Today is May 8th and it marks the 156th birth anniversary of Indian poet, author, songwriter, composer, philosopher and all-round polymath Rabindranath Tagore. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for his book of poems, Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore and his works were considered ahead of their time.
Tagore`s stories, poems, songs, novels and plays wove the personal and the political into then-contemporary narratives to produce timeless works of art. He has written the national anthems of not one but two countries and today, his influence over public consciousness, our culture, literature, music and of course, cinema is unparalleled.
A Pirali Brahmin 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.
By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist, he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain.
As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
Tagore modernised 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.