Person · poet & educator

Rabindranath Tagore

Also known as Tagore, Rabindranath, Gurudev, Rabindranath Thakur

Date

1861 – 1941

Function

Arts & performance

Tradition

Gitanjali; Rabindrasangit; Visva-Bharati

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

He began painting seriously in his sixties, out of the crossings-out in his manuscripts, and produced some two thousand works. He also wrote around two thousand songs; Rabindrasangīt is a genre of its own in Bengali, with its own performers and its own orthodoxy about how it may be sung.

Connections (12)

• Monastic foundationSantiniketan

  Tagore opened a school at Śāntiniketan in 1901 with five pupils and built Visva-Bharati around it in 1921. The argument was that lessons belong outdoors and in the mother tongue, against a colonial system that taught in English indoors — and the school's art department under Nandalal Bose became the centre of Indian modernism.

• Life routeJorasanko Thakurbari, Kolkata

  Jorāsānko is where Tagore was born and died, and where three generations of one household produced most of what is called the Bengal Renaissance. Debendranath's Brahmo reform, Jyotirindranath's theatre, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath's painting and Rabindranath's writing all came out of the same address. Abanindranath's Bengal School of painting and Rabindranath's two thousand songs both came out of that house, and the family also produced the first Indian woman to write an autobiography.

• Court associationMohandās Karamchand Gandhi

  Tagore gave Gandhi the title Mahātmā and disagreed with him publicly for twenty years — over non-cooperation, which Tagore thought a doctrine of negation, over the charkha, and over Gandhi's reading of the 1934 Bihar earthquake as divine punishment. The two men wrote it all out in print and stayed friends.

• Teaching lineageWilliam Carey

  Bengali prose as a written medium barely existed before the Serampore press: there was verse, and there were Sanskrit and Persian for serious matters. Carey's grammars, dictionaries and printed texts gave the language a standard form in print, and the Bengal Renaissance that produced Rammohan Roy and, two generations later, Tagore worked in the register those presses had established.

• Court associationJagadish Chandra Bose

  Bose and Tagore were close friends for forty years, and Tagore raised money for his laboratory and wrote about his plant experiments. The two belong to the same Bengali argument — that Indians should do original work in Bengali institutions rather than take instruction from imported ones — which produced Śāntiniketan, the Bose Institute and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science within one generation.

• Teaching lineageBāul

  Tagore heard Baul singing on the Padma while managing the family estates at Shilaidaha, collected the songs, printed them and openly borrowed their tunes — a sizeable part of Rabindrasangeet is built on Baul melody, and he used the word baul of himself. It is one of the few clear cases of a modern Indian literary music taking its form directly from a rural mendicant practice rather than from a court or a temple.

• Life routeBuenos Aires

  Tagore reached Buenos Aires in November 1924 on his way to Peru, fell ill, and spent two months at a house in San Isidro lent by Victoria Ocampo, the writer who later founded the journal Sur. The poems written there became Purabi, dedicated to her under the name Vijaya. Ocampo afterwards brought Tagore's work and then Gandhi's into Spanish-language print, which is most of how Indian writing entered Latin America at all.

• Succession in timeJallianwala Bagh

  Tagore renounced his knighthood in a letter to the Viceroy at the end of May 1919, six weeks after Jallianwala Bagh, saying he wished to stand beside his countrymen stripped of all special distinctions. It was the most conspicuous single protest by an Indian of standing, and it cost him the relationship he had with the British establishment that had lionised him after the Nobel.

• Life routeTokyo

  Tagore went to Japan five times between 1916 and 1929 and was received as a sage until he began, in lectures at Tokyo and Osaka, to attack Japanese nationalism and imperialism directly — telling an audience in the middle of its own imperial expansion that the nation was an organised self-interest. The lectures were published as Nationalism, the welcome cooled sharply, and he never had the same standing in Japan again.

• Life routeMadanapalle

  In February 1919 Rabindranath Tagore visited Madanapalle at the invitation of James H. Cousins, principal of the Besant Theosophical College. On 28 February 1919 at the college Tagore first sang the Bengali composition 'Jana Gana Mana' in public before an English-speaking audience, then translated the song into English as 'The Morning Song of India' with Margaret Cousins notating the musical score. The Madanapalle episode is credited with carrying Tagore's composition beyond Bengal and eventually into India's national consciousness; the Constituent Assembly adopted 'Jana Gana Mana' as the national anthem on 24 January 1950.

• Patronage networkAnnie Besant

  Annie Besant and Rabindranath Tagore were connected through the Indian nationalist education movement. Tagore visited Besant's Besant Theosophical College at Madanapalle in February 1919, where he translated 'Jana Gana Mana' into English and discussed the pedagogical philosophy of nationalist Indian education with the Cousinses. Besant had earlier publicly supported Tagore's 1913 Nobel Prize nomination through the Theosophical Society's international networks, and the two had corresponded on education-and-nationalism themes throughout the 1910s. Their connection linked Besant's Theosophical educational institutions with Tagore's parallel vision of culturally rooted, internationally oriented education at Santiniketan, which was formalised as Visva-Bharati University in 1921.

• Patronage networkMatangini Hazra

  Matangini Hazra's 29 September 1942 Tamluk martyrdom was commemorated in Rabindranath Tagore's death-anniversary year by Bengal nationalist literature. Tagore's death a year before (7 August 1941) had freed Hazra's generation of elderly Gandhian women to lead the Quit India Movement at mass-mobilisation scale. Hazra was called 'Gandhi Buri' (Grandmother Gandhi) in Bengal's folk memory of the 1942 uprising.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Rabindranath Tagore”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Rabindranath Tagore