"মানুষ ভুল করে এবং ভুল থেকেই

"মানুষ ভুল করে এবং ভুল থেকেই
সে শিখে।এটা সবারই জানা কথা।
তবে অধিকাংশ মানুষই বারবার ভুল
করে এবং সে ভুল থেকে শিক্ষা নেয়
না,আর তাই সে বারবার ভুলের
গহব্বরে নিমজ্জিত হয়।"

যার মন পাথরের মত শক্ত
তুমি তাকেই ভালোবাসো ।
কারন ঔ পাথরের মতো মন
টাতে যদি তুমি এতবার ফুল
ফুটাতে পারো । তাহলে ঔ ফুল
শুধু তোমাকেই সুবাস
দিবে অন্যকে নয়......

তোমার সুখের জন্য যদি তোমাকে
ভুলে যেতে হয়,
তাহলে আমি ভুলে যেতে রাজি....
.
.
.
ভুলতে হয়তো কোনদিন ও পারবো না,
তবেতো ভুলে থাকার অভিনয়
করতে পারবো..!! 

বউ সন্দেহ করছে তার স্বামীর
সাথে কাজের মেয়ের অবৈধ স্বম্পর্ক
আছে।
.
.
.
শিওর হওয়ার জন্য সে কাজের
মেয়েকে ১ দিন ছুটি দিল কিন্তু
স্বামীকে এটা বলল না।
রাতে স্বামী বাসায়
এসে ঘুমোতে যাওয়ার সময় স্ত্রী আদর
পেতে চাইলে
স্বামী বললঃ আমার শরীরটা ভালো না।
আজ থাক। এই বলে সে ঘুমিয়ে পড়লো।
স্ত্রী ঘুমের
ভান করে জেগে থাকলো।
মাঝরাতে স্বামী উঠে পাশের রুমের
কমন টয়লেটে গেল। স্ত্রী তখন কাজের
মেয়ের ঘরে গিয়ে শুয়ে পড়লো এবং লাইট
বন্ধকরে দিল।
একটু পর একজন এসে কিছু না বলেই
সরাসরি একশনে চলে গেল !!
কাজ শেষ হওয়ার পর
স্ত্রী লাইটজ্বালিয়ে বললোঃ :
:
:
:
:
:
"তুমি নিশ্চয় আমাকে এই বিছানায়
আশা করোনি !! "“
অবশ্যই না ম্যাডাম”,
বললো কাজের ছেলে আবুইল্লা !!! .
.
ল্যাও ঠ্যালা ... 

এক লোকের প্যান্ট
ফেটে গেছে। প্যান্ট
সেলাই করতে সে গেল
দর্জির কাছে।
দর্জি সুন্দরমত
লোকটির প্যান্ট
সেলাই
করে দিল ……………
তা দেখে লোকটি বেজায়
খুশি হয়ে বললোঃ বাহ!
↓↓
দারুণ সেলাই ™
করেন তো আপনি ! ___
"তা কত
দিতে হবে ভাই?
দর্জি জবাব
দিলোঃ ৫০০
টাকা দেন।
লোকটি আর
কথা না বাড়িয়ে চুপচাপ
১০০০
টাকা ধরিয়ে দিল
দর্জিকে।
দর্জির
লোকটি তো অবাক
হয়ে গেল
এবং বললঃ আরো ৫০০
বাড়তি দিলেন
কেন?
.
.
.
.
লোকটি মুচকি হাইসা কইলোঃ
↓
↓
"ভাই, দাম
শুনে প্যান্ট আবার
ফাঁইটা
গেছে"
ভাল লাগলে লাইক কমেন্ট করুন।

যে আপনার জন্য কাঁদতে পারে,
সে আপনার জন্য সাধারণ
কোনো মানুষ নয়।
সাধারণ মানুষ আপনার কথায়
হাসতে পারে,
কিন্তু কাঁদতে পারেনা।
যে আপনার জন্য কাঁদে,
সে আপনার খুব কাছেরই কেউ  

Life History of Kazi Nazrul Islam

A twentieth-century poet and musician who became the National Poet of Bangladesh and who revolutionized the style of bangla music and literature. He was imprisoned for his anti-British writing but continued to flourish until 1942 when he was seriously disabled by illness.

Kazi Nazrul Islam in known as the national poet of Bangladesh. He brought about revolutionary changes in the spirit and style of Bangla literature and music.

Early struggles

Nazrul was born on 24 May 1899 at Churulia village in burdwan district of West Bengal. India Nazrul’s family was poor and his father died when he was only nine. Therefore, he had not even completed his primary education before he had to go through a lot of struggle for existence. Later he worked as teacher of a village maktab, a custodian of the shrine of a saint and as a muezzin in a village mosque before he joined a leto group. Leto was a mobile musical troupe which roamed around singing and action in the countryside. He soon became the main poet of the group and made his place there by composing a number of folk plays.

Between 1910 and 1917, Nazrul was able to return to school and studied until class X, However, he could not pursue his education further because he did not like the rules and regulations and he had financial difficulties. During this time, he worked as a cook at the house of a railway guard and later at a tea stall at Asansol. Thus the young Nazrul, aptly nicknamed ‘Dukhu Mia’, experienced the harsh ralities of like in the very early days of his life.

Kazi Nazrul Islam

The beginnings of his literary activates

During the First World War, in 1917, Nazrul joined the Bengal Regiment of the British Indian Army. He was in the army for two and a half years and rose form an ordinary soldier to a havildar (battalion quartermaster). His literary activities began when he was posted in Karachi Cantonment.

During his stay in the army, Nazrul learnt Persian from the regiment’s Punjabi moulvi, practiced music with other musical-minded soldiers to the accompaniment of local and foreign instruments. At the same time he pursued literary activities in both prose and poetry which were published in different literary magazines. Baunduler Atmkaini (Autobiography of a Vogabond), his first prose work, was polished in Saogat, a reputed literary magazine in Kolkata. His first poem to be polished was Mukti (Freedom).

With the end of the war, Nazrul returned to Kolkata to start a career in literature and journalism. In 1920 he became a joint editor of Nabjug, an evening daily published by A.K. Fazlul Haq, the well-known politician. While Nazrul worked as a journalist, he wrote numerous poems in different literary magazines and secured his place in the literary world of Kolkata. At the same time, he met with prominent writers, poets and other literary figures of the time, including Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore and Nazrul maintained a close contact till the former died in 1941.

Influences on him

During this time, the political situation was very volatile in India. Everywhere, the Indians wer involved in the non-cooperation and khilafat movement against the British Raj led by Mahatma Gandhi. He wrote may poems and articles in support of the struggle against the British. He wrote against the injustice, the oppression, the exploitation and the violence that was carried out all over India. He was concerned about the landless farmers and workers and fought against social injustice through his writings. In this he was influenced by the socialist revolution in Russian that took place in 1917.

He wrote his famous revolutionary poem, Bidrohi (The Rebel) in 1921. He also wrote bhangar Gaan, Proloyollash and Kamal Pasha. Some of these poems were published in his famous book of poems, Agnibina (The Fiery Lute). Agniina created a stir in Banlga literature and proved to be a turning point in Bangla poetry, in terms of both content and style. Its first edition was sold out soon after publication, and several editions in quick succession had to be printed.

Reactions

Nazrul was arrested in 1922 for his anti-colonial writings. He was sentenced to a year of rigorous imprisonment. While in jail, he went into a 40 day hunger strike to protest against the mistreatment of political prisoners. During this time, Rabindranath Tagore sent his famous telegram to Nazrul that said: Give up hunger strike, our literature claims you. So he stopped and continued to write while he was in jail. Nazrul married Pramila, a girl form a Brahmo family in 1924, despite a lot of disapproval form society, Many of his love songs and poems, some of them being collected in his first book of poetry. Dolon Champa, were  inspired by his relationship with Pramila.

