He debated the deepest nature of reality with Einstein. He was championed by Yeats and Pound to become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath — a writer and a painter, a philosopher and a musician, and a social innovator — but much of his poetry and prose is virtually untranslatable (or inaccessibly translated) for modern minds. We pull back the “dusty veils” that have hidden his memory from history.
Equipped with magnificent physique and immense energy, with an active mind and a most fertile imagination, he remained to the end of his long life, even when his body began to fail him, sensitive to new ideas and to every form of natural beauty. His reaction to the atmosphere immediately around him was strangely intuitive. From adolescence on he poured forth a-never-failing stream of artistic creation in poems, dramas, novels and essays; in music, in song, with music and words to match one another, and finally in pictures. In defiance of contemporary custom he used in his writing the common idiom and not the classical Bengali of the literati, as Dante had done before him in Italy and Chaucer in England: so that he was readily appreciated by all to whom Bengali was a mother tongue. In later years he wrote and lectured in English, but only when he felt he had so to do in order to reach an audience beyond the confines of Bengal. In producing with the boys, girls and staff of his school his own musical dramas and plays he habitually acted one of the principal roles, and, when he hired a theater in Calcutta, he broke all the ancient traditions about not permitting girls of good and respected families ever to appear in public on the stage whether to sing, dance or act.
It's 25th Boishakh today in Bengali Calendar to mark a red letter day in world history.
What a beautiful bold and thought provoking writing.
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