Rabindranath Tagore

• 1. Introduction

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  Rabindranath Tagore was eight years old when he wrote his first poetry. At sixteen, he released substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhanusimha, meaning Sun Lion, and claimed they were the lost works of a newly discovered 17th-century Vaishnava poet. Regional experts accepted the forgery as genuine classics. This was the boy who loathed formal education, whose entire stay at Calcutta's Presidency College lasted a single day.

  Born on the 7th of May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, he would become a Bengali polymath of the Bengal Renaissance: poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter. In 1913 he became the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any category. He was also the first lyricist and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  How does a man who avoided classrooms come to write the national anthems of two nations? How does a Bengal landowner become a guide for a radical writer in colonial Vietnam, a dinner guest of Mussolini, and a man who renounced a knighthood from the King of England? The answers run through his estates on the Padma River, a marble prayer hall, and a poem dictated the day before his death.

• 2. A House Of Renaissance

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  The Tagore family stood at the forefront of the Bengal Renaissance, hosting literary magazines, theatre, and recitals of Bengali and Western classical music in their Calcutta home. Rabindranath was the youngest of 13 surviving children, the son of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. His mother died in his early childhood, and his father travelled widely, so servants raised him.

  Debendranath invited professional Dhrupad musicians to live in the house and teach Indian classical music to the children. The siblings became a constellation of talent. The oldest brother, Dwijendranath, was a philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, became the first Indian appointed to the formerly all-European Indian Civil Service. Jyotirindranath was a musician, composer, and playwright. Their sister Swarnakumari became a novelist.

  Jyotirindranath's wife, Kadambari Devi, was slightly older than Rabindranath and became a dear friend and powerful influence. Her abrupt suicide in 1884, soon after he married, left him profoundly distraught for years.

  The surname itself carried a wound. Tagore is the anglicised form of Thakur, but the family's original surname was Kushari. They were Pirali Brahmin, a label that historically carried a stigmatised and pejorative connotation, an insult that ostracised Piralis from other Brahmin sub-castes. The Kusharis traced their line to Deen Kushari, granted a village named Kush in the Burdwan district by a Maharaja named Kshitisura.

• 3. The Golden Temple And The River

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  In February 1873, after his coming-of-age rite, the eleven-year-old Tagore left Calcutta with his father to tour India for several months. They visited the Shantiniketan estate and Amritsar before reaching the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie. There he read biographies and studied history, astronomy, modern science, Sanskrit, and the classical poetry of Kalidasa.

  The month at Amritsar marked him deeply. In his My Reminiscences of 1912 he recalled the Golden Temple: "Many a morning have I accompanied my father to this Gurudarbar of the Sikhs in the middle of the lake. There the sacred chanting resounds continually." Father and son were regular visitors, returning loaded with offerings of sugar crystals and sweets. He went on to write six poems relating to Sikhism, including one on Banda Bahadur and one on Guru Gobind Singh.

  The rivers of Bengal shaped him just as profoundly. In 1890 Tagore began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha, today a region of Bangladesh. As Zamindar Babu he criss-crossed the Padma River aboard the family barge, also called the Padma, collecting token rents and blessing villagers who honoured him with banquets, sometimes of dried rice and sour milk.

  There he met Gagan Harkara, and through him the Baul mystic Lalon Shah, whose folk songs greatly influenced him. The years from 1891 to 1895, his Sadhana period, were his most productive. In them he wrote more than half of the eighty-four stories in the three-volume Galpaguchchha, tales of an idealised rural Bengal.

• 4. Gitanjali And The Nobel

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  In 1912 Tagore translated his 1910 work Gitanjali into English, carrying a sheaf of pages to London. He shared the poems with admirers including the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. London's India Society published the work in a limited edition, and the American magazine Poetry printed a selection.

  Yeats wrote the preface to the English Gitanjali. In November 1913 Tagore learned he had won that year's Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy appreciated the idealistic and, for Westerners, accessible nature of the small body of translated material focused on Gitanjali: Song Offerings.

  The honour brought another. King George V awarded him a knighthood in the 1915 Birthday Honours. After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, Tagore renounced it. In his letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, he wrote that the time had come when badges of honour made his shame glaring, and that he wished to stand shorn of all special distinctions by the side of his countrymen.

  Not everyone in the West stayed enchanted. Graham Greene doubted anyone but Yeats could still take the poems seriously. Yeats himself later raged, "Damn Tagore," complaining that the poet brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. E.M. Forster found the theme of The Home and the World beautiful but its charms vanished in translation. The poet who read Shakespeare's Coriolanus for pleasure had become, in English, a figure his own champions struggled to defend.

• 5. The School Under The Trees

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  Tagore held that proper teaching does not explain things but stokes curiosity, a conviction sharpened by his own loathing of rote schooling. He dramatised this in his short story "The Parrot's Training," in which a caged bird is force-fed textbook pages until it dies.

  In 1901 he moved to Santiniketan to found an ashram with a marble-floored prayer hall called The Mandir, an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, and a library. There his wife and two of his children died, and his father died in 1905. Visiting Santa Barbara in 1917, he conceived a new kind of university, one that would make Santiniketan a connecting thread between India and the world.

