Rabindranath Tagore - Short Biography

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7th May 1861 to Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi in the Jorasanko mansion (the ancestral home of the Tagore family) in Calcutta. He was the youngest son among thirteen children. Though the Tagore family had many members, he was mostly raised by servants and maids as he lost his mother while he was still very young and with his father being an extensive traveler. 

Rabindranath Tagore, who composed the National Anthem of India and won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was a multitalented personality in every sense. He was a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, painter and a composer. He was also a cultural reformer. Though he was a polymath, his literary works alone are enough to place him in the elite list of all-time greats. Even today, Rabindranath Tagore is often remembered for his poetic songs, which are both spiritual and mercurial. He was one of those great minds, ahead of his time, and that is exactly why his meeting with Albert Einstein is considered as a clash between science and spirituality. Tagore was keen in spreading his ideologies to the rest of the world and hence embarked on a world tour, lecturing in countries like Japan and the United States. Soon, his works were admired by people of various countries and he eventually became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize (in 1913).

Tagore’s introduction to Guyana could have come from the west or by way of Indian indentureship. Many indentured Indians were Bengali and some of that culture came to British Guiana (BG). The Tagore Secondary School was founded in 1942 – around the time when there was a very strong sense of Indian cultural heritage in British Guiana. Interestingly, the Tagore Memorial school prayer is the exact poem—Verse 35—of the Gitanjali; written by Rabindranath Tagore.                                                                                                                                                          

(Source: https://www.biographyonline.net/poets/tagore-rabindranath.html  &  https://www.stabroeknews.com)

EXTRACTED FROM TAGORE MAGAZINE 2017