Studies On Rabindranath Tagore (Vol. 1)

Studies on Rabindranath Tagore includes essays which offer illuminating insights into various facets of Tagore’s literary works, mind, and personality. Tagore’s long life of eighty years was marked by ceaseless and torrential flow of creativity manifested in the richness and variety of all kinds of literary forms—dance, drama, music, painting, and original organizational activities. Whatever Tagore touched turned into gold. Touching the kindred points of heaven and earth he was both a man of action and of contemplation, a seer and also a pioneer in cooperative movement, a writer of most profound poems and an author of children’s text-books including books of science, a nationalist and internationalist, a man of royal grandeur like his grandfather, a prince, and an ascetic like his father, a maharshi. He was both a poet and a painter, a dramatist and an actor, a philosopher and a social reformer, an educationist and a humanist. Tagore’s unfailing faith in man and divinity, his concern for women and solicitation for children, his sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden, his philosophical speculations and practical wisdom, his perception of the zeitgeist and the evolution of taste—all find expression in the all-encompassing sweep of his writings in a magnificent synthesis of philosophical profundity and aesthetic luxuriance. Whether seen as a great sentinel or a complete man, the finest exponent of the Bengal Renaissance or the harbinger of a new age, a majestic personality or a deeply scarred individual, it is rewarding to revisit Tagore—a miracle of literary history—in the light of modern criticism.