Wikipedia:VideoWiki/Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore, also known by his sobriquets Gurudev, Kabiguru, and Biswakabi, was a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent.^[1][2]

 

Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta to Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. Tagore was raised mostly by servants; his mother had died in his early childhood and his father travelled widely.^[3][4]

 

 

Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati, which the family visited. His brother Hemendranath tutored and physically conditioned him—by having him swim the Ganges or trek through hills, by gymnastics, and by practising judo and wrestling.^[5]

 

 

At age eleven, Tagore and his father left Calcutta in February 1873 to tour India for several months, before reaching Dalhousie. There Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kālidāsa.^[6][7]

 

Tagore returned to Jorosanko and completed a set of major works by 1877, one of them a long poem in the Maithili style of Vidyapati. As a joke, he claimed that these were the lost works of newly discovered 17th-century Vaiṣṇava poet Bhānusiṃha.^[8]

 

Because Debendranath wanted his son to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, East Sussex, England in 1878.^[9] In 1880 he returned to Bengal degree-less, resolving to reconcile European novelty with Brahmo traditions, taking the best from each.^[10]

 

After returning to Bengal, Tagore regularly published poems, stories, and novels. These had a profound impact within Bengal itself but received little national attention.^[11] In 1883 he married 10-year-old^[12] Mrinalini Devi.

 

In 1890 Tagore began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha (today a region of Bangladesh); he was joined there by his wife and children in 1898. Tagore released his Manasi poems (1890), among his best-known work.^[13]

 

The period 1891–1895, Tagore's Sadhana period, named after one of his magazines, was his most productive;^[3] in these years he wrote more than half the stories of the three-volume, 84-story Galpaguchchha.^[14]

 

In 1901 Tagore moved to Santiniketan to found an ashram with a marble-floored prayer hall—The Mandir—an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a library.There his wife and two of his children died.^[15]

 

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 a small body of his translated material focused on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings.^[16]

 

He was awarded a knighthood by King George V in the 1915 Birthday Honours, but Tagore renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.^[17]

 

In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the "Institute for Rural Reconstruction", later renamed Shriniketan or "Abode of Welfare", in Surul.^[18]

 

In the early 1930s he targeted ambient "abnormal caste consciousness" and untouchability. He lectured against these, he penned Dalit heroes for his poems and his dramas, and he successfully campaigned to open Guruvayoor Temple to Dalits.^[19][20]

 

 

Tagore's remit expanded to science in his last years, as hinted in Visva-Parichay, a 1937 collection of essays. His respect for scientific laws and his exploration of biology, physics, and astronomy informed his poetry, which exhibited extensive naturalism and verisimilitude.^[21]

 

His last five years were marked by chronic pain and two long periods of illness. These began when Tagore lost consciousness in late 1937; he remained comatose and near death for a time.^[22]

 

This was followed in late 1940 by a similar spell, from which he never recovered. Poetry from these valetudinary years is among his finest.^[23]

 

A period of prolonged agony ended with Tagore's death on 7 August 1941, aged eighty; he was in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion he was raised in.^[24]