Rabindranath Tagore

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A house full of genius

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the sprawling family mansion at Jorasanko in north Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children of Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and leader of the Brahmo Samaj, and grandson of the entrepreneur Dwarkanath Tagore, a central figure of the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance.<sup>14</sup> The household was an extraordinary engine of culture: his siblings and cousins were poets, musicians, playwrights and painters, and the boy grew up steeped in literature, music and ideas.

He hated conventional school. The rote learning of the colonial classroom oppressed him, and much of his real education happened at home, through tutors, books, and the company of brilliant relatives. He wrote his first verses as a child and was a published poet while still in his teens.<sup>5</sup> In the late 1870s his family sent him to England to study law at University College London, but the law never took. He returned to India without a degree, having decided that his life belonged to literature, music and education rather than a profession.<sup>34</sup> It was a refusal of the cage that would echo through everything he later built.

The river years

In the 1890s Tagore was sent to manage the family's estates in East Bengal, much of his time spent on a houseboat drifting along the Padma river near Shelaidaha. Away from the city, among the villages and the wide Bengali sky, his writing deepened and broadened. He came to know rural Bengal intimately, and the encounter transformed him.

This was the period in which he effectively created the modern Bengali short story, and in which his prose and verse turned from the ornate toward the living, colloquial language of ordinary people.<sup>1</sup> It is worth pausing on the conditions of this work: long, quiet, unhurried hours, far from distraction, the writer alone with the page and the river. The deepest writing has always wanted something like that, and Tagore had found it.

Gitanjali and the world's attention

In 1910 Tagore published, in Bengali, a slim volume of devotional poems called Gitanjali, or Song Offerings. Two years later, recovering from illness and travelling to England, he translated a selection of them into spare English prose. The manuscript passed into the hands of the painter William Rothenstein and then to the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who was electrified. These prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, Yeats wrote in his introduction to the English Gitanjali, published by the India Society in London in 1912.<sup>4</sup>

The most famous poem in the collection, number 35, is a prayer for a nation and a mind set free. Its words have outlived their moment and become something close to scripture in India.

In November 1913 the Swedish Academy awarded Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature, because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.<sup>3</sup> He was the first non-European, and the first Asian, to win it.<sup>12</sup> Almost overnight he became one of the most famous writers alive, his flowing robes and prophet-like presence as celebrated in the West as his verse. There is a quiet thread worth noticing here: the prize honoured words a single human being had set down, by hand, in his own voice. Tagore treated authorship as something near to sacred, and the world agreed.

The poet who returned a knighthood

In 1915 King George V conferred a knighthood on Tagore.<sup>1</sup> Four years later he gave it back. On 13 April 1919, British troops under Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing hundreds. The massacre, and the colonial government's cold response to it, shook the conscience of the country.

On 30 May 1919 Tagore wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, asking to be relieved of his title. The letter is one of the great documents of moral protest.

The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I, for my part, wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.

Tagore to Lord Chelmsford, 30 May 1919

He asked the Viceroy plainly to relieve me of my title of Knighthood.<sup>8</sup> It was, on the vast canvas of the freedom struggle, a single gesture. But it was the gesture of the most celebrated Indian alive, and it rang out far beyond Bengal.

A school under the trees

The work closest to Tagore's heart was not a poem but a place. In 1901, on land at Santiniketan in rural West Bengal that his father had named decades earlier, he founded an experimental school with only five pupils.<sup>6</sup> He built it as the opposite of the schoolrooms he had hated as a boy: classes held in the open air under the trees, a close and unforced bond between teacher and student, learning drawn from curiosity and a kinship with nature rather than fear and rote.<sup>6</sup>

In 1921 the school grew into Visva-Bharati, a world university whose guiding idea was the unity of humanity, a place, in Tagore's words, where the world makes its home in a single nest.<sup>5</sup> Its architecture and spirit deliberately turned away from both British colonial styles and European modernism toward something rooted in Asian and Indian traditions. In 2023, UNESCO inscribed Santiniketan on its World Heritage List, describing it as a place built on a vision of the unity of humanity transcending religious and cultural boundaries.<sup>5</sup> Strip away a century and the impulse is recognisable: to protect the conditions in which a mind can do its deepest work, quiet, unhurried, and free of the noise that crushes attention.

