Biography
RavindraNath Tagore
Biography
Rabindranath Tagore sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his regions 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 Bhanusi?ha (Sun Lion), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long lost classics.
He graduated to his first short stories and dramasand the aegis of his birth nameby 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 acclaimedor pannedfor their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems the Republic of Indias Jana Gana Mana and Bangladeshs Amar Shonar Bangla. The composer of Sri Lankas national anthem Sri Lanka Matha was a student of Tagore, and the song is inspired by Tagores style.