Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

Native name
রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর (Bengali)
BornRabindranath Tagore
(1861-05-07)7 May 1861
Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India
(present-day Kolkata, West Bengal, India)
Died7 August 1941(1941-08-07) (aged 80)
Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India
(present-day Kolkata, West Bengal, India)
Pen nameBhanusimha
Occupation
  • Poet
  • novelist
  • writer
  • dramatist
  • essayist
  • story-writer
  • playwright
  • composer
  • philosopher
  • social reformer
  • educationist
  • linguist
  • grammarian
  • painter
Language
CitizenshipBritish India (1861–1941)
PeriodBengali Renaissance
Literary movementContextual Modernism
Notable works
Notable awardsNobel Prize in Literature
1913
Spouse
(m. 1883; died 1902)
Children5, including Rathindranath Tagore
RelativesTagore family
Signature
Close-up on a Bengali word handwritten with angular, jaunty letters.

Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (/rəˈbɪndrənɑːt tæˈɡɔːr/ ; pronounced [roˈbindɾonatʰ ˈʈʰakuɾ];[1] 7 May 1861[2] – 7 August 1941[3]) was a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter during the age of Bengal Renaissance.[4][5][6] He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali,[7] he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.[8] Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; where his elegant prose and magical poetry were widely popular in the Indian subcontinent.[9] He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal",[10][5][6] Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudeb, Kobiguru, and Biswokobi.[a]

A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district[12] and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.[13] At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.[14] By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent critic of nationalism,[15] 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 also endures in his founding of Visva-Bharati University.[16][17]

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 Sri Lankan national anthem was also inspired by his work.[18] His Song "Banglar Mati Banglar Jol" has been adopted as the state anthem of West Bengal.

  1. ^ "How to pronounce রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর". forvo.com.
  2. ^ 25 Baisakh 1268(Bangabda)
  3. ^ 21 Shravan 1368(Bangabda)
  4. ^ Lubet, Alex (17 October 2016). "Tagore, not Dylan: The first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize for literature was actually Indian". Quartz India. Retrieved 17 August 2022.
  5. ^ a b Stern, Robert W. (2001). Democracy and Dictatorship in South Asia: Dominant Classes and Political Outcomes in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-275-97041-3.
  6. ^ a b Newman, Henry (1921). The Calcutta Review. University of Calcutta. p. 252. I have also found that Bombay is India, Satara is India, Bangalore is India, Madras is India, Delhi, Lahore, the Khyber, Lucknow, Calcutta, Cuttack, Shillong, etc., are all India.
  7. ^ The Nobel Foundation.
  8. ^ O'Connell 2008.
  9. ^ Sen 1997.
  10. ^ "Work of Rabindranath Tagore celebrated in London". BBC News. Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  11. ^ Sil 2005.
  12. ^ * Tagore, Rathindranath (December 1978). On the edges of time (New ed.). Greenwood Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-313-20760-0.
    • Mukherjee, Mani Shankar (May 2010). "Timeless Genius". Pravasi Bharatiya: 89, 90.
    • Thompson, Edward (1948). Rabindranath Tagore : Poet And Dramatist. Oxford University Press. p. 13.
  13. ^ Tagore 1984, p. xii.
  14. ^ Thompson 1926, pp. 27–28; Dasgupta 1993, p. 20.
  15. ^ "Nationalism is a Great Menace" Tagore and Nationalism, by Radhakrishnan M. and Roychowdhury D. from Hogan, P. C.; Pandit, L. (2003), Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition, pp 29–40
  16. ^ "Visva-Bharti-Facts and Figures at a Glance". Archived from the original on 23 May 2007.
  17. ^ Datta 2002, p. 2; Kripalani 2005a, pp. 6–8; Kripalani 2005b, pp. 2–3; Thompson 1926, p. 12.
  18. ^ * de Silva, K. M.; Wriggins, Howard (1988). J. R. Jayewardene of Sri Lanka: a Political Biography – Volume One: The First Fifty Years. University of Hawaii Press. p. 368. ISBN 0-8248-1183-6.


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