Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern South Asia.

A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poemsunder the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramas—and the aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident nationalist he denounced the Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.

Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla.

Works Translated into English

* Chitra	1914
* Creative Unity	1922
* The Crescent Moon	1913
* The Cycle of Spring	1919
* Fireflies	1928
* Fruit-Gathering	1916
* The Fugitive	1921
* The Gardener	1913
* Gitanjali: Song Offerings	1912
* Glimpses of Bengal	1991
* The Home and the World	1985
* The Hungry Stones	1916
* I Won't Let you Go: Selected Poems	1991
* The King of the Dark Chamber	1914
* Letters from an Expatriate in Europe	2012
* The Lover of God	2003
* Mashi	1918
* My Boyhood Days	1943
* My Reminiscences	1991
* Nationalism	1991
* The Post Office	1914
* Sadhana: The Realisation of Life	1913
* Selected Letters	1997
* Selected Poems	1994
* Selected Short Stories	1991
* Songs of Kabir	1915
* The Spirit of Japan	1916
* Stories from Tagore	1918
* Stray Birds	1916
* Vocation	1913

Source: Wikipedia