Rabindranath Tagore - Poet/Writer/Spiritual influence - Nobel Prize in Literature, Hinduism

Tagore brought the love of God and
the Love of fellowmen and the Love
of the Nation into one with his poetry...
This was critical in leading India to a
relatively peaceful liberation.

A sampple of his poems:
Gitanjali 35
Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore was born
Robindronath Thakur, 1861-1941
and also known as Gurudev,
Kabiguru, and Biswakabi, was a Bengali polymath,
poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent.

He reshaped Bengali literature and
music, as well as Indian art with
Contextual Modernism
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Author of the "profoundly sensitive,
fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali,
he became in 1913 the first non-European
to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tagore's poetic songs were viewed
as spiritual and mercurial; however,
his "elegant prose and magical poetry"
remain largely unknown outside Bengal.

A Brhamo from Calcutta with ancestral
gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote
poetry as an eight-year-old. At the age
of sixteen, he released his first
substantial poems under the pseudonym
Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were
seized upon by literary authorities
as long-lost classics.

Tagore modernized Bengali art by
spurning rigid classical forms and
resisting linguistic strictures. His
novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas,
and essays spoke to topics political
and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings),
Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire
(The Home and the World) are his
best-known works, and his verse,
short stories, and novels were
acclaimed—or panned—for their
lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism,
and unnatural contemplation. His
compositions were chosen by two
nations as national anthems: India's
Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's
Amar Shonar Bangla. The Sri Lankan
national anthem was
inspired by his work.

Tagore despised rote classroom
schooling: in "The Parrot's Training",
a bird is caged and force-fed
textbook pages—to death.

He was awarded a knighthood by
King George V in the 1915 Birthday
Honours, but Tagore renounced it
after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Gandhi’s stature was sky-high, as were
nationalist passions, when Rabindranath
Tagore, the most celebrated poet
of his time, wrote a scathing piece in
Modern Review, a Calcutta-based
magazine of great repute, titled
The Cult of the Charkha.

Ref: https://www.news18.com/news/india/greatest-indian-debate-mahatma-gandhi-and-rabindranath-tagore-on-nationalism-1533331.html

Next we quote an interesting and
deep contribution by Tagore where
he critizes 'professional' politicians...
It is deep, as even today and forever
we are all victimized by such superficial
characters governing us!

1 The article criticized not just the
Non-Cooperation Movement, the
Charkha, but the ideas of patriotism
and nationalism as well, which Gandhi
stood up for. “As is livelihood for the
individual, so is politics for a particular
people — a field for the exercise of
their business instincts of patriotism.
All this time, just as business has
implied antagonism so has politics
been concerned with the self-interest
of a pugnacious nationalism,”
--- Tagore wrote in the September
1925 edition of Modern Review.

By way of translations, Tagore influenced
Chileans Pablo Neruda and Gabriela
Mistral; Mexican writer Octavio Paz;
and Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset,
Zenobia Camprubí, and Juan Ramón
Jiménez.

We can not measure his influence
then and now. His songs were early
inspiration for the freedom of India,
and even Gandhi admired and visited
him. He visited many people and places
again a sign of great openness and humility.
Videos - songs in Bengali, Tagores songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPulIwNF1uk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJfJ51LStgo

Most Popular Books:

Gitanjali
The Home and the World
The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought
Whisperings
Selected Short Stories