Rabindranath Tagore Biography In English Life Story 1861-1941

Rabindranath Tagore Biography In English

• Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, dramatist, musician.
• He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with contextual modernism.
• Author of the “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful” poem Gitanjali, he became the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

Birth Details –

Place- Calcutta, Bengal, India

Date of Birth – 7 May 1861

Marital Status- Married

Nationality -Indian

Family –

Mother – Sharda Devi

Father- Debendranath Tagore

Brothers – Dwijendranath, Satyendranath, Kulin

Sister – Swarnakumari

Wife – Mrinalini Devi

Early life –

• Tagore is the English transliteration of the name Thakur. Tagore’s original surname was Kushari.
• Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 at Jorasanko Haveli in Calcutta, the son of Debendranath Tagore and Sharda Devi.
• He was a Pirali Brahmin. Originally belonged to a village called Kush in the district called Burdwan in West Bengal.
• At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhanusinha (“Sun Lion”), which were confiscated by the literary authorities as long-lost classics.
• Tagore was brought up mostly by servants; His mother died when he was young and his father traveled widely.
• Tagore’s eldest brother Dwijendranath was a philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first Indian to be 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 Devi, slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence.

Work –

• Known mostly for his poetry, Tagore wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, plays, and thousands of songs. Of Tagore’s prose, his short stories are perhaps the most highly regarded; He is actually credited with the origin of the Bengali-language version of the genre.

Drama

• In Valmiki Pratibha (1881) Tagore played the title role as Goddess Lakshmi opposite his niece Indira Devi.
• Tagore’s experiences with drama began when he was sixteen, with his brother Jyotirindranath.
• He wrote his first original play when he was twenty – Valmiki Pratibha which was performed at Tagore’s Haveli.
• Chitrangada, Chandalika and Shyama are other major plays that have dance-drama adaptations, together known as Rabindra Nritya Natya.

short stories

• Tagore began his career in short stories in 1877—when he was only sixteen—with “Bhikharini” (“The Beggar Woman”).
• With this, Tagore effectively invented the Bengali language short story genre.
• There he saw the life of the poor and common people of India; Tagore then examines her life with a depth and a spirit unique in Indian literature up to that point.
• In particular, stories such as “Kabuliwala” (“The Fruitseller from Kabul”, published in 1892), “Kshudita Pasan” (“The Hungry Stones”) (August 1895), and “Atithi” (“The Runaway”, 1895) . made this analytical focus on the downtrodden distinctive.

Novel

• Tagore wrote eight novels, including Chaturanga, Shesher Kobita, Char Odhay and Naukadubi.
• Although his novels are the least appreciated of his works, they have received renewed attention through film adaptations by others: Chokher Bali and Ghare Baire are exemplary.

Poem

• Internationally, Gitanjali is Tagore’s best-known collection of poetry, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Receive the Nobel Prize after Theodore Roosevelt.
• Tagore’s poetic style, which follows from a lineage established by Vaishnava poets of the 15th and 16th centuries, ranges from classical formalism to the comic, visionary and ecstatic.

Songs

• Tagore was a prolific composer with around 2,230 songs to his credit. His songs, known as Rabindrasangeet (“Tagore Songs”), merge fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems or parts of novels, stories or plays—are sung alike. .
• In 1971, Amar Sonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh.
• Jana Gana Mana was written in Shadhu-bhasha, a Sanskritized form of Bengali, and is the first of the five verses of the Brahma Bhajan Bharata Bhagya Bidhata that Tagore composed.
• It was first sung at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1911 and was adopted by the Constituent Assembly of the Republic of India as its national anthem in 1950.

Other information –

Date of Death – 7 August 1941

Place – Calcutta, Bengal, India

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