Rabindranath Tagore
From Philosopedia
Tagore, Rabindranath [Sir] (7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941)
Tagore, a Bengali poet and guru who wrote the national anthem of India, was a unitarian, a monotheist, and a philosopher.
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Youth
Nicknamed "Rabi," he was the youngest of fourteen children born in Calcutta's (now Kolkata's) Joransanko section to Debendranath and Sarada Tagore. A Pirali Bengali Brahmin by birth, he began writing poems at the age of eight. Using the pseudonym Bhanushingho ("Sun Lion"), he wrote many works as a teenager. Home-schooled, he wrote Bhikharini (1877, The Beggar Woman), the first short story in the Bangla language. In 1882 he wrote Sandhya Sangit that contains well-known for its poem, "Nirjharer Swapnabhanga" (The Rousing of the Waterfall).
Education
He was sent by his father to study at University College London to become a barrister, but in 1880 returned to Bengal because his father had arranged a marriage to Mrinalini Devi, a 10-year-old. They had five children, four of whom died before reaching full adulthood. In 1890 he began managing his family's estates in Shilaidaha (in what now is Bangladesh).
Works
He was the author of more than fifty dramas, one hundred books of verse, forty volumes of novels and other fiction, much of which denounced nationalism and violence.
In Sadhanaq: The Realization of Life (1913), Tagore emphasized philosophic sentiments in keeping with sacred Hindu writing. Writing in Bengali, he translated his work into English.
Views and Awards
Tagore traveled widely, liked the West’s ability to industrialize but deprecated what he said was its lack of spirituality.
In 1913, he received a Nobel Prize in Literature, especially for Gitanjali (1912), his collection of poetry. According to Joseph McCabe, Tagore had rejected both Christianity and all forms of the Hindu religion, and his biographer, H. D. Brown, shows that Tagore had no belief in any future life.
McCabe calls Tagore an atheist, the Unitarians claim he was a Unitarian, and some say he was a unitarian atheist, a category not uncommon among Unitarians. The Tagore Center in Urbana, Illinois, holds annual festivals in Tagore’s honor. When Tagore visited Urbana in 1912, he addressed the Unitarian congregation and returned several times to lecture.
Details of His Life
Wikipedia has extensive details about his life, including his meetings with Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and others. Although Tagore was knighted by the British Crown in 1915, he renounced the honor in 1919 to protest against the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in which colonial troops killed an estimated 379 unarmed civilians [[1]].
The Human Angle, by Babu Gogineni
The following by Babu Gogineni was posted 7 May 2012 on the web.
- THE HUMAN ANGLE
- Babu Gogineni
On May 6 as the world celebrated the annual celestial event of the supermoon, in at least three countries the curtains were being drawn on the year-long commemoration of a rarer event — the birth of a star.
India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have just concluded celebrating the birth, 150 years ago, of Rabindranath Tagore. Poet, song writer, singer, dramatist, actor, painter, social reformer, educationist, mystic philosopher and freedom fighter, Tagore was a colossus whose full life of eighty years saw a remarkable sensitivity to life and nature, a phenomenal productivity of over 2,500 songs, a new kind of music named after him, thousands of untitled paintings in his distinctive style, the establishment of a university and an indelible stamp on the anti-colonial movement.
Nirad C Choudary once paid tribute to him saying ‘If I were asked who was the greatest poet India has produced, including the greatest of ancient India, Kalidasa, my firm answer would be: Tagore’.
When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Gitanjali, his song offerings to God, Tagore was already famous in India. After 1913 he was enthusiastically hailed as the first non-European to become a Nobel laureate and became a well known figure in Asia and Europe. But such was the cult following that soon developed around him that Thomas Hardy wrote impatiently about ‘this wretched worship of Tagore’. Yeats who nominated Tagore for the Nobel Prize wrote in 1935, complaining about the ‘sentimental rubbish’ of Tagore’s later books. Of course, one need not take too seriously Franz Kafka’s refusal to meet him, and of Thomas Mann’s rudeness in disparagingly referring to him as ‘a fine old English lady’.
Today, 70 years after his death, it is possible to make a more objective assessment of Tagore’s contributions to civilisation. He conceived of a universal humanity while the world was still suffering under the yoke of colonialism and racism. He revelled in the joy of creation, both artistic and artisanal, and chided those who prayed in front of idols for not realising that their God was in their work. He restored to play and playfulness their rightful place in human life and he proclaimed the importance of the artist and of aesthetics. He recreated rites and rituals to make them more meaningful to the modern age. He held a religious view of life, which was also an integral view that saw death as a part of it — he invited it, pleading with it not to be stealthy.
Tagore was a sage and a balladeer of freedom — and just as he enriched the Bengali language so he did with the movement for India’s political independence. He admired Mohandas Gandhi and conferred on him the title of Mahatma, the Great Soul, but disagreed with him frequently.
When Gandhi proposed that all Indians should spin the wheel for 30 minutes a day to transform India’s economy, Tagore who described Gandhi’s movement as ‘The Cult of the Charkha’ gently queried why not 8 hours? When Gandhi asked for foreign cloth to be burnt, Tagore objected that cloth was needed by the naked millions.
When Gandhi proposed satyagraha which includes fasting as a means of personal purification and political action, Tagore warned “For lesser men than yourself it opens up an easy and futile path of duty by urging them to take a plunge into a dark abyss of self-mortification. You cannot blame them if they follow you in this special method of purification of their country, for all messages must be universal in their application, and if not, they should never be expressed at all”.
When Gandhi attributed the Bihar earthquake of 1934 to divine retribution for India’s sin in upholding untouchability, Tagore, like Voltaire, admonished him that unreason was ‘a fundamental source of all the blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-respect’ and asserting that ‘physical catastrophes have their inevitable and exclusive origin in certain combination of physical facts.” He worked with Gandhi but provided an alternative and modern vision for India.
Tagore wrote "Jana Gana Mana", India’s national anthem which was first adopted by Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army based in Singapore. In 1972 the newly formed Bangladesh adopted his "Amar Shonar Bangla" as its national anthem. In 1938, at the request of his student Ananda Samarakun, Tagore wrote in Bengali Nama Nama Sri Lanka Mata — it was almost on the lines of Bankim’s Vande Mataram: Mother Lanka we worship Thee! Plenteous in prosperity, Thou, Beauteous in grace and love, Laden with corn and luscious fruit…
Sadly, a superstitious Sri Lanka changed the first line of the anthem attributing the country’s problems to the first lines. Which of Tagore’s anthems is universal? Not these three as they simply praise land and its beauty. In fact, in a different context, Tagore condemned the idolatry of geography. What will be immortal of Tagore’s poems is the one that offers a modern and inspiring manifesto to the world. It does invoke God, but the measure of a man is not his faith in God but his belief in man, of which Tagore had plenty.
- Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
- Where knowledge is free
- Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
- By narrow domestic walls
- Where words come out from the depth of truth
- Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
- Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
- Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
- Where the mind is led forward by thee
"Into ever-widening thought and action
"Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
This is the real anthem of the great teacher, and should be the Morning Song for the World.
(For a discussion of Tagore’s differences with Gandhi, for whom he had popularized the descriptive term “Mahatma,” or great soul, see “Tagore and His India,” by Amartya Sen in The New York Review of Books, 27 June 1997.)
