Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti or Rabindra Jayanti: Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He is known to reshape Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the author of the famous poetry “Gitanjali” ( Gitanjali is a collection of poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. In 1913, Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature, for the English translation, Gitanjali: Song Offerings, making him the first non-European and the first lyricist to receive this honor. He is also the first Indian citizen and first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize.
Rabindranath Tagore is referred as the “the Bard of Bengal”. He is also known popularly as Gurudeb, Kobiguru and Biswokobi.
Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti or Rabindra Jayanti
Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti or Rabindra Jayanti is celebrated annually to commemorate the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was born on 7th May’1861 as per the Gregorian calender. However, Rabindra Jayanti is celebrated on his birthday in the Bengali calender, on the 25th day of Baisakh. Usually this day falls either on May 8th or 9th. This year in 2023, it will be celebrated on 9th May.
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore was born in Jorasanko Thakur Bari in Jorasanko, North Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It is the ancestral home of the Tagore family. His father’s name was Debendranath Tagore, who was an Indian philosopher and religious reformer, active in the Brahmo Samaj. His mother’s name was Sarada Devi. Tagore was one of the 13 children and his nickname was Rabi. His father used to travel worlwide and as his mother passed away at an early age, he was mostly raised by servants.
He introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, helped introduce Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In Bengali, he is referred as Rabindranath Thakur.
He early began to write verses, and, after incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India. There he published several books of poetry in the 1880s and completed Manasi (1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some of his best-known poems, including many in verse forms new to Bengali, as well as some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.
Unknown facts about Rabindranath Tagore
1 – The name Tagore is the anglicised transliteration of Thakur. The original surname of the Tagores was Kushari. They were Pirali Brahmin (‘Pirali’ historically carried a stigmatized and pejorative connotation) originally belonged to a village named Kush in the district named Burdwan in West Bengal.
2 – Tagore was the youngest of 13 children of his parents.
3 – Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati in West Bengal, which the family visited.
4 – He wrote 6 poems relating to Sikhism and a number of articles in Bengali children’s magazine about Sikhism.
5 – Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five continents.
6 – Tagore was a prolific composer with around 2,230 songs to his credit. His songs are known as rabindra sangit.
7 – On 25 March 2004, Tagore’s Nobel Prize was stolen from the safety vault of the Visva-Bharati University, along with several other of his belongings. On 7 December 2004, the Swedish Academy decided to present two replicas of Tagore’s Nobel Prize, one made of gold and the other made of bronze, to the Visva-Bharati University.
8 – Tagore wrote 3 national anthems. “Jana Gana Mana” for India, “Amar Sonar Bangla” for Bangladesh and also inspired the Sri Lankan national anthem “Sri Lanka Matha”.
9 – Rabindranath Tagore invested his Nobel Prize money in constructing the “Visva-Bharati” school in Shantiniketan. The school ran on the Shantiniketan Education System and gave the nation many distinguished personalities, Amartya Sen, Satyajit Ray, and Indira Gandhi to name a few out of many others.
10 – At the age of sixty, Tagore took up drawing and painting and many of his works were successfully exhibited throughout Europe. His strange colour schemes and off-beat aesthetics made people realize that he was red-green colour blind.
11 – Tagore was once invited by Albert Einstein at his home. The two talked about religion and science and their chat has been documented in the “Note on the Nature of Reality”.
12 – King George V of England knighted Rabindranath Tagore in 1915 for his great contribution in the field of literature. However, following the tragic massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, he renounced his title.
13 – Rabindranath Tagore died on 7th August 1941.
14 – Rabindranath is the one who founded the Visva- Bharati University in Santiniketan. He named it that way to mean, “the communion of the world with India.” It is located in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, IndiaWest Bengal.
15 – Many of the institution’s classes are still conducted under trees in open fields. Visva Bharati University was a college until independence, and in 1951, it was declared a central university.
16 – He is regarded as the “father of India’s national anthem”.
17 – He was inspired by the works of Kalidasa which he read at a very young age. His first poem was in the Maithili style which he composed in 1877.
18 – He moved to Brighton, England in 1878 to study law. He started following the works of Shakespeare while he was in the University College London. He left his degree midway to return to India in 1880 and pursued his passion for poetry.
19 – His international reach was such that his works were translated into all of the widely spoken languages. English, Dutch, German, Spanish, and other European languages all found a place for Tagore’s words. He gained critical acclaim throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. Some of his famous followers include Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, Czech ideologist Vincenc Lesný and French Nobel laureate André Gide.
20 – Tagore wrote around 50 dramas, 100 books of poems, and 40 volumes of novels. His paintings were exhibited in Paris and London in 1930.
Follow read4knowledge for more interesting articles.