My Reminiscences

In the autobiographical sketches painted in this book by Rabindranath Tagore a great thinker and poet from India gives us windows into his childhood his youth and his blossoming as a writer and as a lyricist. He stresses that this is not an autobiography but more like a palimpsest of memories: glimmers and shadows that illustrate his artistic development not a strict record of his life. Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali short-story writer poet musician composer playwright essayist and painter from India who was instrumental in transforming Indian art especially Bengali literature and music by introducing contextual modernism and new verses and prose. Both his prose and poetry were on varied topics and were considered to be magical and spiritual as visible in some of his noted works such as Gitanjali Gora and Ghare-Baire. Referred to as the ‘Bard of Bengal’ his compositions were chosen as national anthems by India and Bangladesh while the Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work. He became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.