Political involvement

Towards the end of 1925, Nazrul formally joined politics and attended political meetings all over Bengal. Apart from being a member of the Bengal Provincial Congress, he played an active role in organizing the Sramik-Praja-Swaraj Dal. ON 16 December 1925, Nazrul started publishing the weekly Langal, with himself as chef editor. The Langal was the mouthpiece of the Sramik-Praja-Swaraj Dal, which aimed to end class differences in society. THe manifesto of the party, which was published in the paper, demanded full independence for India. At this time Nazrul published his published in the paper, demanded full independence for India. At this time Nazrul published his book Samyabadi O Sarbahara containing songs for workers and peasants. Among Nazrul’s other purlicaitons about this time were an anthology of short stories, Rikter Bedan, and four anthologies of poems and songs: Chittanama, Chhayanat, samyabadi and  Puber Hawa. Chittanama was a collection of songs and poems that Nazrul had composed on the sudden death on 16 June 1925 of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, pioneer of the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity.

A flourishing career

Nazrul’s career continued to flourish, and he was involved in a variety of activities ranging from a recording artist, a composer, a music director, a singer, a poet and an story writer. He also acted in films, plays and performed on the radio. Nazrul was particularly keen on composing various forms of songs and he in said to written even more songs than Rabindranath Tagore had.

A long illness and honours

In 1942, Nazrul became ill and this led to the loss of his voice and memory. He was treated at home and abroad, but his condition became worse. Financially, Nazrul’s family went through a lot of hardship as he was the only earning member.

Nazrul was awarded the Jagattarini Gold Medal by Kolkata University. He was awarded the Padmabhushan title by the Government  of India in 1960. In 1972, when Rabindranath’s Amar Shonar Bangla was declared as the National Anthem of BAngladesh, Nazrul’s famous and rhythmic song, Chal Chal Chal, ws declared as the battle song of Bangladesh . In the same year, Nazrul and his family were brought to Dhaka, by an agreement between the governments of Bangladesh and India. During the war of Liberation, the Freedom Fighters were inspired by the rebellious and patriotic songs of Nazrul which were aired by the swadhin Bangla betar Kendra (Independent Bangla Radio Station), a radio station that was set up in India to inspire the freedom fighters.

He was conferred an honorary DLitt degree by the University of Dhaka in 1972. He was granted citizenship of Bangladesh n January  1976 and came to be known as the National Poet of Bangladesh. In February the same Year, he was awarded the Ekushe Padak, one of most prestigious literary awards in Bangladesh.

Nazrul died on 29 August 1976, but in reality he had remined completely silent and inactive for 34 years since his illness in 1942. He was buried at Dhaka University Mosque as he had wished, with one of his ghazals (Moshjideri pashey amar kobor dio bhai)

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful little village located at the base of a tall

mountain near evergreen forests and a lovely lake. This was the village of

Hamelin. Oh, what a very special little place it was. The houses were all

painted bright colors, the streets were made of matched cobble stones that were

as smooth as smooth can be.

It was a family town, too. Lots of children, laughter and fun filled the streets

every day. The people of Hamelin were very kind and good also, but they did

have one fault. They were not very clean. Bits of food were everywhere.

Kitchens were untidy and people left crumbs and scraps wherever they fell.

Very lazy and careless, if you know what I mean. A bit like those children who

don’t clean their rooms, hmmmm? To tell you the truth, the people were not

really concerned about it though, until they started to notice something. Rats!

Yes, all of those crumbs and scraps were attracting rats to the village and the

rats were really starting to be a problem. All of a sudden, it seemed, there were

rats everywhere. Big ones, too!

They were in drawers, under tables, on the stoves, in the cookie jars-why Mrs.

Brooks even claimed to have discovered one in her teapot! The rats were so big,

they even scared the cats! Can you imagine that? The people of Hamelin were

over run and they didn’t know what to do. Finally, they all got together and

decided to take the problem to Mayor Mauldin.

Now Mayor Mauldin was quite a good mayor and everybody liked him, but that

really was because not much had ever gone wrong in the little town of Hamelin

so the biggest part of his job was simply sitting in his office and being very

Mayor Mauldin looking every day. He did that very well indeed, I might just

tell you.

When the people of the town came crowding into his office with their rat problem,

Mayor Mauldin was quite unsure of what he might do to get rid of the large gray

pests. Finally, after lots of careful thought, he decided to contact the Mayors of

other towns around Hamelin to see what they could suggest. As luck would have

it, one of them had heard of a town with exactly the same problem-possibly, they

were a bit messy too!

Anyway, the other Mayor had contacted a fellow known as the Pied Piper to rid his

town of the rats. He told Mayor Mauldin that for a bag of brass coins the Pied

Piper, a strange looking little fellow, had come into town with a magic flute. He

had piped a fantastic song on this unusual instrument, and danced a wild, leaping

sort of dance that made all the rats follow him right out of town. Imagine that in

you will!

The other Mayor did not know how it had happened, but as soon as the Pied Piper

began to play his strange instrument, the rats poured out of houses, off rooftops,

out of gutters, and even out of kitchens with bits of cheese on the floor! They

followed him, dancing along to his tune, out of town and were never seen again.

The Piper came back the next day for his bag of brass coins and went away with a

handshake and a smile.

So, to Mayor Mauldin, the problem seemed to be solved. Except for the fact that

he did not, in actual fact, have any brass coins he could see nothing wrong with the

plan. Oh, well, more about that later!

Mayor Mauldin contacted the Pied Piper as soon as he could and invited him into

Hamelin to do what he had done in the other village. Sure enough, two days later

there he was. Indeed, he was a strange looking little fellow. He had flowing gray

hair, a gray beard, and a pointy little chin and ears. He looked like nothing the

townspeople of Hamelin had ever seen before, I can tell you. He carried a very

strange instrument that looked like a clarinet, a flute, and a recorder all rolled into

one. When he played it for the Mayor, it sounded like a funny little high-pitched

whistle.

I will say to you my dears that even the little bit he played in the Mayor’s office

brought the desired result. Three rats poked their noses out of the desk drawer and

perked up their little ears and Mayor Mauldin was sold right then and there.

“A bag of brass coins?” asked Mayor Mauldin knowing full well that he did not

really have a bag of brass coins but desperately needing to get rid of the rats so he

would not loose his job.

“Agreed,” said the Piper. “A bag of brass coins it is!” They shook hands on the

deal and the Mayor gave the Piper a slap on the back and a big Mayor type grin.

The Pied Piper tapped his instrument on his hand and put it to his lips. The town’s

people had been looking in the window of the Mayor’s office and as he raised the

pipe, they held their breath as waited excitedly. He tooted a few practice toots,

looked out at the people, and began to play.

It was a sort of dance tune with a lively rhythm that made you want to tap your feet

and snap your fingers. He gave a little hop, skip kind of step and out the door he

went. He started down the street playing his pipe and dancing his little dance and

sure enough, out came the rats.

Rats of every size, shape and color came racing out of places you have never

imagined a rat could hide. There must have been a million of them! All heard the

call of the Pied Piper and all followed him up and down the streets of Hamelin: side

streets, alleys, lanes, avenues, and roads-he didn’t miss a single spot in the whole

town. And on the rats came. In the end, as he approached the town gate, it looked

like a giant parade of rats with the Pied Piper in the lead.

