Rabindranath Tagore

   

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindranath Thakur, where Tagore is an anglicization of Thakur, meaning God) (May 6, 1861 - August 7, 1941), also called Robi Thakur or Gurudev was an Indian poet, Hindu philosopher and nationalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, becoming the first Asian to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Tagore was born into a Hindu Brahmin family in Calcutta, later renamed Kolkata, the son of Debendranath Tagore, a Brahmo Samaj leader. His actual last name in Bengali is Thakur, meaning God or The Lord, of which Tagore is an anglicization . His family was of an educated and intellectually diverse lineage.

Tagore is known to Westerners as a poet rather than a philosopher, but these two arts are not differentiated in traditional Indian culture. An implicit philosophy can be seen in Tagore's poetry. The literary device used by Tagore to communicate his philosophical views was that of bridal mysticism, a devotional mode in which the philosopher, or seeker of the Divine, becomes, as it were, the bride of God, experiencing adoration and complete surrender to the Divine as a bridegroom. The images and feelings evoked by his poetry would awaken the same in the listener or hearer. Tagore's Upanishadic ideas, are expressed in his book Sadhana, where he discusses the individual's path to divine consciousness. These powerful ideas permeate his all his works, and he has been elevated in the minds of Indians to the status of poet-sage.

Although poetry dominates his literary oeuvre, he also composed novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, and drama. Also included, and no less notably, among his works are over 2,000 songs belonging to a genre known as Rabindra Sangeet which are considered as Bengali cultural treasures in both West Bengal, India and the predominantly Muslim Bangladesh. The Rabindra Sangeets, which deal with spirituality and transcendental love, are immensely popular with speakers of the Bengali language and form the foundation for Bengali song literature.

Tagore's prose deals with social, political, educational issues and his vision of the universal brotherhood of man. His poetry and songs, apart from their deep spirituality and devotion, often express a celebration of nature and life. For him, life's multifarious variety is ever a source of ohoituki ananda, or pleasure without outward reason. The subject of love is a recurring motif throughout his literature, and he often wrote about patriotism.

The importance of Tagore in literary history is aptly illustrated by the adoption of his songs as national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. In 1913, he won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first non-westerner to receive this honor, for his English translation of his work Gitanjali. W.B.Yeats, was greatly moved by this work, and it is said that it was because of Yeats's encouragement that he undertook its translation. Zenobia Camprubí translated Gitanjali to Spanish from Tagore's English.

Tagore was instrumental in the early stages of the Indian independence movement, although he dissociated himself from what he observed to be "the later ungainly manifestations." He declined a knighthood conferred by the British Crown; this rejection was in protest against the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, where, apparently without warning, British and Gurkha sodiers opened fire upon an unarmed gathering of civilians, resulting in the deaths of 350 innocent men, women and children.

Prominent among the other contributions of Tagore is the university Visva-Bharati, incorporating the vidyalaya school instituted by him to enshrine his educational ideals. The rigid discipline and claustrophobic environment in various schools he attended during his boyhood left a bitter taste in his mouth. He saw the educational system introduced by the British as artificial, with total emphasis on unquestioning obedience, mechanical booklearning, little interaction with nature and usually in subjects with little touch with the life of the country around him, and consequently he felt this was stifling to the sensitivity of the Indian youth. He at times referred in slightly mock-serious tones to his lack of formal education. He does appear to have spent a couple of years intermittently at various schools, following his guardians' wishes, but his education was acquired largely in his family's enormous library.

His realizations about education led him to establish his school, called a Brahmacharyashram (center for Brahmacharya), at Santiniketan in West Bengal in 1901, where his father had left a landed estate in his possession. The word Brahmacharya, although commonly understood as a term for celibacy alone, was used in ancient Vedic India to name the first of four stages, also called ashramas, of life, usually spent in the pursuit of knowledge in a natural and pure setting under the tutelage of a spiritually realized person called the Guru or the Acharya. Celibacy was a natural part of this process, and the child was trained to strive to purity as a precondition for receiving knowledge. This knowledge, sacred to Hindus, encompasses a detachment from activities or thoughts that involve sex or career ambition.

Tagore tried to recapture to the extent possible in modern times this Vedic system of learning amid idyllic surroundings. Over time, the school grew into a university with over 30 departments today. Since 1951, the university has been administered by the Government of India as a Central University. Illustrious almuni of Santiniketan include Satyajit Ray, winner of the 1992 special Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India.

Tagore was keenly sensitive to the world events of his time and expressed eloquently his pain and despair over war. His yearning for world peace was, however, not of a political nature; he desired it to be based on a true realization of the universal identity of mankind and indeed, of the whole of the entire sentient world.

His international travels in the quest of funds for his university led him to many countries and sharpened his understanding of various national and civilizational characteristics. He also visited Hungary and stayed in Balatonfüred for health reasons. He was received with adoration and respect, and he became known and very popular with the Hungarian people. His bust is found in a promenade named after him on the shore of Lake Balaton. His comparative treatment of the East and the West ranks among the finest examples of this genre of world literature, perhaps pioneering it. His essays contributed to repudiate racially colored views such as those of Rudyard Kipling without overtly attempting to do so.

External links

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