  He named the school Visva-Bharati. Its foundation stone was laid on the 24th of December 1918, and it was inaugurated precisely three years later. Teaching was often done under trees, with gurus giving pupils personal guidance that was emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Tagore taught morning classes, then wrote the students' textbooks in the afternoons and evenings. He contributed his Nobel Prize monies and fundraised across Europe and the United States between 1919 and 1921.

  The institution's later history held an indignity. On the 25th of March 2004 Tagore's Nobel Prize was stolen from the safety vault of Visva-Bharati University, along with several of his belongings. That December the Swedish Academy decided to present two replicas, one of gold and one of bronze. In 2016 a Baul singer named Pradip Bauri, accused of sheltering the thieves, was arrested.

• 6. The Argument With Gandhi

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  Tagore lampooned the Swadeshi movement and rebuked it in an acrid 1925 essay, The Cult of the Charkha. According to the economist Amartya Sen, he rebelled against strongly nationalist forms of the independence movement while asserting India's right to be independent without denying what India could learn from abroad. He urged the masses to avoid victimology and seek self-help and education, calling British administration a political symptom of a social disease.

  His disagreements with Mohandas Gandhi were pointed. In 1934 an earthquake struck Bihar and killed thousands. Gandhi hailed it as seismic karma, divine retribution for the oppression of Dalits, and Tagore rebuked him for the implications. Yet two of Tagore's compositions, "Where the Mind is Without Fear" and "If They Answer Not to Thy Call, Walk Alone," gained mass appeal, the latter favoured by Gandhi himself.

  Despite his criticism of Gandhian activism, Tagore was key in resolving a Gandhi-Ambedkar dispute over separate electorates for untouchables, helping to defuse at least one of Gandhi's fasts unto death. In the early 1930s he targeted what he called abnormal caste consciousness and untouchability. He wrote Dalit heroes into his poems and dramas and campaigned successfully to open the Guruvayoor Temple to Dalits.

  His politics nearly cost him his life. He escaped assassination only narrowly by Indian expatriates during a stay in a San Francisco hotel in late 1916, when his would-be killers fell into an argument and the plot failed.

• 7. Anthems And Two Thousand Songs

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  Around 2,230 songs are credited to Tagore, a body of work known as rabindrasangit. Influenced by the thumri style of Hindustani music, they ran the entire gamut of human emotion, from early dirge-like Brahmo devotional hymns to quasi-erotic compositions. About nine-tenths of his songs were not bhanga gaan, the tunes revamped with fresh value from Western, Hindustani, and Bengali folk sources outside his own ancestral culture.

  Two of those songs became national anthems. Amar Sonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh in 1971. He had written it to protest the 1905 Partition of Bengal, which cut the Muslim-majority East from the Hindu-dominated West, an act he saw as a cunning plan to stop the independence movement. Jana Gana Mana, written in a Sanskritised form of Bengali, was first sung in 1911 at a Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and adopted in 1950 as India's national anthem.

  The reach went further. Sri Lanka's national anthem was inspired by his work, and his song "Banglar Mati Banglar Jol" became the state anthem of West Bengal. The Modern Review observed that in Bengal there was no cultured home where Rabindranath's songs were not sung, and that even illiterate villagers sang them.

  The written corpus matched the musical one. He is credited with originating the Bengali-language short story, debuting in 1877 with "Bhikharini," The Beggar Woman. His best-known works include Gitanjali, the novel Gora, and Ghare-Baire, The Home and the World. Satyajit Ray would later adapt his fiction for the films Charulata in 1964 and Ghare Baire in 1984.

• 8. A Sketchbook At Forty

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  At around forty, already a celebrated writer, Tagore wrote to the scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose that he was sitting with a sketchbook, drawing. He confessed that just as a mother lavishes most affection on her ugliest son, he felt secretly drawn to the skill that came to him least easily. He found himself using the eraser more than the pencil, grew dissatisfied, and withdrew, deciding it was not for him to become a painter.

  He returned to it at sixty, taking up drawing and painting in earnest. Likely red-green colour blind, he produced works with strange colour schemes and off-beat aesthetics. He drew on influences as distant as scrimshaw by the Malanggan people of New Ireland, Haida carvings from the Pacific Northwest, and woodcuts by the German artist Max Pechstein. His paintings made their debut in Paris and were exhibited throughout Europe. India's National Gallery of Modern Art lists 102 of his works.

  His final years widened still further, reaching toward science. The 1937 collection of essays Visva-Parichay hinted at this turn, and his respect for scientific laws informed the naturalism of his poetry. He wove the narratives of scientists into stories such as Se in 1937 and Tin Sangi in 1940.

  The end came at Jorasanko, the mansion in which he was born. His last five years brought chronic pain and two long illnesses, the first beginning in late 1937 when he lost consciousness and lay comatose. On the 30th of July 1941, a day before a scheduled operation, he dictated his last poem to A. K. Sen. In it he wrote, "Today my sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had to give." He died on the 7th of August 1941, aged 80. The date is still mourned.