Rabindranath Tagore
……………………………… Writer, thinker, poet, scholar, painter, song-composer, nationalist and campaigner for World peace , Rabindranath Tagore was an extraordinarily versatile genius. He received the Novel Prize for literature in 1913, the first Asian to do so and was Knighted in 1915- an honour which he resigned in 1919 as as a protest against British policy in Punjab.
He believed that India could play the role of a unifier and synthesiser of the East and West towards a common enrichment of the humanities. It was to give form and content to this idea and provide a nucleus for inter-cultural fellowship that he founded the Visva Bharati world university at Santiniketan in Bengal. Tagore ,to paraphrase Humayun Kabir, was essentially a poet with interests not confined to poetry. In sheer quantity of work few writers can equal him. His writings include more than a thousand poems and over 2000 songs besides a large number of short stories , novels, dramatic works and essays on the most of the diverse topics. He was also a musician of the highest order. He took to painting when he was almost 70 and yet produced with in 10 years , about 3000 pictures. His contribution to religious and educational thought , to politics and social reform, to rural regeneration and economic reconstruction were notable.
He believed that India could play the role of a unifier and synthesiser of the East and West towards a common enrichment of the humanities. It was to give form and content to this idea and provide a nucleus for inter-cultural fellowship that he founded the Visva Bharati world university at Santiniketan in Bengal. Tagore ,to paraphrase Humayun Kabir, was essentially a poet with interests not confined to poetry. In sheer quantity of work few writers can equal him. His writings include more than a thousand poems and over 2000 songs besides a large number of short stories , novels, dramatic works and essays on the most of the diverse topics. He was also a musician of the highest order. He took to painting when he was almost 70 and yet produced with in 10 years , about 3000 pictures. His contribution to religious and educational thought , to politics and social reform, to rural regeneration and economic reconstruction were notable.
