Hello readers:) This is blog on assignment
Paper:201 Indian English Literature-Pre Independence and my Topic is Ravindranath Tagore as a great Indian English Writer.
Rabindranath Tagore
Biography
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities, he managed the family estates, a project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He also started an experimental school at Shantiniketan where he tried his Upanishadic ideals of education. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way; and Gandhi, the political father of modern India, was his devoted friend. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India.
Work
Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution.
Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he was first of all a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are Manasi (1890) [The Ideal One],
Sonar Tari (1894) [The Golden Boat],
Gitanjali (1910) [Song Offerings],
Gitimalya (1914) [Wreath of Songs], and Balaka (1916) [The Flight of Cranes].
The English renderings of his poetry, which include The Gardener (1913)
Fruit-Gathering (1916)
The Fugitive (1921), do not generally correspond to particular volumes in the original Bengali; and in spite of its title
Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912) the most acclaimed of them, contains poems from other works besides its namesake. Tagore’s major plays are
Raja (1910) [The King of the Dark Chamber]
Dakghar (1912) [The Post Office]
Achalayatan (1912) [The Immovable]
Muktadhara (1922) [The Waterfall]
Raktakarabi (1926) [Red Oleanders]. He is the author of several volumes of short stories and a number of novels, among them Gora (1910), Ghare-Baire (1916) [The Home and the World], and Yogayog (1929) [Crosscurrents]. Besides these, he wrote musical dramas, dance dramas, essays of all types, travel diaries, and two autobiographies, one in his middle years and the other shortly before his death in 1941. Tagore also left numerous drawings and paintings, and songs for which he wrote the music himself.
Rabindranath Tagore's writing is deeply rooted in both Indian and Western learning traditions. Apart from fiction in the form of poetry, songs, stories, and dramas, it also includes portrayals of common people's lives, literary criticism, philosophy, and social issues. Tagore originally wrote in Bengali, but later reached a broad audience in the West after recasting his poetry in English. In contrast to the frenzied life in the West, his poetry was felt to convey the peace of the soul in harmony with nature.
Tagore’s career, extending over a period of more than 60 years, not only chronicled his personal growth and versatility but also reflected the artistic, cultural, and political vicissitudes of India in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Tagore wrote in “My Life,” an essay collected in Lectures and Addresses (1988), that he “was born and brought up in an atmosphere of the confluence of three movements, all of which were revolutionary”: the religious reform movement started by Raja Rammohan Roy, the founder of the Bramo Samaj (Society of Worshipers of the One Supreme Being); the literary revolution pioneered by the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who “lifted the dead weight of ponderous forms from our language and with a touch of his magic aroused our literature from her age-long sleep”; and the Indian National Movement, protesting the political and cultural dominance of the West. Members of the Tagore family had actively participated in all the three movements, and Tagore’s own work, in a broad sense, represented the culmination of this three-pronged revolution.
The earliest influences that shaped Tagore’s poetic sensibility were the artistic environment of his home, the beauty of nature, and the saintly character of his father. “Most members of my family,” he recalled in “My Life,” “had some gift—some were artists, some poets, some musicians—and the whole atmosphere of our home was permeated with the spirit of creation.” His early education was administered at home under private tutors, but, Tagore wrote in My Boyhood Days (1940), he did not like “the mills of learning” that “went on grinding from morn till night.” As a boy, he was admitted to four different schools in Calcutta, but he hated all of them and began frequently to play truant. Nature was his favorite school, as he recorded in “My Life”: “I had a deep sense, almost from infancy, of the beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and the clouds, and felt in tune with the musical touch of the seasons in the air. ... All these craved expression, and naturally I wanted to give them my own expression.” His father, Debendranath, popularly called Maharshi (Great Sage), was a writer, scholar, and mystic, who for many years had been a distinguished leader of the Brahmo Samaj (Theistic Church) movement founded by Raja Rammohan Roy.
In Letters to a Friend (1928) Tagore told C.F. Andrews, “I saw my father seldom; he was away a great deal, but his presence pervaded the whole house and was one of the deepest influences on my life.” When Rabindranath was 12 years old, his father took him on a four-month journey to the Punjab and the Himalayas. “The chains of the rigorous regime which had bound me snapped for good when I set out from home,” he wrote in his Reminiscences. Their first stop was at Bolpur, then an obscure rural retreat, now internationally known as Santiniketan, the seat of Visva-Bharati University founded by Tagore on December 22, 1918. This visit was Tagore’s first contact with rural Bengal, which he later celebrated in his songs. The Tagores’ final destination was Dalhousie, a beautiful resort in the Himalayas. Overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of the mountains, young Tagore wandered freely from one peak to another. During the sojourn, Debendranath took charge of his son’s education and read with him selections from Sanskrit, Bengali, and English literatures. Debendranath also sang his favorite hymns and recited to Rabindranath verses from the metaphysical Hindu treatises, the Upanishads. Stephen N. Hay surmised, in Asian Ideas of East and West, that “the special attention Debendranath had paid to his youngest sons” during this trip and the sense of liberation experienced by Rabindranath miraculously transformed him “from ugly duckling into much-admired swan.” In Hay’s view, “the pleasurable memory of sudden recognition consequent to a glamorous journey may have remained for the rest of Rabindranath’s life a stimulus to re-enact this archetypal experience.”