As he danced out of the gate, with the rats trailing behind, the people of the town

lagged along to see what was going to happen next. Over the countryside he went

until he came to a very large hillock not too far from the town. As he approached, a

great cave opened in the rocky bottom at its base. The Piper danced into it with all

of the rats following along behind and lo and behold, the cave closed behind them

all!

Well, that is the end of that they all thought. As they walked back to town they

talked about what had happened and how it almost seemed to never have happened

because the whole thing was so strange. But something even more strange was yet

to come. As they approached town, what should they see but the Pied Piper

standing at the gate.

“Well, that is a job well done, and the worker now deserves his pay,” he said.

Oh, Dear! Mayor Mauldin was in a bit of a jam. He did not have a bag of brass

coins and really, and, as you will remember, he had never had a bag of brass coins

at all. He had said that because it seemed the only way out at the time.

“My, my, perhaps you could come back next week and I will have your brass coins

for you. I don’t remember where I put them right now because of all the fuss and

bother with the rats, you know, ” he said. Again, he was taking what he thought

was the easy way out. But the Pied Piper was having none of it.

“All now because I have kept my end of the bargain. Pay what you owe me now

or pay the consequences,” said he in a very angry voice.

“Nonsense,” said the Mayor. “ What can a little fellow like you do to us. The rats

are gone. They followed you into the cave in the hillside and they will never come

back.”

“I warn you. There are some things of much more value than brass coins. This is

your last chance,” said the Piper in a low and dangerous sounding voice.

The mayor only laughed. The townspeople laughed too. The rats were gone and

now they could go back to life as usual-right?

Well, as you may know or remember, that is not the way things happened. The

Piper looked at Mayor Mauldin sadly and began to play a different tune. It seemed

jolly and lively but it also had something about it that made the townspeople want

to cover their ears. Strangely enough though, just like some rock music today, the

children loved it. The young people of the town came out of their houses dancing

and laughing.

And just as he had done with the rats, the Piper danced and piped up and down all

the side streets, lanes, avenues and roads playing his tune. The grown ups watched

in amazement, unable to move, as he led all of their children out of town! He led

them to the same hillock and into the same cave as he had led the rats earlier in the

day.

When the people realized what the Piper was doing, they began to cry and scream.

“Our children, our children! Our wonderful children are all gone. Oh, what have

we done?” they moaned.

Then, as one person, they all turned to, you guessed it, Mayor Mauldin.

“Brass coins, brass coins, we must have brass coins to pay the Piper,” he cried out

in desperation.

Then the truth came out. When the townspeople found out what he had done, they

were furious.

“How could you?” they all cried.

“Well, how could I know this would happen. You all wanted the rats gone and

what was I to do? It was great to be Mayor when things were going well. I am

happy to give the job to someone else now.” said he in a whiny little voice.

Oh, what to do, what to do. How could this problem be solved and how could the

town of Hamelin get their beloved children back home.

There are many possible endings to this story boys and girls. Perhaps you could

think of some of your own, but here is the one I like the best.

Then, Mayor Mauldin had an idea.

“I know what to do. Why don’t we all work together to solve this problem. I

made a mistake but to be honest, we have all been part of the trouble. We have

looked for an easy way out of a hard problem and that never works really. Let us

all work together for a good solution.

I do not have a bag of brass coins and neither do any of you, but between all of us

we could surely each give a little bit to make up the whole amount. And that, boys

and girls, is exactly what they did. Each of the townspeople went home and found

one, two, sometimes even three brass coins and when they all met in the town

square, they had just exactly enough to fill the bag for the Piper.

Just as they had finished tying up the bag, who should appear but, you guessed it,

the Pied Piper himself.

“So, you have the coins now I see. I knew that if you thought of a way to work

together you could see the right thing to do. See, I have done much more than rid

your town of rats. I have shown you the value of caring about each other, not

looking for only the easy way out, and most important of all, I have shown you that

the most important things in life have nothing to do with brass coins,” he said in a

very deep sincere voice.

And, just as he finished speaking, over the hill just outside of Hamelin, came all the

children. They were laughing and singing and calling out to their parents.

“Oh, Oh, what a lovely time we have had at the Piper’s party. Lots of food and

music and fun,” they all cried. The parents ran to greet them and the story of the

Pied Piper of Hamelin had a very happy ending.

1. See how many different little words you can make out of the words:

MAYOR MAULDIN

I will get you started. The only rules are that each word must have at least 3 letters and you can

only use a letter the same number of times it appears in the words. For example, you could use

the letter “M” twice but the letter “N” only once. Can you make 20 words?

1. lid 3. your
2. moan 4. lady
3. There is a very famous quotation that is based on this story. “If you want to dance, you have

to pay the piper.” How do you think this quotation could have come from the story?

3. An adjective is a word that describes or tells something about a noun. For example in the

story it tells you that the Pied Piper was short, and had a pointy chin. Short, and pointy are

adjectives. Use some adjectives of your own to describe some nouns from the story. Here

are a few suggestions and a hint:

1. Rat-little, gray, nibbling, furry
2. Cobble stones-smooth, clean, matched
3. If you are working on a separate piece of paper, you may like, just for fun, to have a contest

to see who can find the most adjectives in the story. I will start you with just a few but there are

tons of them to find.

1. beautiful
2. bright

big

5. The pictures in this story are great. I bet you could draw a great picture too. Think of a part

of the story you liked and imagine what it would look like. Draw a picture and trade with

someone in your class or group or someone in your family and color each other’s picture. You

can be an artist too.

Happy Reading From Mrs. L.

The village of Hamelin was beautiful. It was a very special little place.

Everyone loved Mayor Mauldin because he was such a nice fellow.

The people were not very neat or tidy. Can you find the little rat in this picture.

Oh, Dear! More and more rats were coming to town.

When the Pied Piper played his tune, the rats followed him right out of town.

Poor Mayor Mauldin. He refused to pay because, as you and I know, he

never really had the brass coins anyway.

The Piper played a different tune and the children followed him out of town

right to the cave just as the rats had done.

The people were furious and looked to the mayor to solve the problem.

Each of the townspeople gave a little bit and soon they had enough to fill the

sack of brass coins. They should have used teamwork all along shouldn’t they!

Biography of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali: রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর) 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; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and other-worldly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West. 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 India.

A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under 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 anti-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: the Republic of India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The composer of Sri Lanka's national anthem: Sri Lanka Matha was a student of Tagore, and the song is inspired by Tagore's style.

Early Life: 1861–1878

The youngest of thirteen surviving children, Tagore was born in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, India to parents Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) and Sarada Devi (1830–1875). Tagore family patriarchs were the Brahmo founders of the Adi Dharm faith. The loyalist "Prince" Dwarkanath Tagore, who employed European estate managers and visited with Victoria and other royalty, was his paternal grandfather. Debendranath had formulated the Brahmoist philosophies espoused by his friend Ram Mohan Roy, and became focal in Brahmo society after Roy's death.

"Rabi" was raised mostly by servants; his mother had died in his early childhood and his father travelled widely. His home hosted the publication of literary magazines; theatre and recitals of both Bengali and Western classical music featured there regularly, as the Jorasanko Tagores were the center of a large and art-loving social group. Tagore's oldest brother Dwijendranath was a respected philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first Indian appointed to the elite and formerly all-European Indian Civil Service. Yet another brother, Jyotirindranath, was a musician, composer, and playwright. His sister Swarnakumari became a novelist. Jyotirindranath's wife Kadambari, slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence. Her abrupt suicide in 1884 left him for years profoundly distraught.
Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati, idylls which the family visited. His brother Hemendranath tutored and physically conditioned him—by having him swim the Ganges or trek through hills, by gymnastics, and by practicing judo and wrestling. He learned drawing, anatomy, geography and history, literature, mathematics, Sanskrit, and English—his least favorite subject. Tagore loathed formal education—his scholarly travails at the local Presidency College spanned a single day. Years later he held that proper teaching does not explain things; proper teaching stokes curiosity:

“[It] knock[s] at the doors of the mind. If any boy is asked to give an account of what is awakened in him by such knocking, he will probably say something silly. For what happens within is much bigger than what comes out in words. Those who pin their faith on university examinations as the test of education take no account of this.”

