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Elective English—III
Notes Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was
highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is
generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern South Asia.
A Pirali Brahmin from Kolkata, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he
released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym BhânusiC ha (“Sun Lion”), which
were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short
stories and dramas—and the aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist
internationalist, and strident anti-nationalist he denounced the Raj and advocated independence
from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised
paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy
endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his
best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for
their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were
chosen by two nations as national anthems: India’s Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh’s Amar
Shonar Bangla.
Tagore is distinguished for being a man with numerous dimensional personalities and is the
most eminent Bengali renaissance poet, philosopher, essayist, critic, composer and educator
who dreamt of a harmony of universal humanity among the people of different origin through
freedom of mind and spiritual sovereignty. Rabindranath Tagore occupies a fore position in the
galaxy of the prophets of Humanism. He became the first-ever Asian writer to be awarded a
Nobel Prize in 1913 for translated version of his cycle of song-poems entitled Gitanjali. Tagore
played a very important and a noteworthy part in India’s freedom struggle and his efforts were
appreciated by both Gandhi and Nehru and after independence, India chose a song of Tagore
“Jana Gana Mana Adhionayaka” as its National Anthem. Gitanjali is Tagore’s poetry, which had
earned him remarkable success.
The poem that is covered in this unit is a part of Gitanjali and while studying this unit you will
also learn about Tagore’s other works in music, stories, novels and poems.
10.1 Music
Tagore was a prolific composer with 2,230 songs to his credit. His songs are known as
rabindrasangit (“Tagore Song”), which merges fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems
or parts of novels, stories, or plays alike—were lyricised. Influenced by the thumri style of
Hindustani music, they ran the entire gamut of human emotion, ranging from his early dirge-
like Brahmo devotional hymns to quasi-erotic compositions. They emulated the tonal colour of
classical ragas to varying extents. Some songs mimicked a given raga’s melody and rhythm
faithfully; others newly blended elements of different ragas. Yet about nine-tenths of his work
was not bhanga gaan, the body of tunes revamped with “fresh value” from select Western,
Hindustani, Bengali folk and other regional flavours “external” to Tagore’s own ancestral culture.
Scholars have attempted to gauge the emotive force and range of Hindustani ragas:
“….the pathos of the purabi raga reminded Tagore of the evening tears of a lonely widow, while
kanara was the confused realization of a nocturnal wanderer who had lost his way. In bhupali he
seemed to hear a voice in the wind saying ‘stop and come hither’. Paraj conveyed to him the deep
slumber that overtook one at night’s end.”
Tagore influenced sitar maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad
Ali Khan. His songs are widely popular and undergird the Bengali ethos to an extent perhaps
rivalling Shakespeare’s impact on the English-speaking world. It is said that his songs are the
outcome of five centuries of Bengali literary churning and communal yearning.
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