|
|
Rabindranath Tagore is India's greatest modern poet. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, a collection of poems where he put his thoughts with imagination, deeply religious emotion and love of nature and his homeland. He was a great educator and philosopher as well as a major dramatist and novelist. His poems captured the heart of his native Bengal, and all of India; and when he traveled to the West, his acceptance as one of the finest writers of the world was immediate and overwhelming. Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Romain Rolland recognized him as their colleague in the shaping of literature in the modern world. He was a friend of Einstein and was admired for his ingenuity. Tagore was born in Bengal in May, 1861 in a high class, zamindar family. His father Debendranath Tagore was a prominent philosopher at that time. As a child, he lived a quiet protected life and was even educated at home. He began to write poetry as a child; his first book appeared when he was just 17 years old. After a brief stay in England to study law, he returned to Bengal, where he rapidly became the most important and popular author of the colonial era, writing poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. He composed several hundreds popular songs, which became later to be called as Rabindra-Sangeet. In 1888, at the age of 27, he was asked by his father to take charge of the estate in Shilaidaho, Kushtia, Bangladesh. He not only fell in love with the nature and the river Padma in Shilaidaho, but lived there permanently from 1891-1901 and wrote many of his great writings.
|