After he underwent an upanayan initiation at age eleven, he and his father left Calcutta in February 1873 for a months-long tour of the Raj. They visited his father's Santiniketan estate and rested in Amritsar en route to the Himalayan Dhauladhars, their destination being the remote hill station at Dalhousie. Along the way, Tagore read biographies; his father tutored him in history, astronomy, and Sanskrit declensions. He read biographies of Benjamin Franklin among other figures; they discussed Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and they examined the poetry of Kālidāsa. In mid-April they reached the station, and at 2,300 metres (7,546 ft) they settled into a house that sat atop Bakrota Hill. Tagore was taken aback by the region's deep green gorges, alpine forests, and mossy streams and waterfalls. They stayed there for several months and adopted a regime of study and privation that included daily twilight baths taken in icy water.

He returned to Jorosanko and completed a set of major works by 1877, one of them a long poem in the Maithili style of Vidyapati; they were published pseudonymously. Regional experts accepted them as the lost works of Bhānusimha, a newly discovered 17th-century Vaishnava poet. He debuted the short-story genre in Bengali with "Bhikharini" ("The Beggar Woman"), and his Sandhya Sangit (1882) includes the famous poem "Nirjharer Swapnabhanga" ("The Rousing of the Waterfall"). Servants subjected him to an almost ludicrous regimentation in a phase he dryly reviled as the "servocracy". His head was water-dunked—to quiet him. He irked his servants by refusing food; he was confined to chalk circles in parody of Sita's forest trial in the Ramayana; and he was regaled with the heroic criminal exploits of Bengal's outlaw-dacoits. Because the Jorasanko manor was in an area of north Calcutta rife with poverty and prostitution,[35] he was forbidden to leave it for any purpose other than traveling to school. He thus became preoccupied with the world outside and with nature. Of his 1873 visit to Santiniketan, he wrote:

“What I could not see did not take me long to get over—what I did see was quite enough. There was no servant rule, and the only ring which encircled me was the blue of the horizon, drawn around these solitudes by their presiding goddess. Within this I was free to move about as I chose.”

Shelaidaha: 1878–1901

Because Debendranath wanted his son to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, East Sussex, England in 1878. He stayed for several months at a house that the Tagore family owned near Brighton and Hove, in Medina Villas; in 1877 his nephew and niece—Suren and Indira Devi, the children of Tagore's brother Satyendranath—were sent together with their mother, Tagore's sister-in-law, to live with him. He briefly read law at University College London, but again left school. He opted instead for independent study of Shakespeare, Religio Medici, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. Lively English, Irish, and Scottish folk tunes impressed Tagore, whose own tradition of Nidhubabu-authored kirtans and tappas and Brahmo hymnody was subdued. In 1880 he returned to Bengal degree-less, resolving to reconcile European novelty with Brahmo traditions, taking the best from each. In 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi, born Bhabatarini, 1873–1902; they had five children, two of whom died in childhood.

In 1890 Tagore began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha (today a region of Bangladesh); he was joined by his wife and children in 1898. Tagore released his Manasi poems (1890), among his best-known work. As Zamindar Babu, Tagore criss-crossed the riverine holdings in command of the Padma, the luxurious family barge. He collected mostly token rents and blessed villagers who in turn honoured him with banquets—occasionally of dried rice and sour milk. He met Gagan Harkara, through whom he became familiar with Baul Lalon Shah, whose folk songs greatly influenced Tagore. Tagore worked to popularise Lalon's songs. The period 1891–1895, Tagore's Sadhana period, named after one of Tagore's magazines, was his most productive; in these years he wrote more than half the stories of the three-volume, 84-story Galpaguchchha. Its ironic and grave tales examined the voluptuous poverty of an idealised rural Bengal.

Santiniketan: 1901–1932

In 1901 Tagore moved to Santiniketan to found an ashram with a marble-floored prayer hall—The Mandir—an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a library. There his wife and two of his children died. His father died in 1905. He received monthly payments as part of his inheritance and income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of his family's jewelry, his seaside bungalow in Puri, and a derisory 2,000 rupees in book royalties. He gained Bengali and foreign readers alike; he published Naivedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) and translated poems into free verse. In November 1913, Tagore learned he had won that year's Nobel Prize in Literature: the Swedish Academy appreciated the idealistic—and for Westerners—accessible nature of a small body of his translated material focussed on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. In 1915, the British Crown granted Tagore a knighthood. He renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the "Institute for Rural Reconstruction", later renamed Shriniketan or "Abode of Welfare", in Surul, a village near the ashram. With it, Tagore sought to moderate Gandhi's Swaraj protests, which he occasionally blamed for British India's perceived mental—and thus ultimately colonial—decline.[48] He sought aid from donors, officials, and scholars worldwide to "free village[s] from the shackles of helplessness and ignorance" by "vitalis[ing] knowledge". In the early 1930s he targeted ambient "abnormal caste consciousness" and untouchability. He lectured against these, he penned Dalit heroes for his poems and his dramas, and he campaigned—successfully—to open Guruvayoor Temple to Dalits.

Twilight years: 1932–1941

Tagore's life as a "peripatetic litterateur" affirmed his opinion that human divisions were shallow. During a May 1932 visit to a Bedouin encampment in the Iraqi desert, the tribal chief told him that "Our prophet has said that a true Muslim is he by whose words and deeds not the least of his brother-men may ever come to any harm ..."

Tagore confided in his diary: "I was startled into recognizing in his words the voice of essential humanity."

To the end Tagore scrutinised orthodoxy—and in 1934, he struck. That year, an earthquake hit Bihar and killed thousands. Gandhi hailed it as seismic karma, as divine retribution avenging the oppression of Dalits. Tagore rebuked him for his seemingly ignominious inferences. He mourned the perennial poverty of Calcutta and the socioeconomic decline of Bengal. He detailed these newly plebeian aesthetics in an unrhymed hundred-line poem whose technique of searing double-vision foreshadowed Satyajit Ray's film Apur Sansar. Fifteen new volumes appeared, among them prose-poem works Punashcha (1932), Shes Saptak (1935), and Patraput (1936). Experimentation continued in his prose-songs and dance-dramas: Chitra (1914), Shyama (1939), and Chandalika (1938); and in his novels: Dui Bon (1933), Malancha (1934), and Char Adhyay (1934).

Tagore's remit expanded to science in his last years, as hinted in Visva-Parichay, 1937 collection of essays. His respect for scientific laws and his exploration of biology, physics, and astronomy informed his poetry, which exhibited extensive naturalism and verisimilitude. He wove the process of science, the narratives of scientists, into stories in Se (1937), Tin Sangi (1940), and Galpasalpa (1941). His last five years were marked by chronic pain and two long periods of illness. These began when Tagore lost consciousness in late 1937; he remained comatose and near death for a time. This was followed in late 1940 by a similar spell. He never recovered. Poetry from these valetudinary years is among his finest. A period of prolonged agony ended with Tagore's death on 7 August 1941, aged eighty; he was in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion he was raised in. The date is still mourned. A. K. Sen, brother of the first chief election commissioner, received dictation from Tagore on 30 July 1941, a day prior to a scheduled operation: his last poem.