Songs for two nations

Tagore wrote more than two thousand songs, a body of work so distinctive it forms its own genre, Rabindra Sangeet, woven into the fabric of Bengali life on both sides of the India and Bangladesh border.<sup>1</sup> Two of those songs became the anthems of nations.

He wrote India's national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, in Bengali in December 1911; it was adopted by the new republic in 1950.<sup>7</sup> He had already written Amar Sonar Bangla, My Golden Bengal, in 1905 in response to the British partition of Bengal, setting it to a folk melody he loved; it became the national anthem of Bangladesh in 1971.<sup>7</sup> Tagore holds the singular distinction of having authored the anthems of two countries, and there is a third thread besides: Sri Lanka's anthem, Sri Lanka Matha, was written by Ananda Samarakoon, a student of Tagore's at Santiniketan, in a style learned at the poet's feet.<sup>7</sup> Few writers in history have given so many people the words they sing for their country.

The world's poet

After 1912 Tagore spent long stretches abroad, lecturing and reading across Europe, the Americas and East Asia, and becoming an eloquent voice for Indian independence and against the narrowing of the human spirit by nationalism.<sup>1</sup> On 14 July 1930, at Albert Einstein's house near Berlin, the poet and the physicist held one of the most quoted conversations of the century, on the nature of reality. Einstein held that the world exists independently of us; Tagore argued the opposite.

The world is a human world, the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man.

Tagore, in conversation with Einstein, 1930

The dialogue was published the following year and folded into The Religion of Man, drawn from the Hibbert Lectures Tagore delivered at Oxford in 1930.<sup>910</sup> His friendship with Mahatma Gandhi was deeper and more complicated still. As early as 1915 Tagore was addressing Gandhi as Mahatma, the great soul, while Gandhi called Tagore Gurudev, revered teacher.<sup>11</sup> The two men disagreed, often and publicly, on nationalism, on the spinning wheel, and most sharply when Gandhi called the 1934 Bihar earthquake a divine punishment for the sin of untouchability and Tagore rejected the claim as unscientific. Yet each defended the other's right to differ, and their bond never broke.<sup>11</sup> It is a model of disagreeing well that feels rarer now than it should.

The West, having lionised him, later cooled; outside Bengal his elegant prose and magical poetry are still too little read. In Bengal, and across the subcontinent, his light has never dimmed.

Painting in the twilight

Then, in his sixties, Tagore reinvented himself once more. His painting was born on the page itself. Around 1924, while working on the manuscript of his poetry collection Purabi, he began turning his crossings-out and corrections into little rhythmic doodles, and the doodles slowly became art.<sup>12</sup> Largely self-taught, free of academic rules, he produced a startling, modern body of work: fantastic animals, brooding faces, dreamlike forms drawn in quick, bold lines.

The Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo, who nursed him through an illness in Buenos Aires, was the first to take his art seriously, and helped arrange its debut. In May 1930 his paintings were shown publicly for the first time in Paris, at the Galerie Pigalle, and the exhibition travelled on across Europe.<sup>12</sup> In barely a decade he made more than two thousand five hundred works, well over a thousand of which are preserved at Santiniketan.<sup>12</sup> That a man who could already claim to be his country's greatest poet, composer and educator should, past sixty, become one of its most original modern painters tells you most of what you need to know about him. The page was never the end of his creativity. It was the beginning.

Why a writing device carries his name

Names are promises, so it is worth being honest about why a modern writing tool was given his.

Tagore wrote by hand, for decades, in long undistracted hours, and out of that discipline came poems, songs, novels, plays, essays, and finally paintings that grew straight off the manuscript page. He built Santiniketan to defend the conditions in which a mind can think: quiet, unhurried, close to nature, free of the noise that fragments attention. He believed, as Gitanjali puts it, in a mind without fear and in the clear stream of reason. And he treated the act of a human being setting true words on a page as something close to sacred.

A device cannot match the man, and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. What it can do is honour the things he cared about: a calm, single-purpose space for writing, stripped of the feeds and notifications that pull a mind in a hundred directions, where the work and the writer are what matter. That is the whole idea behind the writing device that bears his name. It borrows the name of Rabindranath Tagore with equal parts pride and humility, in the hope of being, in some small way, worthy of it.

In his spirit

A writing device named for a writer.

Tagore is a distraction-free writing device built for deep, undistracted work, in the spirit of the poet whose name it carries. Reservations are open now, with a $10 fully refundable deposit.

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