Among other influences, Tagore acknowledged three main sources of his literary inspiration: the Vaishnava poets of medieval Bengal and the Bengali folk literature; the classical Indian aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical heritage; and the modern European literary tradition, particularly the work of the English Romantic poets. Underlining Tagore’s many affinities with the European mind, Alexander Aronson, in Rabindranath through Western Eyes, tried to fit him into the Western literary tradition, but, as Edward J. Thompson pointed out in Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist, “Indian influences, of course, were the deepest and touched his mind far more constantly than any European ones, and at a thousand points.” Harmoniously blended and synthesized in Rabindranath were the sensuous apprehension and the mythopoeic tendency of the English romantics, the vision of the great mystics of India, the metaphysical quest of the sages of the Upanishads, the aesthetic sensibilities of an ancient poet like Kalidasa, and the devotional spirit of the medieval Vaishnavite poet-saints and the Bauls—mendicant wandering religious minstrels of Bengal.
Tagore began writing poetry at a very early age, and during his lifetime he published nearly 60 volumes of verse, in which he experimented with many poetic forms and techniques—lyric, sonnet, ode, dramatic monologue, dialogue poems, long narrative and descriptive works, and prose poems. “Unfortunately for both the West and for Tagore,” Mary M. Lago pointed out in Rabindranath Tagore, “many of his readers never knew—still do not know—that so many of his poems were written as words for music, with musical and verbal imagery and rhythms designed to support and enhance each other.” His Gitabitan (“Song Collection”), containing 2,265 songs that were all composed, tuned, and sung by himself, not only started a new genre in Bengali music, known as Rabindrasangit, but, in Lago’s view, became “an important demonstration” of his “belief in the efficacy of cultural synthesis. He used all the musical materials that came to hand: the classical ragas, the boat songs of Bengal, Vaishnava kirtan [group chanting] and Baul devotional songs, village songs of festival and of mourning, even Western tunes picked up during his travels and subtly adapted to his own uses.” Such spirit of experimentation and synthesis marked Tagore’s entire creative career.
Arriving in London in June 1912, he gave these translations to English painter William Rothenstein, who had visited India in 1910 and had shown interest in the poet’s work. Deeply impressed, Rothenstein had copies typed and sent to poet William Butler Yeats, poet and critic Stopford Brooke, and critic Andrew Bradley—all of whom enthusiastically received them. On June 30, Tagore gave a reading of his poems at Rothenstein’s house to a distinguished group of fellow poets, including American poet Ezra Pound, who was at that time the foreign editor of Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe. Pound wanted Poetry to be the first American magazine to print Tagore, and in a letter of December 24, 1912, he wrote to Harriet Monroe that Tagore’s poems “are going to be THE sensation of the winter.” In November 1912, the India Society of London published a limited edition of 750 copies of Gitanjali, with an introduction by Yeats and a pencil-sketch of the author by Rothenstein as frontispiece. In December 1912, Poetry included six poems from the book. And thus the Gitanjali poems reached both sides of the Atlantic to an ever-widening circle of appreciative readers.
The Beginning of Rabindranath Tagore's career as a writer in English was sudden and without any particular creative compulsions. Till the publication of his first English work Gitanjali (Song Offerings), published by the India Society, London, in 1912, Rabindranath, though a celebrity in Bengal, was an obscure figure outside the Bengali-speaking area in India, and totally unknown in the West. At that time he was fifty-one years old and his place in the history of Bengali literature was firmly assured. The prolific writer that he was, he had already produced more than twenty odd books of verse, nearly a dozen plays, a considerable number of essays and short stories and three major novels.
The tremendous enthusiasm with which Gitanjali was greeted by many distinguished poets and thinkers in England, including W.B. Yeats who wrote a brilliant introduction to it, prompted Rabindranath to translate more of his writings. During the next ten years he published more than a dozen books of prose, poems and plays in quick succession in response to the growing interest of western readers in his writings. Undoubtedly he is the only major writer in the literary history of any country who decided to translate his own works to reach a larger audience. His decision to become his own translator, and subsequently to write in English, though not entirely beneficial to him, was nonetheless a momentous one.He wrote primarily in Bengali, but his writings in English, including self-translations, fill four large volumes. Virtually no other major Indian writer has been so prolific.Tagore wrote numerous works, especially fiction, political essays, and travelogues, which have little overt spiritual content.
Conclusion
Indian English writer Rabindranath Tagore was one of the best inspirations for every Indian writer who wants to write in English.
Words (2073).
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