Rabindranath Tagore
Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956) is an Indian writer and the winner of the 54th Jnanpith award, India’s highest literary honor, best known for his work in English fiction. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and Southeast Asia. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied in Dehradun, New Delhi, Alexandria, and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate in Oxford before he wrote his first novel, The Circle of Reason, which was published in 1986.
The Guru of Indian poets, Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta on 7th May 1861. The Tagore family had a long tradition of culture and yet was not close to the new winds coming from the west to India at that time. And what is more, the family was ready to provide its children everything that was congenial to the flowering of their inherent talents. Rabindranath Tagore ran away from a traditional school during his early teens and had his education seen to and supervised by his father. He was sent to England in 1878 for further education under Henry Morley at London University College. At the threshold of his youth, he had already been initiated into Indian classical literature, and Indian and western music and had begun to write verse. In his making as a poet, Tagore was greatly influenced by the inspirations of Brahmo Samaj. His books of poems, dramas, short stories, and novels in Bengali soon gave him a distinctive place in that literature.
Tagore was not only a good litterateur but also a good painter. In his time each painting of his life was very individualistic. He had given tunes to his songs and having a style and a nuance of their own, they form now a separate category in Indian music called Rabindra Sangeet.
Initially, a raconteur, his compendium ‘Letters from a Sojourner in London’ which was based on his life and times in London was published in book form in 1881. During the same year, he wrote the play ‘Valmiki Prativa’ and it was a rare stage appearance when Tagore appeared in the title role. Tagore’s genius entered a new phase when he composed the poems of ‘Manasi’, the musical play ‘Mayur Khela’, and the drama ‘Raja Rani’. He was the editor of the monthly magazine ‘Sadhana’. He ultimately published his works Sonar Tari’ and ‘Panchabhuta’ in the same journal.
HIS POETICAL WORK
Manasi:-
The next important work and landmark in Tagore’s poetic career are Manasi (1890). The poet steps out of adolescence into manhood. The poet’s romantic imagination now flames into a blaze of light. The lyrics are marked by conflicts and tensions, and these tensions enrich the texture and give the work its chief significance. Manasi is the poetry of elemental conflicts. If the entrancing image of beauty, on the one hand, and the call of man, on the other, form the central stream, another stream only less ample runs parallel to it. Indeed, in his pursuit of ideal love, in his concepts of Nature and of man, in his poetry of scathing satire on the contemporary social scene, Tagore’s mind is lacerated by conflicts, and breathing in a tumult of passion unexcelled in romantic poetry. The conflicts themselves create tension that enriches his poetry, and their perception of us is itself a vivifying experience. Love, Nature, Beauty, and Man as “symbolizing the life infinite in the universe,” are its chief themes. The diction is luxuriant, both in imagery and vocabulary. There is subtlety but no obscurity.Sonar Tori (1894):-
The Golden Boat marks another phase or peak. The magic of its rippling verse, the melting delicacy of its limited, but subtly repeated imagery, is unsurpassed. It creates an autonomous universe, a verbal icon before our very eyes. The lyrics of the collection are exquisite in their beauty and melody. This Great Awakening, as the poet calls it, was the first momentous event in the poet’s spiritual life. “Nature suddenly threw away her veil and led the entranced youth to her inmost sanctuary. And with endless wonder, the poet first discovered the hero ravishingly beautifully was nature, how enthralling her majesty. An entranced soul stood all alone in wonder before the waked loveliness of Nature’s charm. And in the process, there stepped out, in all her splendor, a being of imperial beauty whom the poet would love as no man loved a woman. It was a confrontation of a soul with another soul, vast and intangible, and letter after letter of Chinna Patra speaks of that soulful communion.Chitra (1896):-
The conflicts and longings of the earlier work re-appear in the lyrics of this collection. The aesthetic and religious undertones of the lyrics mark a new stage in Tagore’s development. According to E. Thompson, “It is one of the summits of his work unsurpassed and un-suppressible in its kind”. The most important poem in this collection is Urvashi in which the poet’s vision of ideal Beauty finds incarnation in the ancient Hindu mythological figure of Urvashi. Edward Thompson says, “Urvashi is perhaps the greatest lyric in all Bengali literature and probably the most unalloyed and perfect worship of Beauty which the world’s literature contains.” In the figure of Urvarshi the finest romantic and classical arts meet and blend. The poem possesses perfection and felicity of loveliness.