Jorasanko and the Estates
Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in Calcutta, the youngest of many children in the Jorasanko mansion of a wealthy Bengali family at the center of the Brahmo reform movement. The house was a permanent salon of music, theater, painting, and religious argument. He hated formal school and was largely taught at home, and when he was sent to England to study law at seventeen he left without a degree. His education was reading, conversation, and the long apprenticeship of writing poems in Bengali from childhood.
In the 1890s his father sent him to manage the family estates in East Bengal, along the rivers of what is now Bangladesh. Living on a houseboat among tenant farmers changed his writing permanently. He saw poverty and rural isolation at close range, wrote some of his finest short stories about village life, and began developing ideas about cooperative credit, schooling, and self-reliant villages that he would later try to put into practice rather than merely publish.
The Nobel and Its Distortions
In 1912 he prepared English versions of his devotional poems, and the slim volume Gitanjali, with an admiring introduction by W. B. Yeats, made him a sensation in London. The Nobel Prize followed in 1913, the first awarded to a writer from Asia. The English text he offered was not a straight translation. He recast rhymed Bengali lyrics as free prose poems in a deliberately archaic register, which is why readers who know both languages often say the Nobel was given for a book that only half exists.
Western enthusiasm cooled within a decade, and Tagore was reduced in Europe to a sage in robes, a role he found both useful and false. In Bengal he remained something else entirely: a novelist, playwright, essayist, painter after the age of sixty, and composer of more than two thousand songs, a body of work Bengalis treat as a national inheritance. He wrote the words and music of India's national anthem and of Bangladesh's, an unusual double that reflects how completely he crossed the borders drawn later.
Refusals
He was knighted in 1915. After British troops fired on an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919, killing hundreds, he wrote to the viceroy renouncing the honor and asking to stand with his countrymen in their humiliation. It was one of the most conspicuous acts of protest by any Indian public figure of the time. He also argued publicly with Gandhi, whom he admired, over the burning of foreign cloth, the boycott of schools, and the spinning wheel, which he thought a poor substitute for education.
His deeper quarrel was with nationalism itself, which he described in lectures in Japan and the United States as an organized machinery of power that would set peoples devouring one another. Audiences that wanted a mystic were annoyed. He built his answer at Santiniketan, the school he founded in 1901 and expanded into Visva-Bharati University in 1921, meant to join Indian learning with the wider world. He died in 1941, six years before the partition he had warned against.
