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Elective English–I

Notes the voice of India’s spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great
living institution.
Rabindranath Tagore is widely considered to be India’s greatest playwright. He is highly
revered by millions of people all across the sub-continent and, of course, by many recent
immigrants to Canada. His work, however, is practically unknown to mainstream Canadian
audiences. He was born in Calcutta, now Kolkata, India into a wealthy Brahmin family in
1861. After a brief stay in England (1878) to attempt to study law, he returned to India, and
instead pursued a career as a writer, playwright, songwriter, poet, philosopher and educator.
During the first 51 years of his life he achieved some success in the Calcutta area of India
where he was born and raised with his many stories, songs and plays. His short stories were
published monthly in a friend’s magazine and he even played the lead role in a few of the
public performances of his plays. Otherwise, he was little known outside of the Calcutta area,
and not known at all outside of India.
This all suddenly changed in 1912. He then returned to England for the first time since his
failed attempt at law school as a teenager. Now a man of 51, his was accompanied by his son.
On the way over to England he began translating, for the first time, his latest selections of
poems, Gitanjali, into English. Almost all of his work prior to that time had been written in
his native tongue of Bengali. He decided to do this just to have something to do, with no
expectation at all that his first time translation efforts would be any good. He made the
handwritten translations in a little notebook he carried around with him and worked on
during the long sea voyage from India. Upon arrival, his son left his father’s brief case with
this notebook in the London subway. Fortunately, an honest person turned in the briefcase
and it was recovered the next day. Tagore’s friend in England, a famous artist he had met in
India, Rothenstein, learned of the translation, and asked to see it. Reluctantly, with much
persuasion, Tagore let him have the poor system of education imposed by the British, combined
the best of traditional Hindu education with Western ideals. Tagore’s multi-cultural educational
efforts were an inspiration to many, including his friend, Count Hermann Keyserling of Estonia.
Count Keyserling founded his own school in 1920 patterned upon Tagore’s school, and the
ancient universities which existed in Northern India under Buddhist rule over 2,000 years ago
under the name School of Wisdom. Rabindranath Tagore led the opening program of the
School of Wisdom in 1920, and participated in several of its programs thereafter.

1.1 Traditional Arts and Methods of India

Rabindranath Tagore’s creative output tells you a lot about this renaissance man. The variety,
quality and quantity are unbelievable. As a writer, Tagore primarily worked in Bengali, but
after his success with Gitanjali, he translated many of his other works into English. He wrote
over one thousand poems; eight volumes of short stories; almost two dozen plays and play-lets;
eight novels; and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics.
Aside from words and drama, his other great love was music, Bengali style. He composed
more than two thousand songs, both music and lyrics. Two of them became the National
Anthems of India and Bangladesh. In 1929 he even began painting. Many of his paintings can
be found in museums today, especially in India, where he is considered the greatest literary
figure of India of all times.
Tagore was not only a creative genius, he was a great man and friend to many. For instance,
he was also a good friend from childhood to the great Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose.
He was educated and quite knowledgeable of Western culture, especially western poetry and
science. This made him a remarkable person, one of the first of our planet to combine East and
West, and ancient and modern knowledge. Tagore had a good grasp of modern-post-Newtonian-

2 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY