Rabindranath
Tagore, born on 7 May 1861, in Calcutta [now Kolkata], was a Bengali
poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter
who 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
Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally
regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India.
In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The son of the religious
reformer Debendranath Tagore, he early began to write verses, and, after
incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India. There he
published several books of poetry in the 1880s and completed Manasi (1890), a
collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some of his
best-known poems, including many in verse forms new to Bengali, as well as
some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.
In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his
family’s estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed
in a houseboat on the Padma River (the main channel of the Ganges River), in
close contact with village folk, and his sympathy for them became the keynote
of much of his later writing. Most of his finest short stories, which examine
“humble lives and their small miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a
poignancy, laced with gentle irony, that is unique to him (though
admirably captured by the director Satyajit Ray in later film
adaptations). Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside, most of all the
Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these years he
published several poetry collections, notably Sonar Tari (1894; The
Golden Boat), and plays, notably Chitrangada (1892; Chitra).
Tagore’s poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his more than 2,000 songs,
which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali society.
In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West
Bengal at Shantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”), where he sought to blend the
best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled permanently at the
school, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. Years of sadness arising
from the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907 are
reflected in his later poetry, which was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (Song Offerings)
(1912). This book, containing Tagore’s English prose translations of religious
poems from several of his Bengali verse collections, including Gitanjali (1910), was hailed by W.B.
Yeats and André Gide and won him the Nobel Prize in
1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it
in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh)
Massacre.
From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India, lecturing
and reading from his work in Europe, the Americas, and East
Asia and
becoming an eloquent spokesperson for the cause of Indian
independence. Tagore’s novels in Bengali are less well known than his poems and
short stories; they include Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire (1916), translated into English as Gora and The Home and the World, respectively. In the late 1920s, when he was in
his 60s, Tagore took up painting and produced works that won him a place among
India’s foremost contemporary artists.
