Description
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian polymath who was active as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter during the Bengal Renaissance. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the ‘profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful’ poetry of Gitanjali, he became, in 1913, the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore’s poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial, while his elegant prose and magical poetry were widely popular on the Indian subcontinent. He was a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and was referred to as ‘the Bard of Bengal’. Tagore was known by the sobriquets of ‘Gurudeb’, ‘Kobiguru’, and ‘Biswokobi’. His compositions were chosen by two nations as their national anthems: India’s ‘Jana Gana Mana’ and Bangladesh’s ‘Amar Shonar Bangla.’ 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 also endures in his founding of Visva-Bharati University. Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. ‘Chokher Bali’ is one of his notable novels.
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