Rabindranath Tagore
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(1861-1941) Indian poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate. He was born in Calcutta, into a wealthy family, the son of the philosopher Debendranath Tagore. He began to write poetry as a child; his first book appeared when he was 17 years old. After a brief stay in England to study law in 1878, he returned to India, where he rapidly became the most important and popular author of the colonial era, writing poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. He composed several hundred popular songs and in 1929 also began painting. At 1928 15 Feb. met with Sri Aurobindo. At one of his poem Tagore wrote:
“Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee!
O friend, my country’s friend,
O voice incarnate free,
Of India’s soul...”
Sri Aurobindo told to his disciple, “...Tagore introduced a new element of feeling and imagination in Bengali poetry; as he is a genius his poetry is beautiful but much of what is written under Tagore’s influence is wishy-washy stuff, that is to say, it is poetry without any backbone. There is no sound experience behind it. Even in Tagore you find that his idea is diffused into seventy or eighty lines yet it does not come out clearly, though the idea is there.”
Among a number of drawings done by the Mother in Japan we find a pencil sketch of Rabindranath Tagore dated Tokyo, 11 June 1916. Tagore had come to Tokyo a week earlier, a few days after his arrival in Japan for a three-month visit which was his first to this country. On the afternoon of the 11 th, the date of the drawing, he delivered a speech at the Imperial University in Tokyo, “The Message of India to Japan”. The Mother’s pencil drawing of the poet was later rendered in ink, of which there are two versions. The Mother met Tagore again in 1919 in Kyoto. She is seen with him in a group photograph taken there. Mother, “I was with Tagore in Japan. He claimed to have reached the peace of Nirvana and he was beaming with joy. I thought: ”here is a man who claims to have got the peace and reached Nirvana. Let us see.“ I asked him to meditate with me and I followed him in meditation and found that he had reached just behind the vital and the mind: a sort of emptiness. I waited and waited to see if he would go beyond; I wanted to follow him. But he would not go further. I found that he was supremely satisfied and believed that he had entered Nirvana.”
Photos
Bibliography
In English
Tagore, Rabindranath
Salutation to Sri Aurobindo
• Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1949.— 9 p. 22 cm.— NOTES: Bengali, English, and Hindi. (Number at Russian State Library IN 61-27/126)