Biography rabindranath tagore pdf

It was a heavy shock for him as she was his boyhood companion and of the same age. He continued his works. In Tagore began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha today a region of Bangladesh.

He opposed any sort of violence and considered humanity as the greatest things which can end the war. It was established by Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, and later expanded by his son Rabindranath Tagore whose vision became what is now a university town, Visva-Bharati University. It was in the hands of trustees that this can be used only for holy and spiritual activities.

In Rabindranath Tagore expanded this and founded. In September , he came back to India and was warmly received by his countrymen. The Westerners considered his work to be the best literary production of the year in the whole world. Between and , Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five continents. So Gandhiji requested one of his admirers to donate a sum of sixty thousand rupees for the Visva Bharati. His poems reveals devotional mysticism as well as nature mysticism.

One fine evening all things became luminous with truth to him. Gitanjli was his most acclaimed work. In year , he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his exceptional contribution to the Indian and world literature. Further, he received the title Knighthood from the British government in , which he abandoned aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in as a protest against the British rule in India. In , Tagore founded an Institute for Rural Reconstruction- which he later renamed as Shriniketan- and appointed scholars from many places to share their knowledge with the students.

Notable Work Rabindranath Tagore wrote eight novels and a number of poems and most of his creations are in the Bangla language. Aside from fictions and autobiographical works, he also wrote essays, lectures and short stories on various topics ranging from history to science and arts. He composed the words and music of the Indian national anthem Jana Gana Mana, which was accepted as the national anthem in Tagore discovered his talent as a painter in his early sixties, when his first exhibition was held in Paris.

Tagore was credited with the culmination of writing short stories as an art, especially in Bengali. Based upon his early experience with villagers, he wrote stories which give a glimpse of the life most Bengali live. Though Tagore wrote vividly in every genre of literature, he was a poet first of all. His poets are an inseparable part of every Bengali family where his poems are recited on all important occasions. His best collection of poems is Gitanjali, which gained him the Nobel Prize in literature in However, Tagore denounce the Swadeshi Movement in his acerbic essay The Cult of the Charka in , he continued to support Indian nationalist movement in his own non-sentimental and visionary way.

He wrote songs and poems galvanizing the Indian Independence movement. After the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in , he renounced the knighthood awarded by the British government as a protest against it.

His most acclaimed work Jana Gana Mana became the national anthem of India after its declaration as a Republic in The second phase of illness proved to be fatal as he never recovered from that. The students who came to the Santiniketan school were from urban families while the school itself was surrounded by villages.

The early angst Rabindranath felt for an ignorant and helpless humanity in rural East Bengal became an inspiration and a spiritual force in serving his country by creating a holistic education at the most basic level. He was greatly concerned with the cultural domination that was increasingly becoming a divisive force between city and village in early modern India.

The newly emerging professional middle class of Indian society were taking their leave of their village homes and settling in the city. Caste hierarchy was being strengthened by the hegemony of a colonial English education.

To Rabindranath that was a more urgent problem than the lack of political freedom. The only remedy that suggests itself to me and which even at the risk of uttering a truism I cannot but repeat, is — to educate them out of their trance. He argued that foreign rule was a symptom and not a cause. He even hoped that the new ideas of humanism from the West would rejuvenate us to look inwards and reverse the process by examining the radical and reform movements in our own history.

Till then he held his faith in the traditional Hindu Samaj but came in for a rude shock when he realized that, true to orthodoxy, the Hindu Samaj would not take the Muslims into its fold. He gave powerful expression to his disillusionment in the novel Gora while writing and serializing it during the years The boy grew up to be a fiercely patriotic young man and a defender of orthodox Hinduism.

But when Gora finally discovered his foreign origins he also realised he would be rejected by orthodox Hindu society where he had invested his trust and his social commitment.

That became his wake up call about the need to be an Indian without caste or creed. In me there is no longer any opposition between Hindu, Mussulman, and Christian. Today every caste is my caste, the food of all is my food!

Amid growing perplexities of the social, educational and political problems in his times, his mind had been turning to the past to discover in the history of India a central ideal for regulating our life and work. He expressed his inclusive humanism in a song with these words, Day and night, thy voice goes out from land to land, Calling Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains Round thy throne And Parsees, Mussulmans and Christians.

Offerings are brought to thy shrine by the East and the West to be woven in a garland of love. Arrangements were made to study these contributions through the disciplines of philosophy, literature, art, music and dance. Officially, Visva-Bharati international university was inaugurated at Santiniketan in He explained that he used the word for the sake of convenience. There will be a meeting of truths here. I feel confident that they shall accept our invitation.

What we have to ensure is that their 28 hearts are not starved when they are with us. It was hoped that these alternative values would help to build a new Indian personality free from the conflict of communities and capable of appreciating the many currents of the Indian cultural tradition along with the humanistic and liberal ideals of the West. The new Indian personality would belong neither to the East nor to the West, but be a reconciler of both.

He wrote, The India of modern days comprised not only the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain, whose common culture had its origin in India itself, but also the Mohammadan with his wonderful religious democracy of semitic origin and the Christian with his political democracy nurtured in Europe.

There was also in India the Parsi from whom we had parted long ago outside the boundaries of India but who had come back to us again If Santiniketan was to become truly the guest house of India it had to be so comprehensive as to find room for each and all of these in its ripest scholarship The treasures which these different religious cultures contained should be brought into 29 practical use in relation to the modern world, not held apart and miserly hoarded.

