Isn’t it fascinating how often the people who make the most extreme, quantifiable impact on our world are so easily forgotten?
Let me give you an example: he was a poet and a playwright, a musician, philosopher, educator, and painter. His words inspired nationalistic pride like few others in a country that had been oppressed for far too long, while his criticism of the schooling system set the waypoints on a path for better education around the world.
By his death in 1941 at the age of 80, he had reshaped the nation’s cultural identity, become a celebrated figure internationally, and become the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize.
This is Rabindranath Tagore. This is his story.
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Who are you, reader, reading my poems a hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
– The Gardener, 1915.
Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 7th, 1861, in the family mansion in Calcutta, India. The youngest of 13 children in a powerful family at the heart of the Bengali renaissance, he nevertheless had an isolated childhood.
Tagore’s mother died in childbirth, while his father, a religious reformist, spent most of his time travelling around the country, leaving servants to attend to his son’s needs. He referred to this time as “servocracy”, reflecting on the brutal physical punishments the workers would eagerly dole out to the children. Most of his siblings had left the family home by then, and were well on there way to becoming as influential as their father.
Unable to leave the estate for any activities but school and physical conditioning activities like swimming the Ganges under the watch of his brother Hemendranath, Tagore yearned for the outside world. He found it within the literature spread out through his home, in the musical performances and theatrical rehearsals that would often take part in the mansion. Tagore began to detest traditionally schooling, to loathe explanation and desire exploration in its stead. He wanted not to be told things; he wanted to discover the truth for himself. It was then that he first entered the arts, beginning to write poetry at age eight, and experimenting in other mediums.
The chance for exploration proper arrived when he turned 11. After a traditional ceremony, Tagore was declared a man, and granted the opportunity to tour India for a few months alongside his father. The trip marked the first time the pair had spent proper time together, time which they spent trekking through the rice paddies of Shantiniketan, the frigid hills in Dalhousie, and the alpine forests that bordered Kashmir. Father and son studied history, astronomy, the sciences, and languages together.
Eventually, Tagore returned home. Here, he worked on his first major collections of poems, which was finally completed when he turned 16. Jokingly, he announced the anthology was not his own, but that he had discovered the lost works of a famous 17th century writer, Bhānusiṃha. Upon reading the poems, local experts confirmed Tagore’s claim.
A year later, Tagore was sent to England to become a barrister. Studying in Brighton, he paid little attention to his studies, and was summarily sent to the University College London. When he returned to India after a little over a year, he brought nothing home with him beyond a fledging interest in English culture that would come to inspire his work.
His family was disappointed, but Tagore did not care. He would find his own way in life.
1882 saw the release of one of his most acclaimed poems: Nirjharer Swapnabhanga, a call for Indian independence. The following year, he was married, and had five children, two of whom died in childbirth.
Charged with managing ancestral estates in modern-day Bangladesh, Tagore, and eventually his family, relocated. He continued working on his poetry, releasing the acclaimed Manasi in 1890, before spending the next half-decade on the 84 short stories that would make up Galpaguchchha, a reflection on poverty in the Bengali region.
It wasn’t long before Tagore’s name became well known throughout India. He continued writing, poems, novels, and plays alike, but in 1901 he turned his attention to an experimental school he founded in Santiniketan. Tragically, both his wife and father died doing this period, but his work did not slow down.
Returning to England in 1912 with translated copies of his work underarm, where he met with the likes of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Thomas Sturge Moore. His first visit to the USA occurred in the same year.
Tagore’s influence as a political figure expanded after 1913, when he became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali: Song Offerings. His argument that even the poorest of Indians should seek self-education and liberty was in stark contrast to the views of Gandhi, who was drawing increased loyalty from the Indian people. These beliefs were met with disdain by some parties, including a pair of expatriates in San Francisco who planned to assassinate Tagore while he was staying in a hotel. The two fell into an argument, drawing attention, and narrowly saving Tagore’s life in the process.
After being awarded a knighthood from King George V in 1915, Tagore renounced it in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which saw British Indian troops kill and injure nearly 1500 peaceful protestors:
“The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.”
Continuing his travels, Tagore went to Japan, South America, Europe, and back to the US, meeting with the likes of artist and noted pacifist Romain Rolland, Argentinian writer Victoria Ocampo, Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and Albert Einstein, sharing in their ideals and wisdom.
Age did not slow Tagore down as he entered his 60s and 70s. He took up painting (creating over 200 pieces), and established the Institute for Rural Reconstruction in 1921, met with bedouins in the Iraqi desert in 1932, scrutinised religious orthodoxy and called for acceptance of all humans as intrinsically the same in 1934 following the devastating Bihar earthquake that Gandhi called “seismic karma”. Three years later, he wrote a collection of essays on modern science, an interest he had developed over a few short years.
The last five years of Tagore’s life were spent in near-constant pain. He almost died twice. And yet he continued to write, crafting what it is considered some of his most powerful poetry in those twilight years.
He sent his final poem to his friend A.K. Sen on July 30th, before dying on August 7th, 1941, at the age of 80:
“I’m lost in the middle of my birthday. I want my friends, their touch, with the earth’s last love. I will take life’s final offering, I will take the human’s last blessing. Today my sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had to give. In return if I receive anything—some love, some forgiveness—then I will take it with me when I step on the boat that crosses to the festival of the wordless end.”
Rabindranath Tagore died with an astounding 2230 songs to his name, including Amar Sonar Bangla, which became the national anthem of Bangladesh in 1971. He wrote eight novels, four novellas, over 100 short stories, and an innumerable collection of poems. Altogether, his work marked the inception of a new Bengali art culture, one that can still be seen and felt clearly.
Today, the date of his death is not just memorialised in India, but around the world. To list the important figures whom he influenced in mind and heart would take too long, but as one of the greatest polymaths the world has ever seen, Tagore has had an undeniably profound impact on the world we know and love.