“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.”

Travels

Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five continents. In 1912, he took a sheaf of his translated works to England, where they gained attention from missionary and Gandhi protégé Charles F. Andrews, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others. Yeats wrote the preface to the English translation of Gitanjali; Andrews joined Tagore at Santiniketan. In November 1912 Tagore began touring the United States and the United Kingdom, staying in Butterton, Staffordshire with Andrews's clergymen friends. From May 1916 until April 1917, he lectured in Japan and the United States. He denounced nationalism. His essay "Nationalism in India" was scorned and praised; it was admired by Romain Rolland and other pacifists.

Shortly after returning home the 63-year-old Tagore accepted an invitation from the Peruvian government. He travelled to Mexico. Each government pledged US$100,000 to his school to commemorate the visits. A week after his 6 November 1924 arrival in Buenos Aires, an ill Tagore shifted to the Villa Miralrío at the behest of Victoria Ocampo. He left for home in January 1925. In May 1926 Tagore reached Naples; the next day he met Mussolini in Rome. Their warm rapport ended when Tagore pronounced upon Il Duce's fascist finesse. He had earlier enthused:

"without any doubt he is a great personality. There is such a massive vigour in that head that it reminds one of Michael Angelo’s chisel." A "fire-bath" of fascism was to have educed "the immortal soul of Italy ... clothed in quenchless light".

On 14 July 1927 Tagore and two companions began a four-month tour of Southeast Asia. They visited Bali, Java, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Penang, Siam, and Singapore. The resultant travelogues compose Jatri (1929). In early 1930 he left Bengal for a nearly year-long tour of Europe and the United States. Upon returning to Britain—and as his paintings exhibited in Paris and London—he lodged at a Birmingham Quaker settlement. He wrote his Oxford Hibbert Lecturesι and spoke at the annual London Quaker meet. There, addressing relations between the British and the Indians—a topic he would tackle repeatedly over the next two years—Tagore spoke of a "dark chasm of aloofness". He visited Aga Khan III, stayed at Dartington Hall, toured Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany from June to mid-September 1930, then went on into the Soviet Union. In April 1932 Tagore, intrigued by the Persian mystic Hafez, was hosted by Reza Shah Pahlavi. In his other travels, Tagore interacted with Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Romain Rolland. Visits to Persia and Iraq (in 1932) and Sri Lanka (in 1933) composed Tagore's final foreign tour, and his dislike of communalism and nationalism only deepened. Vice President of India M. Hamid Ansari has said that Rabindranath Tagore heralded the cultural rapprochement between communities, societies and nations much before it became the liberal norm of conduct. Tagore was a man ahead of his time. He wrote in 1932, while on a visit to Iran, that "each country of Asia will solve its own historical problems according to its strength, nature and needs, but the lamp they will each carry on their path to progress will converge to illuminate the common ray of knowledge." His ideas on culture, gender, poverty, education, freedom, and a resurgent Asia remain relevant today.

Works

Known mostly for his poetry, Tagore wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas, and thousands of songs. Of Tagore's prose, his short stories are perhaps most highly regarded; he is indeed credited with originating the Bengali-language version of the genre. His works are frequently noted for their rhythmic, optimistic, and lyrical nature. Such stories mostly borrow from deceptively simple subject matter: commoners. Tagore's non-fiction grappled with history, linguistics, and spirituality. He wrote autobiographies. His travelogues, essays, and lectures were compiled into several volumes, including Europe Jatrir Patro (Letters from Europe) and Manusher Dhormo (The Religion of Man). His brief chat with Einstein, "Note on the Nature of Reality", is included as an appendix to the latter. On the occasion of Tagore's 150th birthday an anthology (titled Kalanukromik Rabindra Rachanabali) of the total body of his works is currently being published in Bengali in chronological order. This includes all versions of each work and fills about eighty volumes. In 2011, Harvard University Press collaborated with Visva-Bharati University to publish The Essential Tagore, the largest anthology of Tagore's works available in English; it was edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarthy and marks the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth.

Music and Art

Tagore composed 2,230 songs and was a prolific painter. His songs compose rabindrasangit ("Tagore Song"), which merges fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems or parts of novels, stories, or plays alike—were lyricised. Influenced by the thumri style of Hindustani music, they ran the entire gamut of human emotion, ranging from his early dirge-like Brahmo devotional hymns to quasi-erotic compositions.[90] They emulated the tonal color of classical ragas to varying extents. Some songs mimicked a given raga's melody and rhythm faithfully; others newly blended elements of different ragas. Yet about nine-tenths of his work was not bhanga gaan, the body of tunes revamped with "fresh value" from select Western, Hindustani, Bengali folk and other regional flavours "external" to Tagore's own ancestral culture. Scholars have attempted to gauge the emotive force and range of Hindustani ragas:

“...the pathos of the purabi raga reminded Tagore of the evening tears of a lonely widow, while kanara was the confused realization of a nocturnal wanderer who had lost his way. In bhupali he seemed to hear a voice in the wind saying 'stop and come hither'.Paraj conveyed to him the deep slumber that overtook one at night’s end.”

—Reba Som, Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and His Song.

Tagore influenced sitar maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad Ali Khan. His songs are widely popular and undergird the Bengali ethos to an extent perhaps rivaling Shakespeare's impact on the English-speaking world. It is said that his songs are the outcome of five centuries of Bengali literary churning and communal yearning. Dhan Gopal Mukerji has said that these songs transcend the mundane to the aesthetic and express all ranges and categories of human emotion. The poet gave voice to all—big or small, rich or poor. The poor Ganges boatman and the rich landlord air their emotions in them. They birthed a distinctive school of music whose practitioners can be fiercely traditional: novel interpretations have drawn severe censure in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.

For Bengalis, the songs' appeal, stemming from the combination of emotive strength and beauty described as surpassing even Tagore's poetry, was such that the Modern Review observed that "there is in Bengal no cultured home where Rabindranath's songs are not sung or at least attempted to be sung ... Even illiterate villagers sing his songs". Arthur Strangways of The Observer introduced non-Bengalis to rabindrasangit in The Music of Hindostan, calling it a "vehicle of a personality ... [that] go behind this or that system of music to that beauty of sound which all systems put out their hands to seize."

In 1971, Amar Shonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh. It was written—ironically—to protest the 1905 Partition of Bengal along communal lines: lopping Muslim-majority East Bengal from Hindu-dominated West Bengal was to avert a regional bloodbath. Tagore saw the partition as a ploy to upend the independence movement, and he aimed to rekindle Bengali unity and tar communalism. Jana Gana Mana was written in shadhu-bhasha, a Sanskritised register of Bengali, and is the first of five stanzas of a Brahmo hymn that Tagore composed. It was first sung in 1911 at a Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and was adopted in 1950 by the Constituent Assembly of the Republic of India as its national anthem.

At sixty, Tagore took up drawing and painting; successful exhibitions of his many works—which made a debut appearance in Paris upon encouragement by artists he met in the south of France[95]—were held throughout Europe. He was likely red-green color blind, resulting in works that exhibited strange colour schemes and off-beat aesthetics. Tagore was influenced by scrimshaw from northern New Ireland, Haida carvings from British Columbia, and woodcuts by Max Pechstein. His artist's eye for his handwriting were revealed in the simple artistic and rhythmic leitmotifs embellishing the scribbles, cross-outs, and word layouts of his manuscripts. Some of Tagore's lyrics corresponded in a synesthetic sense with particular paintings.

