An artist-seer par excellence
June 2010
The country is busy celebrating the 150th birth year of one of its finest creative geniuses and a towering renaissance man: Rabindranath Tagore.
Beyond compare: Tagore An artist of rare depth and breadth, he was India’s first Nobel Prize winner. Although his creativity ranged across virtually every field from short stories, novels, plays, fine arts and so on, he was first and foremost a poet. His Gitanjali (song offerings) are ecstatic communications to the Higher Power, for Tagore was fundamentally a seer. His books and plays resound with and healthy. a deep compassion and recognition of the poignant human condition, so prone to misery. His novel Gora reflects his remarkable synthesising ability, as he traces the journey of a young man as he moves from the rigid dictates of conventional religion to the all-accepting space of spirituality. Along the way he raises questions as relevant today as it was during his times: what does being Indian really mean? How can we absorb western influences without surrendering our essential selves? As an artist, Tagore perhaps went more than almost any world writer in looking at the world through a primarily spiritual perspective.
Tagore was a great nationalist as well and supported Gandhiji in the freedom movement. Incidentally, it was he who christened him with the name, Mahatma. Tagore, as the world knows, also composed our national anthem. He is also founder of Shantiniketan, where he tried out Upanishadic ideals of education.
Tagore has played as seminal a part in Indian literature as Shakespeare has in English literature. For those of us who missed reading him before, this is an excellent opportunity to acquaint oneself with his profoundly moving and inspiring work.
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