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Rabindranath
Tagore was born in 1861, into one of the foremost families
of Bengal. He was the fourteenth child of Debendranath Tagore,
who headed the Brahmo Samaj (a Hindu reform movement). The
family house at Jorasanko in Calcutta was a hive of cultural
and intellectual activity. Tagore was educated by private
tutors, and first visited Europe in 1878. He started writing
at an early age, and his talent was recognized by Bankimchandra
Chatterjee, the leading writer of the day. In the 1890s Tagore
lived mainly in rural East Bengal, managing family estates.
In the early 1900s he was involved in the "swadeshi" campaign
against the British, but withdrew when the movement turned
violent. In 1912 he came to England with Gitanjali, an english
translation of some of his religious lyrics. It was acclaimed
by W. B. Yeats and later published by Macmillan, leading directly
to his winning the Noble Prize for literature in 1913. In
the 1920s and 1930s he made extensive lecture tours of America,
Europe and the Far East. Proceeds from these tours, and from
his western publications, went to Visva-Bharati, the school
and international university he created at Santiniketan, a
hundred miles north-west of Calcutta.
Tagore was a controversial figure at home and abroad: at home
because of his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama
and music; abroad because of the stand he took against militarism
and nationalism. In 1919 he protested against the Amritswar
Massacre by returning the knighthood that the British had
given him in 1915. He was close to Mahatma Gandhi, who called
him the "Great Sentinel" of modern India; but he generally
held him aloof from politics. His own translations (Collected
Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, 1936) have not proved
sufficient to sustain the world wide reputation Tagore enjoyed
in his lifetime; but as Bengali writer his eminence is unchallenged.
His work runs to twenty-nine large volumes. They contain some
sixty collections of poems; novels such as "Gora" and "The
Home and the World"; experimental plays such as "The Post
Office" and "Red Oleanders"; and essays on a host of religious,
social and literary topics. He also wrote over 2000 songs,
which have become the national music of Bengal, and include
the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. Late in
life he took up painting, exhibiting in Moscow, Berlin, Paris,
London and New York.
Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941.
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