Theatre

At sixteen, Tagore led his brother Jyotirindranath's adaptation of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. At twenty he wrote his first drama-opera: Valmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki). In it the pandit Valmiki overcomes his sins, is blessed by Saraswati, and compiles the Rāmāyana. Through it Tagore explores a wide range of dramatic styles and emotions, including usage of revamped kirtans and adaptation of traditional English and Irish folk melodies as drinking songs. Another play, Dak Ghar (The Post Office), describes the child Amal defying his stuffy and puerile confines by ultimately "fall[ing] asleep", hinting his physical death. A story with borderless appeal—gleaning rave reviews in Europe—Dak Ghar dealt with death as, in Tagore's words, "spiritual freedom" from "the world of hoarded wealth and certified creeds". In the Nazi-besieged Warsaw Ghetto, Polish doctor-educator Janusz Korczak had orphans in his care stage The Post Office in July 1942. In The King of Children, biographer Betty Jean Lifton suspected that Korczak, agonising over whether one should determine when and how to die, was easing the children into accepting death. In mid-October, the Nazis sent them to Treblinka.

“[...] but the meaning is less intellectual, more emotional and simple. The deliverance sought and won by the dying child is the same deliverance which rose before his imagination, [...] when once in the early dawn he heard, amid the noise of a crowd returning from some festival, this line out of an old village song, "Ferryman, take me to the other shore of the river." It may come at any moment of life, though the child discovers it in death, for it always comes at the moment when the "I", seeking no longer for gains that cannot be "assimilated with its spirit", is able to say, "All my work is thine" [...].”
—W. B. Yeats, Preface, The Post Office, 1914.

His other works fuse lyrical flow and emotional rhythm into a tight focus on a core idea, a break from prior Bengali drama. Tagore sought "the play of feeling and not of action". In 1890 he released what is regarded as his finest drama: Visarjan (Sacrifice). It is an adaptation of Rajarshi, an earlier novella of his. "A forthright denunciation of a meaningless [and] cruel superstitious rite[s]", the Bengali originals feature intricate subplots and prolonged monologues that give play to historical events in seventeenth-century Udaipur. The devout Maharaja of Tripura is pitted against the wicked head priest Raghupati. His latter dramas were more philosophical and allegorical in nature; these included Dak Ghar. Another is Tagore's Chandalika (Untouchable Girl), which was modeled on an ancient Buddhist legend describing how Ananda, the Gautama Buddha's disciple, asks a tribal girl for water.

In Raktakarabi ("Red" or "Blood Oleanders"), a kleptocrat rules over the residents of Yakshapuri. He and his retainers exploits his subjects—who are benumbed by alcohol and numbered like inventory—by forcing them to mine gold for him. The naive maiden-heroine Nandini rallies her subject-compatriots to defeat the greed of the realm's sardar class—with the morally roused king's belated help. Skirting the "good-vs-evil" trope, the work pits a vital and joyous lèse majesté against the monotonous fealty of the king's varletry, giving rise to an allegorical struggle akin to that found in Animal Farm or Gulliver's Travels. The original, though prized in Bengal, long failed to spawn a "free and comprehensible" translation, and its archaic and sonorous didacticism failed to attract interest from abroad. Chitrangada, Chandalika, and Shyama are other key plays that have dance-drama adaptations, which together are known as Rabindra Nritya Natya.

Novels

Tagore wrote eight novels and four novellas, among them Chaturanga, Shesher Kobita, Char Odhay, and Noukadubi. Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)—through the lens of the idealistic zamindar protagonist Nikhil—repudiates the frog-march of nativism, terrorism, and religious querulousness popular among segments of the Swadeshi movement. A frank expression of Tagore's conflicted sentiments, it was conceived of during a 1914 bout of depression. The novel ends in grody Hindu-Muslim interplay and Nikhil's likely death from a head wound.
Gora, nominated by many Bengali critics as his finest tale, raises controversies regarding connate identity and its ultimate fungibility. As with Ghare Baire matters of self-identity (jāti), personal freedom, and religion are lividly vivisected in a context of family and romance. In it an Irish boy orphaned in the Sepoy Mutiny is raised by Hindus as the titular gora—"whitey". Ignorant of his foreign origins, he chastises Hindu religious backsliders out of love for the indigenous Indians and solidarity with them against his hegemon-compatriots. He falls for a Brahmo girl, compelling his worried foster father to reveal his lost past and cease his nativist zeal. As a "true dialectic" advancing "arguments for and against strict traditionalism", it tackles the colonial conundrum by "portray[ing] the value of all positions within a particular frame [...] not only syncretism, not only liberal orthodoxy, but the extremest reactionary traditionalism he defends by an appeal to what humans share." Among these Tagore highlights "identity [...] conceived of as dharma."

In Jogajog (Relationships), the heroine Kumudini—bound by the ideals of Śiva-Sati, exemplified by Dākshāyani—is torn between her pity for the sinking fortunes of her progressive and compassionate elder brother and his foil: her roue of a husband. Tagore flaunts his feminist leanings; pathos depicts the plight and ultimate demise of women trapped by pregnancy, duty, and family honour; he simultaneously trucks with Bengal's putrescent landed gentry. The story revolves around the underlying rivalry between two families—the Chatterjees, aristocrats now on the decline (Biprodas) and the Ghosals (Madhusudan), representing new money and new arrogance. Kumudini, Biprodas' sister, is caught between the two as she is married off to Madhusudan. She had risen in an observant and sheltered traditional home, as had all her female relations.

Others were uplifting: Shesher Kobita—translated twice as Last Poem and Farewell Song—is his most lyrical novel, with poems and rhythmic passages written by a poet protagonist. It contains elements of satire and postmodernism and has stock characters who gleefully attack the reputation of an old, outmoded, oppressively renowned poet who, incidentally, goes by a familiar name: "Rabindranath Tagore". Though his novels remain among the least-appreciated of his works, they have been given renewed attention via film adaptations by Ray and others: Chokher Bali and Ghare Baire are exemplary. In the first, Tagore inscribes Bengali society via its heroine: a rebellious widow who would live for herself alone. He pillories the custom of perpetual mourning on the part of widows, who were not allowed to remarry, who were consigned to seclusion and loneliness. Tagore wrote of it: "I have always regretted the ending".

Stories

Tagore's three-volume Galpaguchchha comprises eighty-four stories that reflect upon the author's surroundings, on modern and fashionable ideas, and on mind puzzles. Tagore associated his earliest stories, such as those of the "Sadhana" period, with an exuberance of vitality and spontaneity; these traits were cultivated by zamindar Tagore’s life in Patisar, Shajadpur, Shelaidaha, and other villages. Seeing the common and the poor, he examined their lives with a depth and feeling singular in Indian literature up to that point. In "The Fruitseller from Kabul", Tagore speaks in first person as a town dweller and novelist imputing exotic perquisites to an Afghan seller. He channels the lucubrative lust of those mired in the blasé, nidorous, and sudorific morass of subcontinental city life: for distant vistas. "There were autumn mornings, the time of year when kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it [...] I would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the mountains, the glens, the forest [...]."

