Complete biography of Rabindranath Tagore

With the exception of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore was the most famous Indian of his time. His name was known to the educated all over the world-from Japan to Scandinavia and from Moscow to Buenos Aires. In India he was venerated as a poet and philoso­pher in the tradition of the ancient rishis.

The admiration he evoked had perhaps never been expressed more rapturously than by Keyserling, who said of him that he was “the most universal, the most encompassing, the most complete human being I have known.”

The Tagores were one of the first families of Bengal. They were not only great hereditary landowners (zamindars) but were noted for their munificent patronage of art and literature. Originally Banerjis, they are believed to have settled in West Bengal about the eighth century A.D. In the seventeenth century they received the appellation of Thakur, which means “respected lord,” or seigneur. The name was later anglicised as Tagore.

The Tagores were intimately con­nected with the social and cultural development of Bengal. Both the poet’s father, Devendranath, and Dwarakanth, his grandfather, were leading members of the Brahmo Samaj. Founded by Raja Rammohan Roy, this sect propagated theism, and was strongly opposed to the idolatry and ritualism practised by the majority of Hindus. But for the tireless labours of Devendranath and Dwaraka- nath Tagore, it is safe to say that the Brahmo Samaj would not have exercised the far-reaching and many-sided influence it has had on modern Indian life.

Defiance of orthodoxy appears indeed to be one of the characteristic traits of the Tagore family. At some time in the past they are supposed to have broken caste rules by eating with Muslims. This offence cost them their place in the Brahman community; and not­withstanding their great wealth and prestige, they were “looked down upon with certain contempt as perilous.” No strictly orthodox Brahman would either eat or intermarry with them. Dwarakanath brushed aside the then prevalent taboo against sea voyages and was one of the first Hindus to visit England. Devendranath evinced the same independence of spirit. But he was less hostile to orthodox Hinduism than either his father or the founder of the Brahmo Samaj, and in his later years his countrymen united to accord him the title of Maharshi, “Great Sage.”

Besides Rabindranath, it’s most dazz­ling star, and his father-who wrote a remarkable autobiography-and his grandfather, the Tagore family has supplied India with an astonishing galaxy of talent. Dwinjendranath, the poet’s elder brother, was a philosopher and essayist of distinction, while Jyotirindra, another brother, was an artist who earned the praise of such discerning critics as Sir William Rothenstein. A third brother was the first Indian to enter the Civil Service. Abanindranath and Gaganindranath, the poet’s nephews, were artists of international renown. Recent and contemporary art in India owes an incalculable debt to them.

Rabindranath was born on May 6, 1861, in the rambling old mansion at Jorasako, in the heart of Calcutta. Where the family had lived for generations. It was a world in itself, this house so vast and full of life it was. Here Rabindranath spend a none too happy childhood He lost his mother when very young. His father was a remote figure, austere and inaccessible, no often to be seen or spoken with. In these circumstances, the child’s early up bringing developed largely on the trusted servants who play such a significant, if inconspicuous, role in aristocratic Indian households.

For schooling of usual kind, Rabindranath had from the begging a wholesome dislike. He was sent to the Bengal Academy and then to St.Xavier’s, “but his resolute refusal authority and blandishment, and he was allowed to study at home.” He showed as little enthusiasm for provide lessons as for the more formal discipline of the class room. His mind as at once too eager and too dreamy, too independent and too sensitive to fall readily into the congenital ruts.

His father was an incessant traveler, and took the bye with him on his wanderings. Rabindranath spend some time in the villages around Calcutta, making his first acquaintance with the lush field and the drifting sails and the simple peasant folk of rural Bengal; and in the course of leisurely journey to the north-west he was able to steps his sense in the sights and sounds of the variegated pageant that is India, from the mouths of the Ganges to the distant frontier.

He paid his first visit to England in 1877.He was at a Brighton school for a while, and then joined University College, London. When he returned to India, after about a year’s absence, he brought back with him some unpleasant memories of England and knowledge of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religion Medici, which he had studied with Henry Morley.

Travel scarcely interrupted his literary output. He had begun to write verse almost as soon as he could walk; his work appeared in print before he was fifteen; and before he was eighteen he had published nearly seven thousand lines of verse and a great quantity of prose. In the Bhanu Singh poems (first published in Bharati, in 1877) he repro­duced the themes and melodies of the old Vaishnava poets with such success that many a scholar was misled into laud­ing them as newly-discovered master­pieces of Bengali literature.

