our minds, instead of being engulfed in such prejudices and narrow
superstitions, must be enriched by thoughts and actions, which are worthy and beneficial
for the sake of the country:
In an ideal free country everybody speaks his/her heart clear, where actions flow in the
form of various streams moving from success to success, where petty conventions do not
stagnant the course of judgment. Tagore entertains a system of thought that emphasizes
the role of reason in obtaining knowledge. He also emphasizes the role of experience,
especially sense perception. Tagore also attempts to tie various perceptions of the world
together in some way. The comparative study of variegated knowledge would led to the
reconstruction of a hypothetical parent Ideal to account for striking similarities among the
various perceptions of East and west:
Where the Mind is without Fear consists of eleven lines and somewhat resembles the style of
a sonnet. In a sonnet, the first eight lines usually present an idea, are argumentative, put a
proposal or a problem. If we look at the first eight lines of Where the Mind is without Fear,
we find that the lines are a form of a prayer and it does present an idea. The first few lines
have the repetition of the word ‘where’ which denotes a particular place but it not revealed
then and there. We get to know about the place in the last line of the poem. The place is
described as a place full of positive qualities, such as, fearlessness, knowledge, unity, truth,
reason, perfection etc. in the last line the poet reveals the place as ‘that heaven of freedom’
and asks God to allow his country to reach there.
The poem is composed in lucid language, simplified diction, images and other poetical
devices. We recommend you go through our summary of Where the Mind is Without Fear
before reading this analysis if you’re not clear with the idea of the poem.
FORM:
The verse form of the poem is free verse, having no metrical patterns or rhymes. He was
credited for having discovered this new form of composing poems, called prose poems.
METAPHOR:
A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action
that does not literally denote in order to imply a resemblance. In simpler words, comparing
two words but not clearly stating. Examples of metaphor in the poem,-
‘clear stream of reason’ and ‘dreary desert sand of dead habit’.
PERSONIFICATION:
“a tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection” is an example of fine personification
in the poem. Personification refers to attribution of human qualities to inanimate ideas. Here
the ‘tireless striving’ has been personified like a human being stretching his arms to reach his
goal through perfection.
STYLE:
Where The Mind Is Without Fear was included in the volume called ‘Naibedya’, the original
poem bears the title ‘Prarthana’ meaning prayer. The poem is a prayer to God. The poem is a
form of a prayer to the universal father-figure, presumably God. Tagore prays to the father-
figure for a country where the people should be free from fears, where knowledge would be
free to all individuals and the people from all religions should be united. He wants India to
awake in such a heavenly state.
The above opposites implies the state of the country under the British Rule and therefore the
poet’s earnest prayer to the Lord to reverse the current condition of the state.
The title of the poem is very significant and appropriate to convey the expressions and
thoughts in the poem.