Rabindranath Tagore Nationalism (1917)

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta, West Bengal in 1861. His father, Debendranath Tagore, was a religious man who was devoted to the Reformation movement. The Tagore family was a distinguished family that included many artists and thinkers. The eminent scholar, Okakura Kakuzō, visited the Tagore family and was inspired by them. In 1901, Tagore opened a boarding school (later to be named Tagore International University) in Shantiniketan, where he was to base his activities from then on. After receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for the English translation of his collection of poems entitled Gitanjali, he became internationally renowned and he interacted extensively with Western intellectuals such as Romain Rolland. Tagore visited Japan five times, beginning with his first visit in 1916. He became increasingly critical of Japan, and his arguments with Noguchi Yonejirō regarding the Sino-Japanese War are particularly famous. Although Tagore himself was a non-political person, he was bound to get involved in the political controversies of the times, and is known to have once disagreed with Gandhi on the Indian independence movement. His true genius, however, was poetry. His poems in his native language, Bengali, are considered classics of modern Indian literature (many of which he himself translated into English). He also wrote plays, short stories, and long novels such as Gora. Tagore had a strong interest in painting too. He himself often painted and he often received Japanese artists as visitors at Shantiniketon. Tagore died in 1941.