The Spirit of Japan

About Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian poet composer philosopher and painter from Bengal. Born to a prominent Brahmo Samaj family Tagore was raised mostly by servants following his mothers untimely death. His father a leading philosopher and reformer hosted countless artists and intellectuals at the family mansion in Calcutta introducing his children to poets philosophers and musicians from a young age. Tagore avoided conventional education instead reading voraciously and studying astronomy science Sanskrit and classical Indian poetry. As a teenager he began publishing poems and short stories in Bengali and Maithili. Following his fathers wish for him to become a barrister Tagore read law for a brief period at University College London where he soon turned to studying the works of Shakespeare and Thomas Browne. In 1883 Tagore returned to India to marry and manage his ancestral estates. During this time Tagore published his Manasi (1890) poems and met the folk poet Gagan Harkara with whom he would work to compose popular songs. In 1901 having written countless poems plays and short stories Tagore founded an ashram but his work as a spiritual leader was tragically disrupted by the deaths of his wife and two of their children followed by his fathers death in 1905. In 1913 Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature making him the first lyricist and non-European to be awarded the distinction. Over the next several decades Tagore wrote his influential novel The Home and the World (1916) toured dozens of countries and advocated on behalf of Dalits and other oppressed peoples.