Rabindranath Tagore
1861–1941
Biography
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta into the Thakur family, a wealthy household with a long tradition of learning and the arts. He had little formal schooling and was taught mostly at home by tutors, and he began writing verse as a boy. Over a long life he wrote poems, novels, short stories, plays, essays and songs, and he took up painting in his later years.
He is one of the central figures of the Bengal Renaissance and is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Bengali language. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, for the English versions of his poems, chiefly Gitanjali. Two of his songs became national anthems, of India and of Bangladesh. In 1901 he founded a school at Santiniketan that grew into Visva-Bharati University, and in 1919 he gave back his British knighthood in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Three of his works are in this library: Bou Thakuranir Haat (বৌ-ঠাকুরাণীর হাট), an early novel; Chaturanga (চতুরঙ্গ), a short novel about a small circle of young friends and the ideals that test them; and Galpaguchchha (গল্পগুচ্ছ), the collection of his short stories. Between them they cover his prose from its early years to the stories that many Bengali readers know best.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
গল্পগুচ্ছ
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
The first volume of Tagore's collected short stories, thirty-three of them, written in the 1880s and 1890s when he was managing the family estates in rural East Bengal. Postmasters, wives and children, and the river villages they live in, in some of the first modern stories in…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.গল্পগুচ্ছ
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
The third volume of Tagore's collected short stories, from the 1890s on. They are stories of families, of a scholar and a village, of ghosts and money, written in the plain and quick prose that Bengali short fiction took from him. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.গোরা
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
Gora, a tall, fiery young Hindu in Calcutta who believes that India must defend every old custom against its critics, is the close friend of the gentler Binoy. Tagore's long novel of 1910 follows their friendship and their meeting with a Brahmo family and its daughters, and asks…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.চতুরঙ্গ
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
A rationalist uncle, a young man of conscience, a widow of strong will and a narrator who loves her are the four whose chapters make up this book, told by the narrator, Shribilas, as he looks back on the people who made him. Tagore's novella of 1916 is a short, unusual book on…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.বৌ-ঠাকুরাণীর হাট
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
On a hot night in Jessore the crown prince Udayaditya sits at his window beside his wife Surama and wishes he had not been born a prince, while his father Pratapaditya, the proud Hindu ruler of the province in the days of Akbar, quarrels with his family and with the Mughal…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.যোগাযোগ
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
Kumudini, the proud and sensitive daughter of an old, impoverished family, is married to Madhusudan, a self-made businessman with money and little feeling for what she values. Tagore's late novel of 1929 follows the two of them in their house in Calcutta, a marriage seen from…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.রাজর্ষি
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
In the kingdom of Tripura a king hears a small girl ask why blood must be shed at the goddess's temple, and sets himself against the priest who serves it. Tagore's first historical novel, written in 1887, is a book on kingship and cruelty, and the plays Bisarjan and Mukut grew…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.শেষের কবিতা
by রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
Amit Ray, a barrister back from England, quick with words and tired of conventional romance, meets Labanya in the hills and begins a love affair carried on by letters and verses. Tagore's playful 1929 novel mixes prose and poems and is a favourite of readers who think Tagore too…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.