The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies

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Rabindranath Tagore painting

Rabindranath Tagore: A Painter

Rabindranath painted mostly by instinct. He never liked to learn conventionally, by practice. This was even more apparent in the last years of his life when he became a prolific painter. He once fell very ill in 1937 and slipped into a coma. At the time his passion for painting was such that the first thing he did on regaining consciousness was to paint a landscape. He himself explained why painting was important to him as an altogether separate language of articulation. He wrote: Read more

Rabindranath Tagore Nobel Prize

Travelling the World for Visva-Bharati

Rabindranath travelled almost incessantly. He went several times to England, to Continental Europe, to the United States of America, to Japan, to Ceylon, to Egypt, to China, to Burma, to Argentina, to Russia, and to the countries of South East Asia. Explaining his migratory instinct he wrote to his younger daughter Mira: Read more

Sriniketan

Sriniketan: An Institute of Rural Reconstruction

The final experiments at Visva-Bharati took form in 1922 with the establishment of an institute of rural reconstruction named Sriniketan, abode of prosperity. Rabindranath insisted from the outset that an Indian education would be incomplete without a relationship with the village as the majority of Indians lived in the villages, and without inculcating a moral responsibility for their survival among the educated classes in India. Read more

Visva-Bharati international university

Establishing Visva-Bharati International University in 1921

In 1918 Rabindranath began preparations to add ‘A Centre of Indian Culture’ to the Santiniketan school for the coordinated study of the various religious cultures that flowed into India’s history: Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, Sikh, Zoroastrian and Christian. Arrangements were made to study these contributions through the disciplines of philosophy, literature, art, music and dance. Read more

Tagore and Shantiniketan

Founding his Santiniketan School in 1901

Rabindranath turned his full attention to the Santiniketan school after withdrawing from the Swadeshi Movement of 1904-1905 which he had joined with great patriotic fervour. Till then he held his faith in the traditional Hindu Samaj but came in for a rude shock when he realized that, true to orthodoxy, the Hindu Samaj would not take the Muslims into its fold. He gave powerful expression to his disillusionment in the novel Gora while writing and serializing it during the years 1907-1909.  Read more