“If I were asked who was the greatest poet India has produced, including the greatest of ancient India, Kalidasa, my firm answer would be: ‘Tagore’ … It is tragic, however, that his greatness as a poet will never be generally acknowledged, like the greatness of Goethe, Hugo or Tolstoy.”[1] Read more
Australia is one of the two continents which Rabindranath Tagore did not visit. When the Nobel Committee announced the award for literature in 1913 on 13 November, the news spread across the world, including the Australian continent. Many Australian newspapers published articles on the Bengali poet. Afterwards, Tagore was repeatedly invited to visit Australia, yet he never managed to go. The last attempt that he made to go there was when Rabindranath was seventy-six years old. Read more
The idea and endeavour of Visva-Bharati thrived in its first two decades, the 1920s and the 1930s. Santiniketan became a hive of diverse communities. Rabindranath’s English biographer Edward Thompson, who had been visiting Santiniketan from 1913, wrote: Read more
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 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