The Golpoguchchho (Bunch of Stories) was written in Tagore's Sabuj Patra period, which lasted from 1914 to 1917 and was named for another of his magazines. These yarns are celebrated fare in Bengali fiction and are commonly used as plot fodder by Bengali film and theatre. The Ray film Charulata echoed the controversial Tagore novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). In Atithi, which was made into another film, the little Brahmin boy Tarapada shares a boat ride with a village zamindar. The boy relates his flight from home and his subsequent wanderings. Taking pity, the elder adopts him; he fixes the boy to marry his own daughter. The night before his wedding, Tarapada runs off—again. Strir Patra (The Wife's Letter) is an early treatise in female emancipation. Mrinal is wife to a Bengali middle class man: prissy, preening, and patriarchal. Travelling alone she writes a letter, which comprehends the story. She details the pettiness of a life spent entreating his viraginous virility; she ultimately gives up married life, proclaiming, Amio bachbo. Ei bachlum: "And I shall live. Here, I live."

Haimanti assails Hindu arranged marriage and spotlights their often dismal domesticity, the hypocrisies plaguing the Indian middle classes, and how Haimanti, a young woman, due to her insufferable sensitivity and free spirit, foredid herself. In the last passage Tagore blasts the reification of Sita's self-immolation attempt; she had meant to appease her consort Rama's doubts of her chastity. Musalmani Didi eyes recrudescent Hindu-Muslim tensions and, in many ways, embodies the essence of Tagore's humanism. The somewhat auto-referential Darpaharan describes a fey young man who harbours literary ambitions. Though he loves his wife, he wishes to stifle her literary career, deeming it unfeminine. In youth Tagore likely agreed with him. Darpaharan depicts the final humbling of the man as he ultimately acknowledges his wife's talents. As do many other Tagore stories, Jibito o Mrito equips Bengalis with a ubiquitous epigram: Kadombini moriya proman korilo she more nai—"Kadombini died, thereby proving that she hadn't."

Poetry

Tagore's poetic style, which proceeds from a lineage established by 15th- and 16th-century Vaishnava poets, ranges from classical formalism to the comic, visionary, and ecstatic. He was influenced by the atavistic mysticism of Vyasa and other rishi-authors of the Upanishads, the Bhakti-Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen. Tagore's most innovative and mature poetry embodies his exposure to Bengali rural folk music, which included mystic Baul ballads such as those of the bard Lalon. These, rediscovered and repopularised by Tagore, resemble 19th-century Kartābhajā hymns that emphasise inward divinity and rebellion against bourgeois bhadralok religious and social orthodoxy. During his Shelaidaha years, his poems took on a lyrical voice of the moner manush, the Bāuls' "man within the heart" and Tagore's "life force of his deep recesses", or meditating upon the jeevan devata—the demiurge or the "living God within". This figure connected with divinity through appeal to nature and the emotional interplay of human drama. Such tools saw use in his Bhānusiṃha poems chronicling the Radha-Krishna romance, which were repeatedly revised over the course of seventy years.

Tagore reacted to the halfhearted uptake of modernist and realist techniques in Bengali literature by writing matching experimental works in the 1930s. These include Africa and Camalia, among the better known of his latter poems. He occasionally wrote poems using Shadhu Bhasha, a Sanskritised dialect of Bengali; he later adopted a more popular dialect known as Cholti Bhasha. Other works include Manasi, Sonar Tori (Golden Boat), Balaka (Wild Geese, a name redolent of migrating souls), and Purobi. Sonar Tori's most famous poem, dealing with the fleeting endurance of life and achievement, goes by the same name; hauntingly it ends: Shunno nodir tire rohinu poŗi / Jaha chhilo loe gêlo shonar tori—"all I had achieved was carried off on the golden boat—only I was left behind." Gitanjali (গীতাঞ্জলি) is Tagore's best-known collection internationally, earning him his Nobel.

Song VII of Gitanjali:

আমার এ গান ছেড়েছে তার
সকল অলংকার
তোমার কাছে রাখে নি আর
সাজের অহংকার।
অলংকার যে মাঝে প'ড়ে
মিলনেতে আড়াল করে,
তোমার কথা ঢাকে যে তার
মুখর ঝংকার।

তোমার কাছে খাটে না মোর
কবির গরব করা-
মহাকবি, তোমার পায়ে
দিতে চাই যে ধরা।
জীবন লয়ে যতন করি
যদি সরল বাঁশি গড়ি,
আপন সুরে দিবে ভরি
সকল ছিদ্র তার।

"Amar e gan chheŗechhe tar shôkol ôlongkar
Tomar kachhe rakhe ni ar shajer ôhongkar
Ôlongkar je majhe pôŗe milônete aŗal kôre,
Tomar kôtha đhake je tar mukhôro jhôngkar.

Tomar kachhe khaţe na mor kobir gôrbo kôra,
Môhakobi, tomar paee dite chai je dhôra.
Jibon loe jôton kori jodi shôrol bãshi goŗi,
Apon shure dibe bhori sôkol chhidro tar."

Tagore's free-verse translation:

“My song has put off her adornments.
She has no pride of dress and decoration.
Ornaments would mar our union; they would come
between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.
My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight.
O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet.
Only let me make my life simple and straight,
like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.”

"Klanti" (ক্লান্তি; "Weariness"):

ক্লান্তি আমার ক্ষমা করো প্রভু,
পথে যদি পিছিয়ে পড়ি কভু॥
এই-যে হিয়া থরোথরো কাঁপে আজি এমনতরো
এই বেদনা ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো প্রভু॥
এই দীনতা ক্ষমা করো প্রভু,
পিছন-পানে তাকাই যদি কভু।
দিনের তাপে রৌদ্রজ্বালায় শুকায় মালা পূজার থালায়,
সেই ম্লানতা ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো, ক্ষমা করো প্রভু॥

"Klanti amar khôma kôro probhu,
Pôthe jodi pichhie poŗi kobhu.
Ei je hia thôro thôro kãpe aji êmontôro,
Ei bedona khôma kôro khôma kôro probhu.

Ei dinota khôma kôro probhu,
Pichhon-pane takai jodi kobhu.
Diner tape roudrojalae shukae mala pujar thalae,
Shei mlanota khôma kôro khôma kôro, probhu."

Gloss by Tagore scholar Reba Som:

“Forgive me my weariness O Lord
Should I ever lag behind
For this heart that this day trembles so
And for this pain, forgive me, forgive me, O Lord
For this weakness, forgive me O Lord,
If perchance I cast a look behind
And in the day's heat and under the burning sun
The garland on the platter of offering wilts,
For its dull pallor, forgive me, forgive me O Lord.”

Tagore's poetry has been set to music by composers: Arthur Shepherd's triptych for soprano and string quartet, Alexander Zemlinsky's famous Lyric Symphony, Josef Bohuslav Foerster's cycle of love songs, Leoš Janáček's famous chorus "Potulný šílenec" ("The Wandering Madman") for soprano, tenor, baritone, and male chorus—JW 4/43—inspired by Tagore's 1922 lecture in Czechoslovakia which Janáček attended, and Garry Schyman's "Praan", an adaptation of Tagore's poem "Stream of Life" from Gitanjali. The latter was composed and recorded with vocals by Palbasha Siddique to accompany Internet celebrity Matt Harding's 2008 viral video. In 1917 his words were translated adeptly and set to music by Anglo-Dutch composer Richard Hageman to produce a highly regarded art song: "Do Not Go, My Love". The second movement of Jonathan Harvey's "One Evening" (1994) sets an excerpt beginning "As I was watching the sunrise ..." from a letter of Tagore's, this composer having previously chosen a text by the poet for his piece "Song Offerings" (1985).

Politics

Tagore's political thought was tortuous. He opposed imperialism and supported Indian nationalists, and these views were first revealed in Manast, which was mostly composed in his twenties. Evidence produced during the Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial and latter accounts affirm his awareness of the Ghadarites, and stated that he sought the support of Japanese Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake and former Premier Ōkuma Shigenobu. Yet he lampooned the Swadeshi movement; he rebuked it in "The Cult of the Charka", an acrid 1925 essay. 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".