There is very little of value in these early effusions. Rabindranath himself attached little importance to them, if we may judge from the pieces he selected for the first collected edition of his poems (1896).

The prose work of this period has at least the virtue of displaying a compre­hensive sweep of interest. In 1878 one number of Bharati-a magazine edited by his brother-contains articles on The Saxons and Anglo-Saxon Litera­ture, Petrarch and Laura, Dante and his Poetry, and on Goethe, all by Rabin­dranath. An essay entitled The Hope and Despair of Bengalis is notable for adumbrating a theme which was to exercise him a good deal in after years- the necessity of East and West to each other. In Letters of a Travelled to Europe he described his experiences in the West and maintained that the social morality of Europe was in some respects superior to that of the East.

In his early twenties, Rabindranath passed through a moment of mystical illumination-the first of many similar experiences-which left a deep impress on him. We must relate it in his own words. “One morning,” he writes in his Reminiscences, “I happened to be standing on the verandah. The sun was just rising through the leafy tops of those trees. As I continued to gaze, all of a sudden a covering seemed to fall away from my eyes, and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side. This radiance pierced in a moment through the folds of sadness and despondency which had accumulated over my heart, and flooded it with this universal light.”

Evening Songs have perhaps no intrin­sic merit, but they mark an important stage in Rabindranath’s development. They were soon followed by Morning Songs, a much better book, in which the poet gave exultant and tumultuous ex­pression to his new-found sense of inner freedom. Nature’s Revenge, his first important drama, embodied one of the key-thoughts of all his life-the joy of attaining the Infinite within the finite. The Love of Rahu, in Pictures and Songs, is held by some to be perhaps his greatest poem. But the whole of this phase must be regarded as mainly experimental in, character. It ended with the publication of Sharps and Flats (1887), which is remarkable for the beauty of its sonnets, some of them among the loveliest in any language.

In the meantime, Rabindranath, after a holiday in Karwar on the west coast, returned to Calcutta and married Shri- mati Mrinalini Devi (December, 1883). In addition to his other work, he actively participated in the attempts to start a Bengali Literary Academy and con­tributed frequently to various periodicals, including Balika, a magazine for boys. He was rapidly establishing himself as the best of the younger literary men of Calcutta, the “Bengali Shelley.” Always strikingly handsome, he dressed at this time “with much eccentricity and ex- quisiteness.” He is said to have intro­duced among educated Bengalis the fashion of wearing long wavy hair and the “Napoleon beard.” “My recog­nised cognomen was the Lisping Poet,” he says, in his Reminiscences.

These years saw, too, the ripening of a friendship with Bankimchandra Chat- terjee, the famous Bengali novelist-a friendship unfortunately broken by a long spell of estrangement following on a controversy over the Neo-Hindu move­ment and the death of his older brother Jyotirindra’s wife. Rabindranath was profoundly affected by this loss. “From now onwards the thought of death is very present in his poetry.”

In 1887 he withdrew to Ghazipur. in the United Provinces, intending to devote himself to the single-minded worship of his muse. Here he wrote Manasi, his first fully mature work, savagely satirical in parts; but the life of semi-retirement amid the famed roses of this provincial town called on him before long. He determined to leave Ghazipur and travel along the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar in a bullock- cart. But the plan was thwarted by his father’s wish that he should go to Shileida, on the Ganges, and take charge of the family estates. “The poet was just a little afraid at the name of Work, but at last he consented.”

At Shileida, Rabindranath spent some of the happiest years of his life. Poet though he was, he showed himself not incapable of practical efficiency in the management of the estate. He was in intimate touch with the common people, and gained a first-hand knowledge of the rural problems of India, both in their technical and human aspects. He was surrounded by the Bengal landscape that he loved so well and delighted to describe -its fields and its canals, “its ducks and its reed beds.” And he had the leisure and peace of mind necessary for the complete enfoldment of his genius.

This period was rich in achievement. Not only did Rabindranath contribute for four years a ceaseless stream of essays, short stories and poems to Sadhana, but he now revealed himself as a dramatist of the first rank. Sacrifice has been described as the greatest drama in Bengali literature; while Chitrangada “is one of the summits of his work, unsurpassed, and unsurpassable in its kind.” His lyrical powers, too, were at their height. Sonar Tan, a volume which exposed him to the charge of mysticism, was followed two years later by Chitra. “In no other book has he attained to more single-minded adoration and celebration of beauty…. The greatest poem of all (in Chitra), Urbasi, is perhaps the greatest lyric in all Bengali literature, and probably the most un­alloyed and perfect worship of Beauty which the world’s literature contains.”

