Rabindranath Tagore: Encyclopedia II - Rabindranath Tagore - Biography

Rabindranath Tagore - Biography

Rabindranath Tagore - Early life

Tagore was born in Jorasanko, Kolkata (Calcutta; Bangla: কলকাতা), the son of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. Debendranath Tagore formulated the Brahmo faith propagated by his friend, the reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Debendranath became the central figure in Brahmo society after Ray's death, who was addressed out of respect by followers as maharishi.^[1] He continued to lead the Adi Brahmo Shomaj until he died.^[2]

Tagore was born the youngest of fourteen children. As a child, Tagore lived amidst an atmosphere where literary magazines were published and music and theatre performed. The Jorasanko Tagores were indeed at the center of a large and art-loving social group. Tagore's oldest brother, Dwijendranath, was a respected philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first ethnically Indian member appointed to the elite and formerly all-white Indian Civil Service. Yet another brother, Jyotirindranath Tagore, was a talented musician, composer, and playwright.^[3] Among his sisters, Swarna Kumari Devi earned fame as a novelist in her own right. Jyotirindranath's wife, Kadambari — who was about the same age as Tagore — was a dear friend and a powerful influence on Tagore. Her abrupt suicide in 1884 left him distraught for years, and left a profound mark on the emotional timbre of Tagore's literary life.

In 1878, Tagore traveled to Brighton in England to study in a public school there. Later, he enrolled at University College London. He never did complete his degree, however, and left England after just over a year's stay. This exposure to English culture and language would later filter into his earlier acquaintance with Bengali musical tradition to create new forms of music. Nevertheless, Tagore neither fully embraced English strictures nor his family's traditionally strict Hindu religious observances in either his life or in his art, choosing instead to choose and pick the best from both realms of experience.^[4]

Rabindranath Tagore - Life at Shelaidaha

On 9 December 1883, Tagore married Mrinalini Devi, and the couple had two sons and three daughters, several of whom died at young ages. By this time he had already come into the literary limelight with several works, including a long poem set in the Maithili style pioneered by Vidyapati, which he initially claimed was that of a lost poet called Bhanu Simha. His reputation was further consolidated by compilations such as Sandhya Sangit (1882), which includes the famous poem Nirjharer Svapnabhanga — "The cry of the waterfall".

In 1890, Tagore went to manage the family estates at Shelaidaha, an estuarine region in today's Bangladesh, where he lived on a houseboat on the tributary system of the river Padma. Works from this period such as Sonar Tari (1894), Chitra (1896), and Katha O Kahini (1900), further established him as a poet. In addition, he was also establishing a reputation as an essayist, playwright, and his short stories, reflecting the village life that he saw around him, earned him considerable praise.

Rabindranath Tagore - Life at Santiniketan

In 1901, Tagore left Shilaidaha and moved to Santiniketan, where he set up an experimental school. He continued writing, with works such as Naivedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) being published in this period. Unfortunately his wife died in this period, and also a favorite daughter and also a son, leaving him distraught. By now, he had a large following among Bengali readers. Some translations were also being produced, but were often of mediocre quality. In response to English admirers such as the painter William Rothenstein, Tagore started translating some of his poems in free verse. In 1912, he went to England, carrying a sheaf of his translations. At readings there, these translations moved a number of Englishmen, notably the Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats and the English missionary and Gandhi protégé Charles F. Andrews. Yeats would later write the preface to the English Gitanjali, and Andrews joined him for a long period in India. The English-language Gitanjali was later published by the India Society with a glowing preface by Yeats. In November of that same year he was surprised to find that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, based on such a slender corpus of translated work.

In reaction to a July 22, 1904 suggestion by the British that Bengal should be partitioned, an outraged Tagore took to delivering a lecture — entitled Swadeshi Samaj ("The Union Of Our Homeland") — that instead proposed an alternative solution: a self-help based comprehensive reorganization of rural Bengal.^[5]

Together with Charles F. Andrews and W. W. Pearson, Tagore on May 3, 1916 set off by boat and embarked on an extended lecturing circuit in Japan and the United States. During a four-month layover in Japan, Tagore authored “On the Way to Japan” and “In Japan”, which were later compiled into the book “Japanyatri” (“A Sojourn to Japan”).^[6] During the tour, Tagore denounced nationalistic chauvinistic and belligerant nationalism worldwide, including that of the Japanese and Americans themselves. He would also author an essay, Nationalism in India, on the subject with regards to his own land. This outspoken stance attracted much derision from militaristic critics, but also earned plaudits from pacifists and internationalists such as Romain Rolland.^[7]

