Rabindranath Tagore was a poet and writer who also has made his mark in the realm of music and painting. He was born in Calcutta on May 6th 1861 in the family mansion at Jorasanko. This location is the present site of Rabindra Bharati University, Jorasanko Campus. His well-to-do brahmin family also owned a large estate in rural Bengal. Tagore was educated at several different schools in Calcutta including the Oriental Seminary, the Normal School the Bengal Academy and St. Xavier's School. Most accounts of his schooling say he didn't take to formalized education and probably learned more from the private tutors who came to his home.
Shantiniketan (Abode of Peace)
As a student he was ordinary enough but did exhibit a taste for poetry. In 1873 his father took him to Shantiniketan, a small village a little over a hundred kilometres north-west. His father had bought some land that he intended to use as a religious retreat. Rabindranath grew up with a deep attachment to rural Bengal and a disdain for institutionalized education. Between 1878 and 1880 he studied law at University College in London but decided to forsake that life for the one of a writer and poet. As the youngest of fourteen children he received intellectual stimulation from his family. His elder brother Jyotindranath was a writer, playwright, scholar and musician.
Tagore on Colonial Education
Tagore never completed a university degree though late in life Oxford University awarded him an Honourary Doctor of Letters in absentia (1940). He expressed his dislike for contemporary schooling in a speech he gave on the eve of the opening of his Vishva Bharati University.
"I recall it, the classroom, gaping each morning like a big mouth, its bare walls, its wooden benches, its wooden desks at which the teacher stood giving his lesson like a phonograph. I still know it by heart, and can hear it, the repetition of the same, which had neither beauty of melody nor rhythm, which every morning we chanted in chorus on the wooden verandah of the school before entering class. It spoke of many good things no doubt, that it was necessary to be wise, not to steal, nor borrow. But it was, nevertheless a bad beginning to the day."
Elsewhere he writes:
"We had to sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons were pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers."
Despite Tagore's critique, little has changed. Most Indian students face an outmoded nineteenth century colonial school system.
Rabindranath Tagore married in 1883 and fathered five children. In the 1890's he lived in Sheaildaha, East Bengal where the family had a large estate. He was again infatuated by village culture with its songs, stories and battle for survival. This was also one of "the most productive periods of his literary life." In 1901 he took his family to Shantiniketan where he set up a school based on his ideals of the open-classroom. Here he also continued his prolific writing career.
Tagore and Gandhi
The politics of the era caught his concern whereby he actively participated in the 1905 protests against the partition of Bengal. He advocated non-violence and noncooperation but concerned with the rising violence between Hindus and Muslims chose to leave politics. Bengalis have suggested that Tagore's views on non-violence influenced Mahatma Gandhi and the struggle for Indian Independence.
Gitanjali
The best known of Tagore's works are his collection of poems found in Gitanjali (1912) for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the following year. With his newly acquired recognition he travelled widely lecturing in the U.S., Canada, England, Ceylon, China, Persia, South America, and Continental Europe.
The man whom the world knew only briefly became a legend in his native Bengal. He was seen to exemplify the flowering of Bengali culture that continues to blossom with the talents of musician Ravi Shankar and film director Satyajit Ray. Tagore became an icon in the pantheon of prominant Bengali cultural figures. Even sixty five years after his death, his ideas and fame continue to influence the social and cultural life of this corner of the world.
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