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Tagore: a personal homage

posted on Monday, August 25, 2008 08:14 PM

Author: Sanjay Kumar, Brighton

A very brief intro into the life of the ‘Eternal Spirit of Calcutta’

Mahatma Gandhi called him ‘The Great Sentinel’. Rabindranath Tagore was an educational, social and religious reformer on par with Gandhi. But by embracing Western civilisation, unlike Gandhi, Tagore gave India ways to assimilate the West without becoming a mockery of it. The East and the West are polarities as old as the hills. Tagore was the first to see that these two polarities would be compelled to meet in the 20th century.

Throughout his long life he expressed all the delight and the torture of that encounter in his unique, mercurial personality. Tagore belonged to an age that seems far from ours in the West. But, like Mahatma Gandhi, his life has the power to move us in the very core of our being.

Tagore was a creative artist of incredibly abundant and rare gifts: a writer of poetry, short stories, novels, essays and plays, a highly unorthodox painter of rare skill, and a composer of songs that have completely captured Bengali hearts.

‘These prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years’, W.B Yeats wrote in 1912. ‘A whole people, a whole civilisation, immeasurable strange to us, seems to have taken up in this imagination; and yet we are moved not because of its strangeness, but because we met our own image’. ‘I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before’, Charles Darwin’s granddaughter wrote to a friend after meeting Tagore.

A year later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; the first Asian writer to have won it. Travelling the world for two decades, he received a homage not granted to any other writer this century – comparable only to that of his good friend Albert Einstein.

Today no artistic figure, living or dead, is more actively worshipped in West Bengal than this man: Rabindranath Tagore.

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