Twilight years 1932 1941

Tagores 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 orthodoxyand 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 Rays 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).

Tagores 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 Tagores 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.Im lost in the middle of my birthday. I want my friends, their touch, with the earths last love. I will take lifes final offering, I will take the humans last blessing. Today my sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had to give. In return if I receive anythingsome love, some forgivenessthen I will take it with me when I step on the boat that crosses to the festival of the wordless end.