Sadhana, “incomparably the best periodical Bengal has ever known,” ceased publication in 1896, and with it the first purely aesthetic phase of Rabindranath’s life came to an end. His restless spirit sought for some more solid and significant belief than Art for Art’s sake. Besides, political preoccu­pations were beginning to weigh on him. Bengal, like the rest of India, was wit­nessing a national revival; British rule was being assailed with increasing vehemence; and Rabindranath, who had till then preserved an aristocratic detach­ment, found himself drawn more and more into these popular movements. Inevitably, he became a leader of the Indian Renaissance.

Opposed as he was to foreign rule, he was even more strongly critical of the servile and cringing attitude of so many Indian politicians of the time. He exhorted them to cease blaming the British raj for all the ills of India and to turn their zeal into channels of educa­tional and social reform that lay well within their power. In order to re­surrect for his countrymen ideals in harmony with the national genius, he delved into India’s past. He lectured on the Upanishads and on the civilization of Aryan India; he extolled the valour and self-reliance of Marathas, Sikhs and Rajputs; and he endeavoured to popu­larise these themes not only by the use of the colloquial idiom, as in Kshanika -in itself a revolutionary departure- but by the adoption of a simple ballad form in Katha and Kahini.

But the most enduring memorial of this time is Santiniketan. The world- famous school, on a site two miles out of Bolpur, whither the Maharshi was wont to repair for communion with Nature, was founded in 1901. Here Rabindranath hoped to recapture the meditative calm of ancient India and provide an environment where the mind of the young “might expand into love of Beauty and of God.” Some of the best educational methods of the West were copied at Santiniketan. Before many years had passed the school came to be looked upon as a model institution. Among those who gave devoted service to it were a number of eminent Indian scholars and artists; and, in addition to the poet himself, some of his English friends, notably W. W. Pearson and the Rev. C. F. Andrews.

The next few years were as busy as they were full of grief. Rabindranath’s wife died in November, 1902. His second daughter was ill with consumption. In a vain attempt to save the child he took her to Almore, in the Himalayas, where he nursed her for many anxious months. She died in 1904. In 1905, his father, the venerable Devendranath, passed away; also, two years later, at Monghyr, his first son-“he was a very sweet boy.” The suffering caused by these successive bereavements is reflected in his poetry, in Smaran and in Kheya. It was, however, during these years that he wrote most of his novels, including Gora, “a long story with the fullness of detail of the Russian novel.”

The partition of Bengal had now become a burning USING issue. The whole country was seething with excitement. Indian nation­alism, in one of its crucial struggles with the Government, had no more effective champion than Rabindranath. He made innumerable speeches and wrote innumer­able articles. The songs he composed were sung by patriotic youths in every province. He started national schools, formed village committees and was active in a hundred other ways. Yet, in the midst of all this, disillusionment grew on him. He despised the politicians, and their endless petty squabbles wearied him. So, suddenly, he resigned from the political committees and organisations with which he had been associated and withdrew to Santiniketan.

Watched by the police and abused by many of his countrymen, he lived
here in strenuous retirement during the next few years. Political and social problems definitely yielded place in his mind to religion. He would often talk to the boys in his school on religious subjects, and these talks were subse­quently collected and issued in a series of volumes entitled Santiniketan. He wrote a group of symbolical plays- Autumn Festival. The King of the Dark Chamber, and The Post Office; and he wrote Gitanjali.

This was not his first book of religious poetry. Naibedya had come out in 1901. But Naibedya was as much an experiment in form and patriotic hymnology as a lyrical expression of religious sentiment. The inspiration of Gitanjali is clear and unsullied. It is the authentic voice of one who, through much suffering, had attained joyous serenity. Some passages in it, Maeterlinck said, “are among the loftiest, most profound and most divinely human ever written.”

In 1911 Rabindranath emerged from his seclusion and plunged once more into public work. He exerted himself to heal the breach between the different sects into which the Brahmo Samaj had been split for many years. His efforts were of no avail and he went back to Santiniketan. The next year his jubilee was celebrated in Bengal with immense eclat. Shortly after, he sailed for England, happy, but tired and ill.

