Poetry:
Saisab sangit, 1881
Sandhya sangit, 1882
Prabhat sangit, 1883
Chabi o gan, 1884
Kari o komal, 1887
Mānashi, 1890
Sonār tari, 1893 (The Golden Boat, 1932)
Chitra, 1895
Chaitāli, 1896
Kanika, 1899
Kalpana, 1900
Katha o kahini, 1900
Kshanikā, 1900
Naivedya, 1901
Sisu, 1903 (The Crescent Moon, 1913)
Smaran, 1903
Utsarga, 1904
Kheya, 1905
Gitānjali, 1910 (Gitanjali: Song Offerings, 1912)
The Gardener, 1913
Gitali, 1914
Balāka, 1916 (A Flight of Swans, 1955, 1962)
Fruit-Gathering, 1916
Gan, 1916
Stray Birds, 1917
Love’s Gift, and Crossing, 1918
Palataka, 1918 (The Fugitive, 1921)
Lipika, 1922
Poems, 1922
Sisu bholanath, 1922
The Curse at Farewell, 1924
Prabahini, 1925
Purabi, 1925
Fifteen Poems, 1928
Fireflies, 1928
Mahuya, 1929
Sheaves: Poems and Songs, 1929
Banabani, 1931
The Child, 1931
Parisesh, 1932
Punascha, 1932
Vicitrita, 1933
Bithika, 1935
Ses saptak, 1935
Patraput, 1936, 1938 (English translation, 1969)
Syamali, 1936 (English translation, 1955)
Khapchada, 1937
Prantik, 1941
Janmadine, 1941
Poems, 1942
Sesh lekha, 1942
The Herald of Spring, 1957
Wings of Death: The Last Poems, 1960
Devouring Love, 1961
A Bunch of Poems, 1966
One Hundred and One, 1967
Last Poems, 1973
Later Poems, 1974
Long Fiction:
Bau-Thakuranir Hat, 1883
Rajarshi, 1887
Chokher bāli, 1902 (Binodini, 1959)
Naukadubi, 1906 (The Wreck, 1921)
Gora, 1910 (English translation, 1924)
Chaturanga, 1916 (English translation, 1963)
Ghare bāire, 1916 (Home and the World, 1919)
Jogajog, 1929
Shesher kabita, 1929 (Farewell, My Friend, 1946)
Dui bon, 1933 (Two Sisters, 1945)
Short Fiction:
The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories, 1916
Mashi, and Other Stories, 1918
Stories from Tagore, 1918
Broken Ties, and Other Stories, 1925
The Runaway, and Other Stories, 1959
Drama:
Prakritir Pratishodh, pb. 1884 (verse play; Sanyasi: Or, The Ascetic, 1917)
Rājā o Rāni, pb. 1889 (verse play; The King and the Queen, 1918)
Chitrāngadā, pb. 1892 (verse play; Chitra, 1913)
Prayaschitta, pr. 1909 (based on his novel Bau-Thakuranir Hat)
Rājā, pb. 1910 (The King of the Dark Chamber, 1914)
Dākghar, pb. 1912 (The Post Office, 1914)
Phālguni, pb. 1916 (The Cycle of Spring, 1917)
Arupratan, pb. 1920 (revision of his play Rājā)
Muktadhārā, pb. 1922 (English translation, 1950)
Raktakarabi, pb. 1924 (Red Oleanders, 1925)
Chirakumār Sabhā, pb. 1926
Natir Pujā, pb. 1926 (Worship of the Dancing Girl, 1950)
Paritrān, pb. 1929 (revision of Prayaschitta)
Tapati, pb. 1929 (revision of Rājā o Rāni)
Chandālikā, pr., pb. 1933 (English translation, 1938)
Bānsari, pb. 1933
Nrityanatya Chitrāngadā, pb. 1936 (revision of his play Chitrāngadā)
Nritya-natya Chandālikā, pb. 1938 (revision of his play Chandālikā)
Three Plays, pb. 1950
Nonfiction:
Jivansmriti, 1912 (My Reminiscences, 1917)
Sadhana, 1913
Personality, 1917
Nationalism, 1919
Greater India, 1921
Glimpses of Bengal, 1921
Creative Unity, 1922
Talks in China, 1925
Lectures and Addresses, 1928
Letters to a Friend, 1928
The Religion of Man, 1931
Mahatmaji and the Depressed Humanity, 1932
Man, 1937
Chhelebela, 1940 (My Boyhood Days, 1940)
Sabhyatar Samkat, 1941 (Crisis in Civilization, 1941)
Towards Universal Man, 1961
Miscellaneous:
Collected Poems and Plays, 1936
A Tagore Reader, 1961
Rabindranath Tagore (tah-GOR), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, is considered the founder and shaper of modern Bengali-language literature. He was the fourteenth of fifteen children born to Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. His mother, Sarada, died when he was thirteen years old. His name Rabin means Lord of the Sun. Tagore’s ancestors came from what is now Bangladesh to live in Calcutta, located in the eastern region of India known as Bengal. His immediate family was wealthy by Indian standards of the time; his grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, was referred to as a prince.
