31 Jul Poet – Tuhin
Rabindranath Tagore
7th May 1861 – 7th August 1941
He wrote, novels, plays, short stories, song, and poems. He wasn’t a freedom fighter per se, although he did galvanize an entire nation with his work.
Internationally, Gitanjali is Tagore’s best-known collection of poetry, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was the first person (except Roosevelt) outside Europe to get the Nobel Prize.
On 25 March 2004, Tagore’s Nobel Prize was stolen from the safety vault of the Visva-Bharati University, along with several other of his belongings. On 7 December 2004, the Swedish Academy decided to present two replicas of Tagore’s Nobel Prize, one made of gold and the other made of bronze, to the University.
Some facts
Issues with Gandhi
Though somewhat critical of Gandhian activism, Tagore was key in resolving a Gandhi–Ambedkar dispute involving separate electorates for untouchables, thereby mooting at least one of Gandhi’s fasts “unto death”
He urged the masses to avoid victimology and instead seek self-help and education, and he saw the presence of British administration as a “political symptom of our social disease”. He maintained that, even for those at the extremes of poverty, “there can be no question of blind revolution”; preferable to it was a “steady and purposeful education”.
Issues with the British
Tagore renounced his knighthood in response to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
Issues with the country
“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
He toured HARD
Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five continents. Meeting many politicians, poets, writers etc. of the likes of W.B Yeats, Romain Rolland, Mussolini, Aga Khan III, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann and many more.
Poems
Where the mind is without fear
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
Face to Face
Day after day, O lord of my life,
shall I stand before thee face to face.
With folded hands, O lord of all worlds,
shall I stand before thee face to face.
Under thy great sky in solitude and silence,
with humble heart shall I stand before thee face to face.
In this laborious world of thine, tumultuous with toil
and with struggle, among hurrying crowds
shall I stand before thee face to face.
And when my work shall be done in this world,
O King of kings, alone and speechless
shall I stand before thee face to face.
