Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941): Author Profile
A monumental figure of this era, he became Asia's first Nobel laureate in Literature in 1913. It is truly difficult to summarize his vast career in a few sentences, and readers are encouraged to look at the Wikipedia entry for a detailed biography.
Tagore was the son of Debendranath Tagore, mentioned above as a co-founder of the Brahmo Samaj, a key figure in the Bengal Renaissance. Tagore had the benefit of several highly accomplished and ambitious siblings, including one brother who was a philosopher and poet, another who was a musician and playwright,another who was the first Indian appointed to the elite (and previously all-English) Indian Civil Service, and a sister who was herself a novelist.
Tagore's early education was largely informal; he did not do a conventional secondary school or college/university degree. Tagore did study law briefly in England before dropping out, to engage in independent study of English literature. He began writing in earnest in the 1880s and 90s, publishing many short stories and books of poems during that fertile period (sometimes referred to as the "Sadhana" period, after the magazine that was published by the Tagore family). His biographers Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson identify the 1890 collection of poetry he published just after returning from England, Manasi (or Manashi) as being an especially important breakthrough for his own career and for Bengali-language literature.
Tagore was born and raised in Calcutta (Kolkata), but in the 1890s he was living primarily at his family's country estate at Shelaidaha (then usually called "Shelidah" in English), in what is today Bangladesh. There, he performed landlord duties on his family's behalf, receiving payments from tenants, addressing complaints, and managing the estate. He is described by his biographers Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson as finding the experience of country life and ordinary people as an eye-opening experience, and the decade he spent living and working at Shelaidaha as one of the most fruitful ones for him of his entire career. Not surprisingly, many of the stories he wrote during this period play on what might be described as "country vs. city" themes, exploring the gap between urban and rural life, and the clash between traditional Bengali peasant life and modern, colonial India. Also, even as he was outside of Calcutta while writing most of these stories, many of the stories do engage with city living in Calcutta in interesting ways. Others are written from the point of view of Landlords (Zemindars) like himself.
After 1901, Tagore left Shelaidaha and began developing his school at Shantiniketan. He also shifted towards novel-writing, with books like Nastanirh (1901) and Chokher Bali (1902). In the 1910s, he came to the attention of the English-speaking world as translations of many of his important works began appearing.
- We are collecting all of the Tagore short stories that we can find under a single 'path', with bibliographic information here.
- In 1912, the English translation of Gitanjali piqued the interest of W.B. Yeats, who wrote a gushing preface; the critical acclaim led to Tagore receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
- We have versions of Gora and The Home and the World in English translation on this site, along with Tagore's influential lectures on the problem of nationalism and militarism here.
- We have also included a book of autobiographical essays, published as My Reminiscences, here.
- A volume of translated Tagore short stories, called Stories from Tagore, was published by Macmillan in 1918. An edition of the stories is here; our detailed summaries are here.
- Another volume of translated stories also appeared in 1918, Mashi and Other Stories. Our summaries of those stories, with generous inclusion of relevant quoted passages, can be found here.
- Tagore's first collection of short stories translated into English in the West was The Hungry Stones and Other Stories (1916).
- Another volume of translated stories appeared in 1925 as Broken Ties and Other Stories (1925). See our detailed summaries of the stories in this collection here.
- There was also a volume of Tagore short stories published in translation in Calcutta in 1913, Glimpses of Bengal Life.
- The English translation of Gitanjali, with a preface by W.B. Yeats, is here.