Rabindanath Tagore Case

Rabindranath Tagore

A Bengali revolutionary and artist, Rabindranath Tagore was a great poet, philosopher, music composer and a leader of Brahma Samaj, who took the India culture and tradition to the whole world and became a voice of the Indian heritage. Best known for his poems and short stories, Tagore largely contributed to the Bengali literature in the late 19th and early 20th century and created his masterpieces such as Ghare-Baire, Yogayog, Gitanjali, and Gitimalya. The author extended his contribution during the Indian Independence Movement and wrote songs and poems inspiring the movement, though he never directly participated in it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913 and became the Asia's first Nobel Laureate. Two famous songs composed by him “Amar Shonar Bangala” and “Jana Gana Mana” have become a part of the national anthem of Bangladesh and India respectively after their independence. He was the only person to have written the national anthems of two countries. Aside from this, the greatest legacy of the poet to his country remains the world-renowned institution he founded known as “Visva-Bharati University.”

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta on May 7, 1861 to a family that was prominent in Calcutta not only because of its wealth but also because of its cultural and spiritual alliance. Their home in Jorasanko, north of Calcutta, was a center of musical, literary, and theatrical events. Tagore's mind was made by that rich cultural atmosphere and by his own reading, rather than by the various schools to which he was sent; he felt restrained by their teaching methods and preferred to study with family members and private tutors. The house in which Rabindranath Tagore grew up was the home of a vast joint, or extended, family; there were sometimes as many as two hundred Tagore’s who lived in that complex.

Tagore’s father was Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and scholar. His mother Saradadevi died, when he was very young and her body was carried through a gate to a place where it was burned and it was the moment when he realized that she would never come back. Tagore's grandfather had established a huge financial empire for himself, and financed public projects, such as Calcutta Medical College. The Tagore’s were pioneers of Bengal Renaissance and tried to combine traditional Indian culture with and Western ideas. However, in “My Reminiscence’s” Tagore mentions that it was not until the age of ten when he started to use socks and shoes. Servants used to beat the children regularly. All the children contributed significantly to Bengali literature and culture. These included the painters Abinindranath and Gaganendranath and, among Rabindranath's own 11 elder brothers and sisters, the writer and philosopher Dvijendranath, the musician Jyotirindranath, and Bengal's