Page 28 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Unit 3: Chitra by Rabindranath Tagore

magazines and theatre and recitals of both Bengali and Western classical music as the Jorasanko Notes
Tagores were part of an art-loving social group. Tagore’s oldest brother Dwijendranath was an
esteemed poet and philosopher whereas another brother, Satyendranath, was the first Indian
selected to the elite and formerly all-European Indian Civil Service. Yet another brother,
Jyotirindranath, was a musician, composer, and playwright. His sister Swarnakumari became a
novelist. Jyotirindranath’s wife Kadambari, slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and
powerful influence. Her abrupt suicide in 1884, soon after he married, left him for years
profoundly distraught.
After he experienced an upanayan commencement at age 11, he and his father left Kolkata in
February 1873 for a months-long trip of the Raj. They visited his father’s Santiniketan estate and
rested in Amritsar on the way to the Himalayan Dhauladhars, their destination being the remote
hill station at Dalhousie. Along the way, Tagore read biographies of Benjamin Franklin and
many other famous people and his father taught him in Sanskrit, astronomy and history.
He came back to Jorosanko and completed a set of key works by 1877, one of them a long poem
in the Maithili style of Vidyapati, which were published after his death. Regional experts
acknowledged them as the lost writings of Bhânusimha, a newly discovered 17th century
Vaishnava poet. He debuted the short-story genre in Bengali with “Bhikharini” (“The Beggar
Woman”), and his Sandhya Sangit (1882) includes the well-known poem Nirjharer Swapnabhanga

(“The Rousing of the Waterfall”). As the Jorasanko manor was in an area of north Kolkata rife
with poverty and prostitution, he was prohibited to leave it for any purpose other than travelling
to school. Therefore, he became preoccupied with the world outside and with nature.

3.1.2 Santiniketan 1901–1932

In 1901, Tagore moved to Santiniketan to establish an ashram with a marble-floored prayer
hall—The Mandir—an experimental school, a library, gardens and groves of trees. After some
time his wife and two of his children passed away. He also lost his father in 1905. He received
monthly payments as part of his inheritance and income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of
his family’s jewellery, his seaside bungalow in Puri, and a derisory 2,000 rupees in book royalties.
He won Bengali as well as foreign readers and published Naivedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) and
translated poems into free verse.
In November 1913, Tagore won that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy
praised the idealistic—and for Westerners—availability of a small body of his translated work
focussed on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. In 1915, the British government granted Tagore a
knighthood, which he gave up after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.

Did u know? In 1921, Tagore with the agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst founded
the “Institute for Rural Reconstruction” which was later renamed Shriniketan or “Abode
of Welfare”, in Surul, a village near the ashram.
With it, Tagore sought to curb Gandhi’s Swaraj protests, which he sometimes blamed for
British India’s apparent mental—and thus finally colonial—decline. He wanted aid from
donors, officials, and scholars worldwide to “free village[s] from the shackles of helplessness

and ignorance” by “vitalis[ing] knowledge”. In the early 1930s, he targeted “abnormal
caste consciousness” and untouchability. He lectured against these social issues and penned
Dalit heroes in his poems and dramas, he also campaigned—to open Guruvayoor Temple
to Dalits.
3.1.3 Twilight Years 1932–1941

Tagore’s life as a “peripatetic litterateur” stated his opinion that human divisions were
insubstantial. A visit to a Bedouin encampment in the Iraqi desert in May 1932, the tribal chief

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 23