He had taken a short holiday in Europe in 1890. And before that, when he was about twenty, he had set out for England to study law, but had turned back at Madras because his companion, an older nephew, suffered so much from sea-sick- ness that it was impossible for him to continue the voyage, and Rabindranath was in no mood to face the rigors of English life for the second time without a friend at his side. Arriving in London in the spring of 1912, he found himself just as lonely and wretched as on his first visit in 1877. “Everyone seemed like phantoms. . . . Then it occurred to me to try to get into touch with Rothenstein.” At Rothenstein’s he met Yeats, Stop ford Brooke, Nevinson and others who at once recognised the profound beauty of his poems, even in translation. An English publisher was found for them. A special edition of Gitanjali was brought out, and had a splendid reception from the public. “Not since Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam won its vogue has any Eastern poetry won such acceptance.”

After a visit to America, Rabin­dranath returned to Santiniketan in the autumn of 1913, universally recognised as one of the foremost poets of the age. Within a few weeks of his arrival the Nobel Prize for Literature was conferred on him. Calcutta University hastened to crown him with academic laurels. In 1914 he was knighted. During these years, when his fame was spreading over the world, he wrote The Gardener, The Crescent Moon, The Cycle of Spring, The Home and the World-a long novel- and Balaka, “the greatest of his books.” In 1916 he delivered a series of lectures on “Nationalism”-in Japan-and on “Personality,” in the United States.

The Great War intensified the loathing with which Rabindranath had always regarded the nationalism and militarism of the West. But also it gave a fillip to the national awakening in India. Political tension was even more acute than in the days of the Bengal Partition; and follow­ing on the shootings at Amritsar in 1919, Rabindranath felt compelled to resign his knighthood as a gesture of protest.

It was about this time that Mahatma Gandhi came into Rabindranath’s life. He and some of his disciples stayed for a while at Santiniketan on their return from South Africa in 1915. Much as the poet admired the politician-saint, there were deep differences between them-differ­ences which rose to the surface when Gandhi launched the non-co-operation movement. Rabindranath was pro­foundly opposed to it. He condemned its narrowness of spirit; he feared its further consequences; he deplored the effect it was having on the lives of the young; and he derided the glorification of the charkha.

He was fiercely attacked for this attitude but would not be shaken from it. Quietly he pursued what he held to be the true ideal of nationalism and internationalism by founding the Insti­tute of World-Culture-Viswa-bharati -and by starting a Department of Rural Reconstruction-Sriniketan-to develop the village welfare work that he had begun in 1914.

Meanwhile his popularity abroad was on the increase. A cult of his work sprang up. In the decade between 1920 and 1930 he undertook no less than seven extensive lecture tours in the West, in Europe and America, and throughout the East. He was everywhere welcomed with enthusiasm, and made countless friends and admirers. But towards the end of this period, a reaction set in. Mysticism and religiosity came to be identified with his name, and his reputa­tion suffered. In 1930 he visited the Soviet Union and was favourably im­pressed by much that he saw there. His Hibbert Lectures on The Religion of Man were delivered in 1931. To mark his seventieth birthday a memorial volume was presented to him with con­tributions from Einstein, Heinrich Mann, Bertrand Russell and many others.

Rabindranath’s literary achievement is prodigious; it overshadows everything else. It should be recorded, however, that he was not only poet, playwright and novelist, but a musician, actor, painter, composer, philosopher, journal­ist, teacher, orator, and a host of other things-and distinguished himself in each of these very different roles. There is a no more versatile, prolific and gifted genius in history.

He drew his inspiration chiefly from two sources: the Sanskrit poets of the classical age and the mediaeval Vaishnava lyrics. They represent two of the central traditions of Indian history-the secular, aristocratic tradition and the religious fervour of the masses. Blending these with the lofty mysticism of the Upani­shads, Rabindranath achieved a distinc­tive synthesis which is as perfect an expression as it is perhaps possible to have of the spirit of India. Besides, as a craftsman, a master of words, he exercised an enormous influence on the languages of India, particularly on Bengali, which became in his own life­time, and largely through his own work, a vigorous and flexible tongue equal to the needs of the present century.

Though Rabindranath shrank from the rough and tumble of politics, he had a vivid awareness of the plight of his country under foreign rule. He con­stantly inveighed against a system which destroyed freedom and condemned millions to miserable and poverty- stricken lives. There is reason to think that later in life, he grew more conscious than ever of the importance of doing away with imperialism and the greed and violence ingrained in it. But he never ceased to urge with all his eloquence that the subject nation, struggling for independence, should not acquire the aggressive vices of its rulers, but to under­stand other peoples and discover ways of co-operating with them in the common cause of civilization. During his last few years he kept in very poor health. His intellectual powers, however, were unimpaired, and from time to time he raised his voice in indignant protest at the barba­rism and bloodshed that had been released in many parts of the world.