Tagore was a precocious child who was educated primarily at home by tutors. He wrote his first poem at the age of eight. The household of his family in Calcutta was like a small city, populated by immediate family, in-laws, servants of all sorts, and tutors. The family also owned vast agricultural estates in eastern Bengal, and they would prove to be a big influence on both the topics and the themes of much of his work. Tagore married Mrinalini Devi when she was eleven years old and he was twenty-two.
He first traveled to the family’s rural estates, an area called Santiniketan, and North India, including the Himalayas, with his father in 1873. This trip was shortly after the investiture of the sacred thread, a Hindu religious rite-of-passage ceremony. This trip and his numerous returns to the area are much in evidence in his writings, particularly in his short stories, sensitive tales of the simple village life he observed, which was so different from the frenetic pace of the Tagore household and life in Calcutta. “The Postmaster” is a classic representation.
Tagore is first and foremost a lyric poet; in his lifetime he published fifty-four collections of Bengali poems, and six more were published posthumously. Gitānjali was the collection primarily responsible for his getting the attention that led to the Nobel Prize. Tagore began writing short stories in the 1890’s and eventually published more than ninety of them. He wrote nearly fifty dramas, though only a fraction of them were translated into English. During the period 1883 to 1934, he published ten Bengali novels, one-third of them translated into English. Tagore’s nonfiction prose, including songs, essays, lectures, sermons, and instructional writings, runs into the thousands of pages, but little of it has been translated. During his lifetime, Tagore translated many of his own works into English. His song “Our Golden Bengal” became the national anthem of Bangladesh. Near the end of his life, he became a prolific painter, producing twenty-five hundred pieces.
In addition to his well-to-do, intense family life and his ability to travel, other influences on Tagore were British colonialism, begun in India in 1690 with the establishment of the East India Company, and his family’s adherence to the Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. Because of colonialism, he was exposed early in life to the literature of William Shakespeare, John Milton, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, who became his particular favorites, as well as the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Other literary influences (Tagore read them in their original languages) included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Guy de Maupassant. Tagore attended University College, London for one year. He was knighted by the British in 1915 but resigned his knighthood in 1919, after the Amritsar Massacre, when the British army slaughtered hundreds of innocent Indian men, women, and children.
Vaishnavism emphasizes worship of Vishnu, the Preserver. It puts no restrictions on caste, class, or gender, and central to its tenets is pursuit of the enigmatic, personal relationship between the Creator and humans. A major component of the faith is worshiping through songs. Themes that weave throughout Tagore’s works, regardless of genre, have to do with the remoteness of nature and the human dimension, the world beyond India and attempts to coalesce or synthesize opposites, including Eastern and Western cultures or a search for the universal.
Throughout his life, beginning with his first trip to London in 1879, Tagore traveled widely and frequently. In addition to trips to Europe, he visited the United States several times as well as Japan and China. His travels brought him friendships and contacts with famous contemporary Western writers such as William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound.
Physically, Tagore resembled the West’s idea of what a poet and holy man from the East should look like. His appearance, in the flowing robes of traditional Bengali dress, with long hair and beard, and what some describe as the romantic quality of his writing, both helped and hurt the initial acceptance of and the legacy of his work.