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.
- 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.
- We are collecting all of the Tagore short stories that we can find under a single 'path', with bibliographic information 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 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.