REMINISCING RABINDRANATH TAGORE ON HIS BIRTH ANNIVERSARY

Rabindranath tagore and his brilliance :

A gem from the Indian subcontinent, an artist, poet, ayurveda researcher, polymath and a musician, Rabindranath Tagore. He completely reshaped not only Bengali but Indian music and literature. He was born on May 7 in the year 1861 in Calcutta, Bengal and is often also known by his pen name ‘Bhanu Singha Thakur’.

Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to be winning a Nobel Prize in the field of literature in 1913. Being the author of ‘Gitanjali’, which were a collection of poems. The central theme of Gitanjali revolved around spirituality and devotion.

Also often referred to as the “Bard of Bengal”, his mercurial and spiritual poetic songs. His magical and elegant poetries are largely known outside the state and even beyond the country borders.

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From child prodigy to established individual :

Tagore initiated writing only at a mere age of eight. He released his first substantial piece of literary poems as a teenager at the age of sixteen. Which however happened to be seized as lost classics by literary authorities. By the year 1877, he started to publish dramas and short stories under his own name.

Rabindranath Tagore also worked as a humanist, internationalist and an universalist, fighting for the beliefs and rights of masses. And was a huge advocate of Indian independence from the British Raj, a rule he denounced.

Literature

Tagore was also an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance which was a social, cultural, artistic and intellectual movement in Eastern India. Which was majorly dominated by Bengal. For the same, he put forth a vast canon comprising of thousands of songs, hundreds of texts, paintings, doodles and sketches.

Tagore’s Masterpieces :

Tagore’s pieces of art were related to both personal and political topics. Some of his best known works apart from Gitanjali include:

  • Gora (meaning fair-faced) which was the longest of his twelve novels. Which include themes of liberation, feminism, class and caste, brotherhood, universalism, colonial rule, traditions vs modernism, rural peasants vs urban elite and the Brahmo Samaj.

 

  • Ghare-Baire (The home and the world) which largely illustrated the battle of the man (Tagore) with himself, with his ideas of the western culture and his revolution against it. His opposing ideals in the novel lead a large way in understanding the history and contemporary issues faced by Bengal.

His success and legacy even echoes today (post his death in 1941) in the form of national anthems adopted by two countries – India’s ‘Jana Gana Mana’ and Bangladesh’s ‘Amar Shonar Bangla’. The Sri Lankan national anthem is also inspired by his works.

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