A Birthday Gift

My birthday was Wednesday, July 29th, and my friends Jeff and Lizzie gave me this beautiful book of short "song offerings" by Rabindranath Tagore.

Tagore was a poet, novelist, playwright, musician and painter. He became Asia's first Nobel Laureate when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Tagore was born in Calcutta on May 7, 1861, the son of the well-known philosopher and religious reformer Devendranath Tagore. He was sent to England to study law, but returned as he found it uninteresting. He began writing poetry early in life, and in 1890 he published Manasi, a collection that demonstrated his genius. It contains his first social and political poems. Most of his life was spent in his native Bengal, and much of his writing dealt with the land and its people.

Tagore produced a massive amount of literature in the Bengali language. His works include numerous novels, short stories, collection of songs, dance-drama, political and personal essays. Some prominent examples are Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World). He wrote of the poverty and backwardness of the people in a collection of stories, Galpaguchchha (1912). Other writings include Sonar Tari, Chitra, Kalpana and Naivedya - all poetry collections. His plays include Chitrangada and Malini.

Tagore strongly protested against the British Raj and gave his support to the Indian Independence Movement and Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore's life was tragic - he lost virtually his entire family and was devastated to witness Bengal's decline - but his life's work endured, in the form of his poetry and the institution he founded, Vishwa-Bharati University.

Tagore was knighted in 1915 but he returned the title in 1919 to protest the Jaliawala Bagh Massacre. He was an internationalist in spirit, stressing the need for a dialogue between the world's diverse cultures. Much of the last 25 years of his life was spent in lecture tours abroad. Yet in the same period he produced 21 collections of writings. He died in Calcutta on August 7, 1941.

Gitanjali is a masterpiece which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. These immensely touching verses were written in Bengali in 1910, after he lost his father, wife, second daughter and youngest son. Gitanjali's canvas encompasses life's experiences with an innocence and simplicity that one does not find elsewhere in literature.

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 its name; and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.

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