The
youngest of thirteen surviving children, Tagore was born in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, India to parents Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905)
and Sarada Devi (1830–1875 The Tagore family came into prominence
during the Bengal Renaissance that started during the age of Hussein Shah (1493–1519). The
original name of the Tagore family was Banerjee.
Being Brahmins, their ancestors were referred to as 'Thakurmashai' or
'Holy Sir'. During the British rule, this name stuck and they began to be
recognised as Thakur and eventually the family name got anglicised to Tagore
WORKS
Known mostly for his poetry,
Tagore wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas, and thousands
of songs. Of Tagore's prose, his short stories are perhaps most highly
regarded; he is indeed credited with originating the Bengali-language version
of the genre. His works are frequently noted for their rhythmic, optimistic,
and lyrical nature. Such stories mostly borrow from deceptively simple subject
matter: commoners. Tagore's non-fiction grappled with history, linguistics, and
spirituality. He wrote autobiographies. His travelogues, essays, and lectures
were compiled into several volumes, including Europe Jatrir
Patro (Letters from Europe) and Manusher Dhormo (The Religion of Man). His brief chat with Einstein, "Note on the
Nature of Reality", is included as an appendix to the latter. On the
occasion of Tagore's 150th birthday an anthology (titledKalanukromik Rabindra
Rachanabali) of the total body of his works is currently being published in
Bengali in chronological order. This includes all versions of each work and
fills about eighty volumes.[92] In 2011, Harvard University Press collaborated with Visva-Bharati University to publish The Essential Tagore, the largest anthology of Tagore's works available in
English; it was edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarthy and marks the 150th anniversary of Tagore's
birth.
Music
Tagore was a
prolific composer with 2,230 songs to his credit. His songs are known as rabindrasangit ("Tagore Song"), which merges
fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems or parts of novels, stories,
or plays alike—were lyricised. Influenced by the thumri style of Hindustani music, they ran the entire gamut of human emotion, ranging from
his early dirge-like Brahmo devotional hymns to quasi-erotic compositions. They emulated the tonal color of
classical ragas to varying extents. Some songs mimicked
a given raga's melody and rhythm faithfully; others newly blended elements of
different ragas. Yet about
nine-tenths of his work was not bhanga
gaan, the body of tunes revamped with "fresh value" from select
Western, Hindustani, Bengali folk and other regional flavours
"external" to Tagore's own ancestral culture Scholars have attempted
to gauge the emotive force and range of Hindustani ragas:
Novels
Tagore wrote
eight novels and four novellas, among them Chaturanga, Shesher
Kobita, Char Odhay, and Noukadubi. Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)—through the lens of the idealistic zamindar protagonist Nikhil—excoriates rising
Indian nationalism, terrorism, and religious zeal in the Swadeshi movement; a frank expression of Tagore's conflicted sentiments, it
emerged from a 1914 bout of depression. The novel ends in Hindu-Muslim violence
and Nikhil's—likely mortal—wounding.
Gora raises controversial questions regarding
the Indian identity. As with Ghare
Baire, matters of self-identity, personal freedom, and religion are
developed in the context of a family story and love triangle. In it an Irish boy orphaned in the Sepoy Mutiny is raised by Hindus as the titular gora—"whitey".
Ignorant of his foreign origins, he chastises Hindu religious backsliders out
of love for the indigenous Indians and solidarity with them against his
hegemon-compatriots. He falls for a Brahmo girl, compelling his worried foster
father to reveal his lost past and cease his nativist zeal. As a "true
dialectic" advancing "arguments for and against strict
traditionalism", it tackles the colonial conundrum by "portray[ing]
the value of all positions within a particular frame [...] not only syncretism,
not only liberal orthodoxy, but the extremest reactionary traditionalism he
defends by an appeal to what humans share." Among these Tagore highlights
"identity [...] conceived of as dharma."
In Jogajog (Relationships), the heroine
Kumudini—bound by the ideals of Śiva-Sati, exemplified by Dākshāyani—is torn between her pity for the
sinking fortunes of her progressive and compassionate elder brother and his
foil: her roue of a husband. Tagore flaunts his feminist leanings; pathos depicts the plight and ultimate demise
of women trapped by pregnancy, duty, and family honour; he simultaneously
trucks with Bengal's putrescent landed gentry. The story revolves around the underlying
rivalry between two families—the Chatterjees, aristocrats now on the decline
(Biprodas) and the Ghosals (Madhusudan), representing new money and new
arrogance. Kumudini, Biprodas' sister, is caught between the two as she is
married off to Madhusudan. She had risen in an observant and sheltered
traditional home, as had all her female relations.
Others were
uplifting: Shesher Kobita—translated
twice as Last Poem and Farewell
Song—is his most lyrical novel, with poems and rhythmic passages written by
a poet protagonist. It contains elements of satire and postmodernism and has
stock characters who gleefully attack the reputation of an old, outmoded,
oppressively renowned poet who, incidentally, goes by a familiar name:
"Rabindranath Tagore". Though his novels remain among the
least-appreciated of his works, they have been given renewed attention via film
adaptations by Ray and others: Chokher Bali and Ghare Baire are exemplary. In the first, Tagore inscribes Bengali society
via its heroine: a rebellious widow who would live for herself alone. He
pillories the custom of perpetual mourning on the part of widows, who were not
allowed to remarry, who were consigned to seclusion and loneliness. Tagore
wrote of it: "I have always regretted the ending".
