Nationalism

<p>Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath-poet writer playwright composer philosopher social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the profoundly sensitive fresh and beautiful poetry of Gitanjali he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however his elegant prose and magical poetry remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as the Bard of Bengal Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudev Kobiguru Biswakobi.</p><p><br></p><p>A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district and Jessore Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At the age of sixteen he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusimha (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 also endures in his founding of Visva-Bharati University.</p><p><br></p><p>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. (wikipedia.org)</p><p><br></p>