Tell about Rabindranath Tagore ?

In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his work ‘Gitanjali‘ This made his writings internationally known and his fame spread throughout the world.

Tagore showed little enthusiasm for private lessons. Little surprise then that at Visva-Bharati, many classes are still conducted in open fields! Watch this video to get a virtual tour of the university.

This gave Tagore the opportunity to travel extensively giving lectures and recitals in many different countries.

He also became acquainted with many of the leading cultural contemporaries of the day; this included W.B.Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, Robert Frost and Albert Einstein.

Tagore had a great love for nature and many of his poems invoke the simple beauties of the natural world.

For Tagore, his religion could be found in the wonders and mysteries of nature – as much as in temples and sacred books.

Tagore was a prolific composer of music.

Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur, (born May 7, 1861, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died August 7, 1941, Calcutta), 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.

He composed over 2,000 songs which have been popularised and sung widely across Bengal.

Like his literature, he broke away from classical constraints to offer a great emotive and spiritual appeal.

Tagore is unique for being the official composer for the national anthem of two countries – India’s Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh’s Amar Shonar Bangla.

Tagore was an opponent of British imperialism, though he also felt Indians had a duty to improve their self-education; he said that British rule was partly due to the state India had fallen into.

In particular, he was very denigrating about India’s obsession with caste.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, philosopher, social reformer, and dramatist who came into international prominence when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

In 1919, Tagore returned his knighthood in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, in which many peaceful Indian protesters were killed.

Tagore was a polymath, and towards the end of his life he took up art and also pursued an interest in science.

Rabindranath Tagore or simply Rabindranath as he is known in India, was born into an affluent and brilliantly talented Calcutta family on May 7, 1861. His grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846) had amassed great wealth through investment and speculation in coal mines, indigo, and sugar. Despite the fact that the family was an outcast Brahmin one, belonging to the group called pirali brahman—Brahmins who had been made ritually impure by sometimes forced contact with Moslems—the dynasty he founded gave Bengal and all of India some of its most prominent painters, poets, musicians, and religious leaders.

Dwarkanath's own views were iconoclastic; his wife left him, for example, because he had violated Hindu practice by eating meat. Rabindranath's father, Debendranath (1818-1905), was outstanding in fields of learning ranging from mathematics to ancient scripture and was a man of profound religious concern.

Tagore was also very much an internationalist, criticising nationalism, though also writing songs and articles in support of the general principle of the Indian independence movement.

He was one of the founders of the religious society called the Brahmo Samaj, which, confronted by Christianity, attempted to purge popular Hinduism of "idolatry" and to reconstruct the "pure monotheism" of classical Indian religion.

“Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live. “

– Rabindranath Tagore

The house in which Rabindranath grew up was the home of a vast joint, or extended, family; there were sometimes as many as 200 Tagores living in the complex known as Jorasanko, in northern Calcutta. These included the painters Abinindranath and Gaganendranath and, among Rabindranath's own 11 elder brothers and sisters, the writer and philosopher Dvijendranath, the musician Jyotirindranath, and Bengal's first woman novelist, Svarnakumari Devi, who also edited a literary magazine.

Tagore died on 7th August 1941, after a long and painful illness, aged 80

With his father frequently away and his mother ill, Rabindranath was cared for in his early childhood largely by servants and teachers who confined him strictly, breeding in him, as he later wrote, a longing for the freedom of the outside world and a detestation of conventional and restrictive scholastic education. The boy showed unmistakable poetic talent, and as early as 8 he was urged by his brothers and cousins to express himself in poetry.

This encouragement, which continued throughout his formative years, caused his talent to flourish.