Stories
Tagore's
three-volume Galpaguchchha comprises eighty-four stories that
reflect upon the author's surroundings, on modern and fashionable ideas, and on
mind puzzles. Tagore associated his earliest stories, such as those of the
"Sadhana" period, with an exuberance of vitality and
spontaneity; these traits were cultivated by zamindar Tagore's life in Patisar, Shajadpur,
Shelaidaha, and other villages. Seeing
the common and the poor, he examined their lives with a depth and feeling
singular in Indian literature up to that point. In "The Fruitseller from
Kabul", Tagore speaks in first person as a town dweller and novelist
imputing exotic perquisites to an Afghan seller. He channels the lucubrative
lust of those mired in the blasé, nidorous, and sudorific morass of
subcontinental city life: for distant vistas. "There were autumn mornings,
the time of year when kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never
stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the
whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it
[...] I would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the mountains, the glens,
the forest [...].
The Golpoguchchho (Bunch of Stories) was written
in Tagore's Sabuj Patra period, which lasted from 1914 to 1917
and was named for another of his magazines These
yarns are celebrated fare in Bengali fiction and are commonly used as plot
fodder by Bengali film and theatre. The Ray film Charulata echoed the controversial Tagore novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). In Atithi, which was made into
another film, the little Brahmin boy Tarapada shares a boat ride with a village zamindar. The boy relates his
flight from home and his subsequent wanderings. Taking pity, the elder adopts
him; he fixes the boy to marry his own daughter. The night before his wedding,
Tarapada runs off—again. Strir
Patra (The Wife's Letter)
is an early treatise in female emancipation Mrinal
is wife to a Bengali middle class man: prissy, preening, and patriarchal.
Travelling alone she writes a letter, which comprehends the story. She details
the pettiness of a life spent entreating his viraginous virility; she
ultimately gives up married life, proclaiming,Amio bachbo. Ei bachlum:
"And I shall live. Here, I live."
Haimanti assails Hindu arranged marriage and
spotlights their often dismal domesticity, the hypocrisies plaguing the Indian middle
classes, and how Haimanti, a young woman, due to her insufferable sensitivity
and free spirit, foredid herself. In the last passage Tagore blasts the
reification of Sita's self-immolation attempt; she had meant
to appease her consort Rama's doubts of her chastity. Musalmani Didi eyes recrudescent Hindu-Muslim
tensions and, in many ways, embodies the essence of Tagore's humanism. The somewhat
auto-referential Darpaharan describes a fey young man who harbours
literary ambitions. Though he loves his wife, he wishes to stifle her literary
career, deeming it unfeminine. In youth Tagore likely agreed with him. Darpaharan depicts the final humbling of the man
as he ultimately acknowledges his wife's talents. As do many other Tagore
stories, Jibito o Mrito equips Bengalis with a ubiquitous
epigram: Kadombini moriya
proman korilo she more nai—"Kadombini died, thereby proving that she
hadn't."
Poetry
Tagore's poetic
style, which proceeds from a lineage established by 15th- and 16th-century
Vaishnava poets, ranges from classical formalism to the comic, visionary, and
ecstatic. He was influenced by the atavistic mysticism of Vyasa and other rishi-authors of the Upanishads, the Bhakti-Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen. Tagore's
most innovative and mature poetry embodies his exposure to Bengali rural folk
music, which included mystic Baul ballads such as those of the bard Lalon. These, rediscovered and repopularised
by Tagore, resemble 19th-century Kartābhajā hymns
that emphasise inward divinity and rebellion against bourgeois bhadralok religious and social orthodoxy During his Shelaidaha years, his poems
took on a lyrical voice of the moner
manush, the Bāuls' "man within the heart" and Tagore's "life
force of his deep recesses", or meditating upon the jeevan devata—the demiurge or
the "living God within. This figure connected with divinity through appeal
to nature and the emotional interplay of human drama. Such tools saw use in his Bhānusiṃha poems chronicling the Radha-Krishna romance, which were repeatedly revised
over the course of seventy years.
Every
year, many events pay tribute to Tagore: Kabipranam,
his birth anniversary, is celebrated by groups scattered across the globe; the
annual Tagore Festival held in Urbana, Illinois; Rabindra Path Parikrama walking pilgrimages from Calcutta to
Santiniketan; and recitals of his poetry, which are held on important
anniversaries. Bengali culture is
fraught with this legacy: from language and arts to history and politics.Amartya Sen deemed
Tagore a "towering figure", a "deeply relevant and many-sided
contemporary thinker".Tagore's Bengali originals—the 1939 Rabīndra
Rachanāvalī—is canonised as one of his nation's greatest cultural
treasures, and he was roped into a reasonably humble role: "the greatest
poet India has produced
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