The final experiments at Visva-Bharati took form in with the establishment of an institute of rural reconstruction named Sriniketan, abode of prosperity. Rabindranath insisted from the outset that an Indian education would be incomplete without a relationship with the village as the majority of Indians lived in the villages, and without inculcating a moral responsibility for their survival among the educated classes in India. The villages were kept out of the mainstream of Indian life and cut off from the advancement of knowledge where they needed it most.

Rabindranath argued forcefully that the poverty problem was not the most important, the problem of unhappiness was. He called upon everyone to collaborate in this effort, scholars and poets and musicians and artists. He warned that the urban populace would otherwise live like parasites, sucking life from the rural people and giving back nothing to them. For a brief period Sriniketan blossomed into an inspiring environment with idealists and specialists from all over the world joining hands with the village people in bringing action and hope to their lives.

Just what the founder of Visva-Bharati worked for. Explaining his migratory instinct he wrote to his younger daughter Mira, Having examined myself from within I know for certain that God did not create me for the life of a householder.

That is perhaps why I am a constant traveller, and not able to set up home anywhere. The world has received me in its arms, I shall do the same with the world. His close association with world literature had widened his horizons from early on in life. Rabindranath absorbed every bit of that cosmopolitan air.

His inclination to embrace the world came from the confidence of his own solid education in his mother tongue and his grounding in the Indian cultural tradition both of which were also family gifts. It was indeed poetic justice that of all the Tagore family, Rabindranath was most in need of that confidence as he worked his way to find a delicate balance between his commitments to his country and to the world.

This was particularly so after his award of the Nobel prize for literature in when he felt more and more at home in the world. He wrote, I have felt the meeting of the East and the West in my own individual life It was the same feeling which I had when I listened to those in my family who recited verses from English literature and from the great poets of those days.

Then also I felt as if a new prophet of the human world had been revealed to my mind. He never liked to learn conventionally, by practice. This was even more apparent in the last years of his life when he became a painter. He once fell very ill in and slipped into a coma. At the time his passion for painting was such that the first thing he did on regaining consciousness was to paint a landscape.

He himself explained why painting was important to him as an altogether separate language of articulation. It must, therefore, seek for its expression other languages — lines and colours, sounds and movements.

Through our mastery of these we not only make our whole nature articulate but also understand man in all his attempts to reveal his innermost being in every age and clime … It is the duty of every human being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of the intellect, but also the language of the personality which is the language of Art.

But his art could speak without the medium of an interpreter. He did not himself want to see meaning in them nor did he want others to do so. He asserted that everything of this earth outside the human world was silent. The stars did not utter words, the planets and clouds and trees did not, nor the green grass and flowers. Why therefore should we tie meaning to art, he asked. He wrote, It is the element of unpredictability in art which seems to fascinate me strongly.

The subject matter of a poem can be traced back to some dim thought in the mind. Once it leaves the matted crown of Siva, the stream of poetry flows along its measured course — well-defined by its two banks. While painting, the process adopted by me is quite the reverse. First there is the hint of a line, then the line becomes a form. The more pronounced the form becomes the clearer becomes the picture to my conception.

This creation of form is a source of wonder. If I were a finished artist I would probably have a preconceived idea to be made into a picture. This is not doubt a rewarding experience. But it is greater fund when the mind is seized upon by something outside of it, some 34 surprise element which gradually evolves into an understandable shape.

Last Years and Legacy The idea and endeavour of Visva-Bharati thrived in its first two decades, the s and the s. Santiniketan became a hive of diverse communities. Rabindranath entrusted its preservation to Mahatma Gandhi. To his utter shock the second world war broke out in his last years. That hurt the peace of even his far away rural hamlet. His legacy is vast, from a great variety of the written form to song and music, to art, to pioneering work in the fields of education and rural reconstruction, to discourses on the nation-state, politics of power, militarism, war and decay of civilization.

He saw the less welcome change that had come over his society in his lifetime. His own social class had undergone complete reorientation. They who had patronized jatra, kathakata, kirtan and other aids to folk education and folk entertainment had either left the village or lost their sense of brotherhood.

The village folk were not able to benefit from what knowledge the city folk had acquired in the scientific age. Their life was no longer enlivened with music and ballads and tales. Torn by guilt over their misery he wrote, The moment came when I had to pull myself away from preoccupation with literature. For, the sight of the terrible poverty of the Indian masses grew inescapable. They compared his work with Baudelaire and found him wanting. It is fair to suggest that Rabindranath held firm to his faith in the beauty and sublimity of life.

He did not lose faith in man. But that is not to say there was no anguish in his poetry. He felt guilty that millions of his countrymen were so weighed down by their daily miseries to feel any beauty whatsoever from life. He felt circumscribed by the fact that he was not able to really reach out to them wholly, that he could not bridge the inherent distance. The aristocracy of his birth stood in the way.

Come poet of the multitudes, sing songs of obscure man, reveal his unspoken soul, soothe his humiliated heart, restore life and song to this dry land. Resuscitate the failing hearts of hidden men. May your voice reflect those standing bowed. Let the one-stringed minstrel, also, add his tune to the great court anthem of the muse.

Come, poet of the new age, lead me to those hearts so far away, those hearts so near.