Rabindranath Tagore Biography and List of Works

Often considered the greatest writer in modern Indian literature, Bengali poet, novelist, educator, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore was awarded the knighthood in 1915, but he surrendered it in 1919 as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, where British troops killed some 400 Indian demonstrators protesting colonial laws. Tagore's reputation in the West as a mystic has perhaps led his Western readers to ignore his role as a reformer and critic of colonialism.

"Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hands. With a grip that kills it."
(from Fireflies)

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta into a wealthy and prominent Brahman family. His father was Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and scholar, his mother Sarada Devi. His grandfather had established a huge financial empire for himself, and financed public projects, such as Calcutta Medical College. The Tagores were pioneers of the Bengal Renaissance and tried to combine traditional Indian culture with Western ideas. All the children contributed significantly to Bengali literature and culture. Tagore, the youngest of the children, received his early education first from tutors and then at a variety of schools, among them Bengal Academy where he studied Bengali history and culture, and University College, London, where he studied law but left after a year without completing his studies.

In 1883 Tagore married Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri, with whom he had two sons and three daughters. In 1890 he moved to East Bengal. His first book, a collection of poems, was published when he was 17. In East Bengal (now Bangladesh) he collected local legends and folklore and wrote seven volumes of poetry between 1893 and 1900, including SONAR TARI (The Golden Boat), 1894 and KHANIKA, 1900. This was a highly productive period in Tagore's life, and earned him the rather misleading epitaph 'The Bengali Shelley.' More important was the fact that Tagore wrote in the common language of the people and abandoned the ancient for of the Indian language. This was something that was hard to accept among his critics and scholars.

Tagore's early major prose works include CHOCHER BALI (1903, Eyesore) and NASHTANIR (1901, The Broken Nest), first published serially. Between 1891 and 1895 he published forty-four short stories in Bengali periodicals, most of them in the monthly journal Sadhana. In 'Punishment' Tagore sets the story in a rural village and describes the oppression of women through the tragedy of the low-caste Rui family. Chandara is a proud, beautiful woman, "buxom, well-rounded, compact and sturdy," her husband, Chidam, is a farm-labourer, who works in the fields with his brother Dukhiram. One day when they return home after a day of toil and humiliation, Dukhiram kills his sloppy and slovenly wife because his food is not ready. Chidam's tells the police, in an attempt to help his brother, that his wife struck her sister-in-law with the farm-knife. Chandara takes the blame on to herself. 'In her thoughts, Chandara was saying to her husband, "I shall give my youth to the gallows instead of you. My final ties in this life will be with them."' Afterwards both Chidam and Dukhiram try to confess that they are guilty but Chandara is convicted. Just before the hanging, the doctor tells her that her husband wants to see her. "To hell with him," says Chandara.

In 1901 Tagore founded a school outside Calcutta, Visva-Bharati, which was dedicated to merging Western and Indian philosophy and education. It became a university in 1921. He produced poems, novels, stories, a history of India, textbooks, and treatises on pedagogy. His wife died in 1902, followed in 1903 by the death of one of his daughters and in 1907 his younger son.

Tagore's reputation as a writer was established in the United States and in England after the publication of GITANJALI: SONG OFFERINGS, in which Tagore tries to find inner calm and explores the themes of divine and human love. Tagore himself translated the poems into English. "When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose touch of the one in the play of the many." Tagore's cosmic visions owed much to the lyric tradition of Vaishnava Hinduism and its concepts concerning the relationship between man and God. The poems appeared in 1912 with an introduction by William Butler Yates, who wrote "These lyrics - which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention - display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long." His poems were praised by Ezra Pound, and drew the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. "There is in him the stillness of nature. The poems do not seem to have been produced by storm or by ignition, but seem to show the normal habit of his mind. He is at on with nature, and finds no contradictions. And this is in sharp contrast with the Western mode, where man must be shown attempting to master nature of we are to have "great drama." (Ezra Pound in Fortnightly Review, 1 March 1913) However, Tagore also experiments with poetic forms and these works have lost much in translation.

Much of Tagore's ideology comes from the teaching of the Upahishads and from his own beliefs that God can be found through personal purity and service to others. He stresses the need for a new world order based on trans national values and ideas, the "unity consciousness." "The soil, in return for her service, keeps the tree tied to her; the sky asks nothing and leaves it free." Politically active in India, Tagore was a supporter of Gandhi, but warned of the dangers of nationalistic thought. Unable to gain ideological support for his views, he retired into relative solitude. Between 1916 and 1934 he travelled widely, attempting to spread the ideal of uniting East and West. Only hours before he died on August 7,1941, Tagore dictated his last poem.

Tagore's short stories influenced deeply Indian Literature, and he was the first Indian to bring an element of psychological realism to his novels. Tagore wrote his most important works in Bengali, but he translated his poems into English, forming new collections. Many of his poems are actually songs, and inseparable from their music. His written production, still not completely collected, fills 26 substantial volumes. At the age of 70 Tagore took up painting. He was also a composer, settings hundreds of poems to music. Tagore's song "Our Golden Bengal" became the national anathema of Bangladesh. He was an early advocate of Independence for India and his influence over Gandhi and the founders of modern India was enormous. Tagore remained a well-known and popular author in the West until the end of the 1920s, but nowadays he is not much read.

For further reading: Rabindranath Tagore by Krishna Kripalani (1962); Rabindranath Tagore by H. Banerjee (1971); Rabindranath Tagore by B.C. Chakravorty (1971); An Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore by V.S. Naravene (1977); The Humanism of Rabindranath Tagore by M.R. Anand (1979); Rabindranath Tagore by S. Ghose (1986); The Unversal Man by S. Chattopadhyay (1987); Sir Rabindranath Tagore by K.S. Ramaswami Sastri (1988); Gandhi and Tagore by D.W. Atkinson (1989); Rabindranath Tagore by K. Basak (1991); Rabindranath Tagore by E.J. Thompson (1991)

KABIKAHINI, (1878)