Tagore’s duties as steward and mentor at Santiketan kept Tagore busy in the years centered around October 6, 1918, when he was busy teaching classes in mornings and personally authoring the children’s textbooks in his afternoons and evenings.^[8] He would write regarding his duties that “I long to discover some fairyland of holidays … where all duties look delightfully undutiful, like clouds bearing rain appearing perfectly inconsequential”.^[8]

On July 14, 1927, Tagore together with two companions later embarked on a four-month tour of Southeast Asia — visiting such places as Bali, Java, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Penang, Siam, and Singapore. The travelogues from this tour was collected into the work “Jatri”.^[9]

In April 1932, Tagore was invited as a personal guest of Iranian Shah Reza Shah Pahlavi.^[6]

Tagore wrote a number of songs in support of the Indian independence movement. He renounced the knighthood conferred by the British Crown in 1915 in protest against the 1919 Jaliyaanwala Bagh Massacre (Amritsar), where, without warning, British soldiers opened fire upon an unarmed gathering of civilians, killing over five hundred innocent men, women and children. He felt strongly that the nation could be uplifted only through widespread education. Writing of the rote-oriented education system introduced in India under the British Raj, he once said:

These views crystallized in the experimental school at Santiniketan, (শান্তিনিকেতন, "abode of peace") in West Bengal in 1901, where his father had left a landed estate in his possession. This school, established in the traditional Brahmacharya structure of the student living together with his Guru in a self-sustaining community, became a magnet for a talented International group of scholars, artists, linguists, and musicians. Tagore spent prodigious amounts of energy obtaining funds for this school (contributing all his Nobel monies). Today the institution is known as Visva Bharati University (বিশ্বভারতী, 'India in the World"), a Central University under the Government of India.

All along, Tagore had an artist's eye regarding his own handwriting, and he embellished the cross-outs and word layouts in his manuscripts with simple artistic leitmotifs. At the age of sixty, he started to paint, and successful art exhibitions were held in much of Europe. He died in the Jorasanko house on 7 August 1941 (22 Shravan 1348), a day that is still mourned in public functions across the Bangla-speaking world.

When in 1912 Tagore toured the United Kingdom, he consulted with both William Rothenstein and W. B. Yeats, who took the opportunity to read his “Gitanjali”. Later, he dwelled in Butterton, Staffordshire, where he stayed with C.F. Andrews’ clergymen friends.^[10]

Over the course of his life, Tagore engaged nearly all brilliant minds contemporaneous with his — including Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Rolland.^[11] Particularly famous was the famous Tagore-Einstein dialogue that occurred at Einstein’s home in Kaputh, Berlin on July 14, 1930; the conversation’s second stage occurred when Einstein visited Tagore at the home of their common friend, Dr. Mendel. They probed a variety of subjects, including epistemology, ontology, music theory, and creativity:^[12]

“When I began my life as a poet, the writers among our educated community took their inspiration from English literature. I suppose it was fortunate for me that I never in my life had what is called an education, that is to say, the kind of school and college training which is considered proper for a boy from a respectable family”.^[13]

Tagore's richest legacy for today's polarized world is perhaps his eloquent denunciation of nationalism, which he perceived, in the shadows of our last great war, as one of the largest threats to humanity. "A nation," he wrote, ". . . is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose", a purpose often associated with a "selfishness" that "can be a grandly magnified form" of personal selfishness.

His international travels sharpened his understanding of the shallowness of human divisions. Once when visiting a Bedouin camp in today's battleground of Iraq, the chief told him, "Our prophet has said that a true Muslim is he by whose words and deeds not the least of his brother-men may ever come to any harm..." Tagore noted in his diary: "I was startled into recognizing in his words the voice of essential humanity." (Dutta/Robinson p.317).

During his intensive travels in Europe, America and the Far East, he gradually formed a vision of the unity of East and West. Subsequently, he was profoundly shocked by the intense nationalism he found breeding in Germany and other nations before the Second World War. In a series of lectures on Nationalism that were enthusiastically received in much of Europe, but not so much in the United States, he said

This internationalism and sensitivity to the fundamental unity of man is perhaps Tagore's lasting legacy to the world. However, among the Bangla-speaking people of West Bengal and Bangladesh, his literary legacy continues to inform an unusually vivid artistic and cultural life.

In 2004, thieves broke into Santiniketan and took off with the Nobel Prize Medal that had been displayed in the museum. Despite an extensive search, authorities failed to retrieve the medal. The medal was later replaced by a new set awarded by the Nobel committee.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Biography", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki