Associate Professor, Dept of English,

Faculty of Arts,

The MS University of Baroda, Vadodara

PRESENTED BY:

The SPB College of Business Administration, Udhna , Surat

AND

Robindronath Thakur 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941

Gurudev Tagore , was a Bengali poet, novelist, musician, painter and playwright

Tremendous influence on Bengali literature, culture & Indian literature

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 Knighted by the British Crown in 1915, which he returned after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

The only writer who has written anthems of two countries, India & Bangladesh.Founder of Santiniketan – the Visva Bharati University.Proponent of Indian independence

Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore travelled to more than thirty countries, befriending eminent literary figures like Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, and HG Wells. He met with Albert Einstein and Mussolini.

COMPOSER OF….POEMS 3,000SONGA 2,000VOLUMES OF ESSAY

40

PLAYS 50NOVELS 8NOVELLAS 4

Chokher Bali was directed by Rituparno Ghosh in 2003 and stars Prasenjit as Mahendra, Aishwarya Rai as Binodini and Raima Sen as Ashalata.

Accomplished musicianComposed more than 2000 songs, which constitute a distinctive style of music -Rabindrasangeet.They are part of his novels and stories and have been used in Bengali movies as well

Collection of his songs is known as Gitabitan (garden of songs).The Rabindra Sangeet has influenced the styles of such musicians as sitar maestro Vilayat Khan, and the sarodiyas Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad Ali Khan.

Film "Parineeta's" popular song "Piyu bole" inspired by Tagore's "Phule, phule, doley, doley".SD Burman's "Tere mere milan ki yeh raina" picturized on Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri in the film "Abhimaan" is based on Tagore's "Jodi tare nai chini go sheki".

At age of sixty,

Tagore took up drawing

and painting

A prolific painter and had several exhibitions around the world

He was said to suffer from color blindness as he painted with certain peculiarities in color schemes and aesthetics

THE VEDANTIC SPIRITUALISM

THE BHAKTI POETRY

POETRY OF BAULS

WESTERN LITERATURE

"There is in him the stillness of nature. The poems do not seem to have been produced by storm or by ignition, but seem to show the normal habit of his mind. He is at one with nature, and finds no contradictions. And this is in sharp

sharp contrast with the Western mode, where man must be shown attempting to master nature if we are to have "great drama."

-Ezra Pound (Fortnightly Review, 1 March

1913)

“The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and

and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble….A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and

and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image…”

- WB YEATS (PREFACE TO GITANJALI)

““SONG OFFERINGS”SONG OFFERINGS”A collection of prose translations

made by the author fromthe original Bengali

With an introduction byW. B. YEATS

A collection of 103 poems, Largely translations, by Rabindranath Tagore himself

The translations were undertaken prior to a visit to England in 1912, where the poems were extremely well received.

A slender volume was published in 1913, with a preface by W. B. Yeats.

In the same year, based on a corpus of translations, Rabindranath became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize.

Gitanjali (Gitanjoli) is also the title of an earlier Bengali volume (1910) of 157 mostly devotional songs. The word ‘gitanjoli’ is composed from "git", song, and "anjoli", offering, and thus means - "An offering of songs"

The word for offering, anjoli, has a strong devotional connotation, so the title may also be interpreted as "prayer offering of song"TheEnglish collection is not a translation of poems from the Bengali volume of the same name.

Half the poems (52 out of 103) in the English text were selected from the Bengali volume, others were taken from these works (given with year and number of songs selected for the English text): Gitimallo (1914, 17), Noibeddo (1901, 15), Khea (1906, 11) and some from other works.

The translations were often radical, leaving out or altering large chunks of the poem and in one instance even fusing two separate poems (song 95, which unifies songs 89, 90 of naivedya).

THEME OF GOD AS LOVER AND GOD LIVING WITHIN

Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs.

I shall ever try to keep all untruths out from my thoughts, knowing that thou art that truth which has kindled the light of reason in my mind.

I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.

And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act.

THE THEME OF ONENESS WITH NATURE AND

NATURE AS EMBODIMENT OF

DIVINEINFLUENCE OF ENGLISH

ROMANTICISM

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

THEME OF CREATIVITY AS BHAKTI AND GOD AS

MASTER CREATOR

My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.

My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

THEME OF FREEDOM FROM MATERIAL

BONDAGE

The child who is decked with prince's robes and who has jewelled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step.

In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps himself from the world, and is afraid even to move.

Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keeps one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.

THEME OF FREEDOM FROM EGO

He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name; and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.

THEME OF LOVE FOR NATION AND FREEDOM FROM SLAVERY OF ALL

KINDS

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action

- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,

Let my country awake. 

THE THEME OF DEATH

Death, thy servant, is at my door. He has crossed the unknown sea and brought thy call to my home.

The night is dark and my heart is fearful - yet I will take up the lamp, open my gates and bow to him my welcome. It is thy messenger who stands at my door.

I will worship him placing at his feet the treasure of my heart.

He will go back with his errand done, leaving a dark shadow on my morning; and in my desolate home only my forlorn self will remain as my last offering to thee.