Rabindranath Tagore

Not many of us know that Gandhiji got the title of Mahatma from none other than Rabindranath Tagore. Today is the 150^th birth anniversary of the man who gave a politically charged slogan “ Ekla Chalo Re” during India’s struggle for freedom. Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in the year 1913, the first Asian to be honoured so. Like Leonardo Da Vinci, Tagore is regarded as the modern day Genius of India, having diverse talent in the field of Literature, Music, and Painting. He was the leading force behind the Bengali Renaissance movement. His songs comprised the Rabindra Sangeet which later on became an integral part of Bengali Culture. He was also fondly called as” Gurudev”.

Though known mostly for his rhythmic and lyrical poetry, Tagore also wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas, and thousands of songs. Tagore’s short stories are most highly regarded; he is credited with originating the Bengali-language version of the genre. He also wrote non-fiction books with topics ranging from Indian history, linguistics and spirituality.

Gitanjali, Gora and Home and the World ( Ghare-Baire) are some of his memorable works.

Tagore founded the Vishwa Bharti University in Shantiniketan in the year 1921. Tagore was an extensive traveler; he is believed to have visited thirty countries in five continents. The idea behind his travels were to make his work familiar with non-Indian audience and to promote his political ideas.

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Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), was the youngest son born to Brahmo Samaj leader Debendranath Tagore. Educated at home, he was sent to England for formal schooling when he was seventeen years old. Even though he did not finish his studies there Tagore had already started his literary journey at young age by publishing his first poetry at age sixteen.

With the translation of some of his poems, he became rapidly known in the West. For the world he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution. By late 19th and early 20th centuries the Bengali polymath had reshaped Bengali literature and music as a poet, playwright, painter, novelist and musician.

Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he was first of all a poet. Gitanjali Gora, and Ghare-Baire are some of his best-known works. After being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 he was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India. Tagore was perhaps the only litterateur who penned anthems of two countries: Bangladesh and India: Amar Shona Bangla and Jana Gana Mana.

Today is Rabindra Jayanti – Gurudev’s 150th birthday. So, I decided to go through his works and musings, to learn more about the man who has inspired generations of Indians. Here are some excerpts from his work titled, the Poet’s religion. Enjoy!!!!

“Beauty is no phantasy, it has the everlasting meaning of reality. The facts that cause despondence and gloom are mere mist, and when through the mist beauty breaks out in momentary gleams, we realise that Peace is true and not conflict, Love is true and not hatred; and Truth is the One, not the disjointed multitude. We realise that Creation is the perpetual harmony between the infinite ideal of perfection and the eternal continuity of its realisation; that so long as there is no absolute separation between the positive ideal and the material obstacle to its attainment, we need not be afraid of suffering and loss. This is the poet’s religion.

Those who are habituated to the rigid framework of sectarian creeds will find such a religion as this too indefinite and elastic. No doubt it is so, but only because its ambition is not to shackle the Infinite and tame it for domestic use; but rather to help our consciousness to emancipate itself from materialism. It is as indefinite as the morning, and yet as luminous; it calls our thoughts, feelings, and actions into freedom, and feeds them with light. In the poet’s religion we find no doctrine or injunction, but rather the attitude of our entire being towards a truth which is ever to be revealed in its own endless creation.

In dogmatic religion all questions are definitely answered, all doubts are finally laid to rest. But the poet’s religion is fluid, like the atmosphere round the earth where lights and shadows play hide-and-seek, and the wind like a shepherd boy plays upon its reeds among flocks of clouds. It never undertakes to lead anybody anywhere to any solid conclusion; yet it reveals endless spheres of light, because it has no walls round itself. It acknowledges the facts of evil; it openly admits “the weariness, the fever and the fret” in the world “where men sit and hear each other groan”; yet it remembers that in spite of all there is the song of the nightingale, and “haply the Queen Moon is on her throne,” and there is:

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine, Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves; And mid-day’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

But all this has not the definiteness of an answer; it has only the music that teases us out of thought as it fills our being.

…………….Men of great faith have always called us to wake up to great expectations, and the prudent have always laughed at them and said that these did not belong to reality. But the poet in man knows that reality is a creation, and human reality has to be called forth from its obscure depth by man’s faith which is creative. There was a day when the human reality was the brutal reality. That was the only capital we had with which to begin our career. But age after age there has come to us the call of faith, which said against all the evidence of fact: “You are more than you appear to be, more than your circumstances seem to warrant. You are to attain the impossible, you are immortal.” The unbelievers had laughed and tried to kill the faith. But faith grew stronger with the strength of martyrdom and at her bidding higher realities have been created over the strata of the lower. Has not a new age come to-day, borne by thunder-clouds, ushered in by a universal agony of suffering? Are we not waiting to-day for a great call of faith, which will say to us: “Come out of your present limitations. You are to attain the impossible, you are immortal”? The nations who are not prepared to accept it, who have all their trust in their present machines of system, and have no thought or space to spare to welcome the sudden guest who comes as the messenger of emancipation, are bound to court defeat whatever may be their present wealth and power.

This great world, where it is a creation, an expression of the infinite–where its morning sings of joy to the newly awakened life, and its evening stars sing to the traveller, weary and worn, of the triumph of life in a new birth across death,–has its call for us. The call has ever roused the creator in man, and urged him to reveal the truth, to reveal the Infinite in himself. It is ever claiming from us, in our own creations, co-operation with God, reminding us of our divine nature, which finds itself in freedom of spirit. Our society exists to remind us, through its various voices, that the ultimate truth in man is not in his intellect or his possessions; it is in his illumination of mind, in his extension of sympathy across all barriers of caste and colour; in his recognition of the world, not merely as a storehouse of power, but as a habitation of man’s spirit, with its eternal music of beauty and its inner light of the divine presence.  ”

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