The New Nation - Internet Edition

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

After Pohela Boishakh, 25th Boishakh keeps occupying the Bengali with another greenish aspiration for enlivening Bengali bond among us. This especial day has been bejeweled by the arrival of one great scholar of Bengali literature for which our identity has been uplifted across the world. He is Rabindranath Tagore. Today is his 147th birth anniversary. The day is being observed among all Bengalis with special greeting and celebration.

Tagore was born into a distinguished Bengali family in Kolkata, West Bengal on 25th Boishakh [1861, 7th May]. His father's name was the Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, a well known Hindu reformer and mystic and his mother was Shrimati Sharada Devi. Tagore received his education at home. He was taught in Bengali, with English lessons in the afternoon. He read the Bengali poets since his early age and he began writing poetry himself by the age of eight. Rabindranath Tagore did have a brief spell at St Xavier's Jesuit school, but found the conventional system of education uncongenial. His father wanted him to become a barrister and he was sent to England for this reason.

In England, Tagore was highly impressed and inspired by John Bright W.E. Gladstone's "large-hearted, radical liberalism." In 1879, he enrolled at University College, at London, but was called back by his father to return to India in 1880. By l883 he was married. Tagore's family chose his bride, an almost illiterate girl of ten named Bhabatarini (renamed Mrinalini), whom he married with little ceremony. They were to have four children; the eldest was born when Mrinalini was 13. However, Mrinalini died at the age of 30.

What Rabindranath was doing in literature he also tried to do in music too. While caring for both the traditions, classical and folk, he respected the inviolable sanctity of neither and freely took from each what suited his purpose. In his mother land, however, each change of season, each aspect of Bengali's rich landscape and every undulation of human heart, in sorrow or in joy has found its voice in some song of his. They are sung in religious gatherings no less than in concert halls. Patriots have mounted the gallows with his song on their lips; and young lovers unable to express the depth of their feelings sing his songs and feel the weight of their dumbness relieved. Rabindranath had said, "Whatever fate may be in store in the judgment of the future for my poems, my stories and my plays, I know for certain that the Bengali race must need my songs, they must all sing my songs in every Bengali home, in the fields and by the riverst I feel as if music wells up from within some unconscious depth of my mind, that is why it has certain completeness."

From 1890, Tagore had undertaken the management of his family estates. In 1901 he founded the famous Shantiniketan at Bolepur. This was designed to provide a traditional ashram and Western education. He began with 5 pupils and 5 teachers (three of whom were Christian). His ideals were simplicity of living and the cultivation of beauty.

In 1912, Tagore visited Britain again and his own English translation of Gitanjali was published under William Butler Yates' auspices. A lecture tour of Britain and the USA followed.

In 1913, he was awarded the famous Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 by the Nobel Committee. The Committee pronounced "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, apart of the literature of the West." He used the prize money to improve his school at Shantiniketan.

Rabindranath Tagore's role in the innovation of educational ideas has been eclipsed by his fame as a poet. He was a pioneer in the field of education. For the last forty years of his life he was content to be a schoolmaster in humble rural surroundings, even when he had achieved fame such as no Bengali had known before. He was one of the first, in Bengali Literature, to think out for himself and put in practice principles of education which have now become commonplace of educational theory, if not yet of practice.

If Rabindranath had done nothing else, what he did at Santiniketan and Sriniketan would be sufficient to rank him as one of the subcontinent's greatest nation-builders. With the years, Rabindranath had won the world and the world in turn had won him. He sought his home everywhere in the world and would bring the world to his home. And so the little school for children at Santiniketan became a world university, Visva-Bharati, a centre for Bengali Culture, a seminary for Eastern Studies and a meeting-place of the East and West.

The poet selected for its motto an ancient Sanskrit verse, Yatra visvam bhavatieka nidam, which means, "Where the whole world meets in a single nest." In 1940 a year before he died, he put a letter in Gandhi's hand, "Visva-Bharati is like a vessel which is carrying the cargo of my life's best treasure, and I hope it may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation."

Tagore's 'Our Golden Bengal' became the national anthem of Bangladesh. The song touches all and sundry to be great lovers of motherland: Bangladesh. We pay a due homage to his 147th birth anniversary. We wish many returns of the propitious 25th Boishakh. "When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose touch of the one in the play of the many."

(From Gitanjali).