Fictitious interview of an eminent personality Rabindranath Tagore
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Rabindranath Tagore was India's most famous modern poet and is one of its greatest cultural icons. Born in 1861, Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, which brought him international fame. But while the Western world forgot Tagore soon after the Nobel, his reputation continued to grow in India and in Bangladesh, which was once part of his native state of Bengal.
Tagore was born into a large, unorthodox Hindu Bengali family composed of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and artists—he was the youngest of 13 surviving children. Rabindranath's father, Debendranath, was a religious reformer, and one of the founding members of the Hindu reformist movement the Brahmo Samaj. Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath, prolific across many artistic and intellectual forms: a poet, composer of songs, essayist, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and, later in his life, a painter. He travelled widely and met and corresponded with artists, intellectuals, and political figures such as Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Bertrand Russell, Woodrow Wilson, Benito Mussolini, Albert Einstein, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Gandhi. He established a university with a new educational system in the small town of Santiniketan in West Bengal, which produced such renowned alumni as the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Tagore is best known in Bengal as a poet and a composer of songs—having contributed more than two thousand songs to the Bengali canon—and in India, more broadly, as a nationalist figure; he wrote both the Indian and the Bangladeshi national anthems. He died in 1941.
I spoke to Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and musician, in London. Chaudhuri's book On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today was published by Peter Lang in 2013.
—Prithvi Varatharajan
rabindranath tagore introduction