Such views enraged many. He escaped assassination—and only narrowly—by Indian expatriates during his stay in a San Francisco hotel in late 1916; the plot failed when his would-be assassins fell into argument. Yet Tagore wrote songs lionising the Indian independence movement Two of Tagore's more politically charged compositions, "Chitto Jetha Bhayshunyo" ("Where the Mind is Without Fear") and "Ekla Chalo Re" ("If They Answer Not to Thy Call, Walk Alone"), gained mass appeal, with the latter favoured by 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".

Repudiation of Knighthood

Tagore renounced his knighthood, in response to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. In the repudiation letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, he wrote:

“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.”

Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati

Tagore despised rote classroom schooling: in "The Parrot's Training", a bird is caged and force-fed textbook pages—to death. Tagore, visiting Santa Barbara in 1917, conceived a new type of university: he sought to "make Santiniketan the connecting thread between India and the world [and] a world center for the study of humanity somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography." The school, which he named Visva-Bharati, had its foundation stone laid on 24 December 1918 and was inaugurated precisely three years later. Tagore employed a brahmacharya system: gurus gave pupils personal guidance—emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Teaching was often done under trees. He staffed the school, he contributed his Nobel Prize monies, and his duties as steward-mentor at Santiniketan kept him busy: mornings he taught classes; afternoons and evenings he wrote the students' textbooks. He fundraised widely for the school in Europe and the United States between 1919 and 1921.

Impact

Every year, many events pay tribute to Tagore: Kabipranam, his birth anniversary, is celebrated by groups scattered across the globe; the annual Tagore Festival held in Urbana, Illinois; Rabindra Path Parikrama walking pilgrimages from Calcutta to Santiniketan; and recitals of his poetry, which are held on important anniversaries. Bengali culture is fraught with this legacy: from language and arts to history and politics. Amartya Sen scantly deemed Tagore a "towering figure", a "deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker". Tagore's Bengali originals—the 1939 Rabīndra Rachanāvalī—is canonised as one of his nation's greatest cultural treasures, and he was roped into a reasonably humble role: "the greatest poet India has produced".

Tagore was renowned throughout much of Europe, North America, and East Asia. He co-founded Dartington Hall School, a progressive coeducational institution; in Japan, he influenced such figures as Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Tagore's works were widely translated into English, Dutch, German, Spanish, and other European languages by Czech indologist Vincenc Lesný, French Nobel laureate André Gide, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, former Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, and others. In the United States, Tagore's lecturing circuits, particularly those of 1916–1917, were widely attended and wildly acclaimed. Some controversies involving Tagore, possibly fictive, trashed his popularity and sales in Japan and North America after the late 1920s, concluding with his "near total eclipse" outside Bengal. Yet a latent reverence of Tagore was discovered by an astonished Salman Rushdie during a trip to Nicaragua.

By way of translations, Tagore influenced Chileans Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral; Mexican writer Octavio Paz; and Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset, Zenobia Camprubí, and Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the period 1914–1922, the Jiménez-Camprubí pair produced twenty-two Spanish translations of Tagore's English corpus; they heavily revised the The Crescent Moon and other key titles. In these years, Jiménez developed "naked poetry". Ortega y Gasset wrote that "Tagore's wide appeal [owes to how] he speaks of longings for perfection that we all have [...] Tagore awakens a dormant sense of childish wonder, and he saturates the air with all kinds of enchanting promises for the reader, who [...] pays little attention to the deeper import of Oriental mysticism". Tagore's works circulated in free editions around 1920—alongside those of Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, and Tolstoy.

Tagore was deemed overrated by some. Graham Greene doubted that "anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously." Several prominent Western admirers—including Pound and, to a lesser extent, even Yeats—criticised Tagore's work. Yeats, unimpressed with his English translations, railed against that "Damn Tagore [...] We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then, because he thought it more important to know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English." William Radice, who "English[ed]" his poems, asked: "What is their place in world literature?" He saw him as "kind of counter-cultural," bearing "a new kind of classicism" that would heal the "collapsed romantic confusion and chaos of the 20th century." The translated Tagore was "almost nonsensical", and subpar English offerings reduced his trans-national appeal:

“[...] anyone who knows Tagore's poems in their original Bengali cannot feel satisfied with any of the translations (made with or without Yeats's help). Even the translations of his prose works suffer, to some extent, from distortion. E.M. Forster noted [of] The Home and the World [that] "the theme is so beautiful," but the charms have "vanished in translation," or perhaps "in an experiment that has not quite come off."
—Amartya Sen, "Tagore and His India".

Rabindranath Tagore's Works:

Original

Bengali
Poetry
* ভানুসিংহ ঠাকুরের পদাবলী Bhānusiṃha Ṭhākurer Paḍāvalī (Songs of Bhānusiṃha Ṭhākur) 1884
* মানসী Manasi (The Ideal One) 1890
* সোনার তরী Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat) 1894
* গীতাঞ্জলি Gitanjali (Song Offerings) 1910
* গীতিমাল্য Gitimalya (Wreath of Songs) 1914
* বলাকা Balaka (The Flight of Cranes) 1916

Dramas
* বাল্মিকী প্রতিভা Valmiki-Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki) 1881
* বিসর্জন Visarjan (The Sacrifice) 1890
* রাজা Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber) 1910
* ডাকঘর Dak Ghar (The Post Office) 1912
* অচলায়তন Achalayatan (The Immovable) 1912
* মুক্তধারা Muktadhara (The Waterfall) 1922
* রক্তকরবী Raktakaravi (Red Oleanders) 1926

Fiction
* নষ্টনীড় Nastanirh (The Broken Nest) 1901
* গোরা Gora (Fair-Faced) 1910
* ঘরে বাইরে Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) 1916
* যোগাযোগ Yogayog (Crosscurrents) 1929

Memoirs
* জীবনস্মৃতি Jivansmriti (My Reminiscences) 1912
* ছেলেবেলা Chhelebela (My Boyhood Days) 1940

English
* Thought Relics-1921

Translated

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
* The Lover of God-2003
* Mashi-1918
* My Boyhood Days-1943
* My Reminiscences -991
* 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

Adaptations of Novels and Short Stories in Cinema

Hindi
Sacrifice - 1927 (Balidaan) - Nanand Bhojai and Naval Gandhi
Milan - 1947 (Nauka Dubi) - Nitin Bose
Kabuliwala - 1961 (Kabuliwala) - Bimal Roy
Uphaar - 1971 (Samapti) - Sudhendu Roy
Lekin... - 1991 (Kshudhit Pashaan) - Gulzar
Char Adhyay - 1997 (Char Adhyay) - Kumar Shahani
Kashmakash - 2011 ((Nauka Dubi) - Rituparno Ghosh

Bengali
Natir Puja - 1932 - The only film directed by Rabindranath Tagore
Naukadubi - 1947 (Noukadubi) - Nitin Bose
Kabuliwala - 1957 (Kabuliwala) - Tapan Sinha
Kshudhita Pashaan - 1960 (Kshudhita Pashan) - Tapan Sinha
Teen Kanya - 1961 (Teen Kanya) - Satyajit Ray
Charulata - 1964 (Nastanirh) - Satyajit Ray
Ghare Baire - 1985 (Ghare Baire) - Satyajit Ray
Chokher Bali - 2003 (Chokher Bali) - Rituparno Ghosh
Chaturanga - 2008 (Chaturanga) - Suman Mukhopadhyay
Elar Char Adhyay - 2012 (Char Adhyay) - Bappaditya Bandyopadhyay