Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been called one of the outstanding thinkers of the 20th century and the greatest poet India has ever produced. His Nobel followed publication of Gitanjali, his English version of some of his Bengali poems. WB Yeats and Ezra Pound were great supporters. Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861 and educated partly in Britain; King George V knighted him, but Tagore renounced this in 1919 following the Amritsar Massacre. A key figure in Indian nationalism, Tagore became a friend of Gandhi, offering criticism as well as support. A polymath and progressive, Tagore painted, wrote plays, novels, short stories and many songs. The national anthems of India and Bangladesh are based on his poems.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Chandrika Kaul 5 episodes
  Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews
• Bashabi Fraser No other episodes
  Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University
• John Stevens No other episodes
  Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS, University of London

Reading list

• Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man
  Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (I.B.Tauris, 2008) Google Books →
• A Meeting of Two Minds: Geddes-Tagore Letters
  Bashabi Fraser (Word Power Books, 2005) Google Books →
• Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography
  Krishna Kripalani (UBS Publishers' Distributors Ltd, 2008) Google Books →
• Return from Exile
  Ashis Nandy (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• Gitanjali
  Rabindranath Tagore (trans. William Radice) (Penguin Books, 2011) Google Books →
• Gora
  Rabindranath Tagore (Sahitya Akademi, 2003) Google Books →
• I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems
  Rabindranath Tagore (trans. Ketaki Kushari Dyson) (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2010) Google Books →
• Nationalism
  Rabindranath Tagore (Penguin Classics, 2010) Google Books →
• Selected Poems
  Rabindranath Tagore (trans. William Radice) (Penguin, 2005) Google Books →
• Selected Short Stories
  Rabindranath Tagore (trans. William Radice) (Penguin, 2005) Google Books →
• The Golden Boat: Selected Poems
  Rabindranath Tagore (trans. Joe Winter) (Anvil Press Poetry, 2008) Google Books →
• The Home and the World
  Rabindranath Tagore (Penguin Classics, 2005) Google Books →
• The Post Office
  Rabindranath Tagore (Kessinger Publishing, 2010) Google Books →
• The Religion of Man
  Rabindranath Tagore (Martino Fine Books, 2013) Google Books →
• My Life in My Words
  Rabindranath Tagore (ed. Uma Das Gupta) (Penguin, 2010) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Rudyard Kipling
  
  16 Oct, 2014 820 English and Old English literatures
• Yeats and Mysticism
  
  31 Jan, 2002 820 English and Old English literatures
• al-Biruni
  
  10 Jun, 2010 900 History
• Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment
  
  10 Feb, 2000 830 German and related literatures
• The Ramayana
  
  9 Mar, 2023 290 Other religions
• Robert Burns
  
  24 Oct, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
  
  22 May, 2014 890 Other literatures
• Yeats and Irish Politics
  
  17 Apr, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures
• Tolstoy
  
  25 Apr, 2002 890 Other literatures
• Goethe
  
  6 Apr, 2006 830 German and related literatures

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b05sxv7b

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05sxv7b

Auto-category: 920 (Biography and History)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. It's claimed that Rabindranath Tagore was at one time one of the most famous poets in the world.