Rabindranath Tagore
From Philosopedia
Tagore, Rabindranath [Sir] (7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941)
Tagore, a Bengali poet and guru who wrote the national anthem of India, was a unitarian, a monotheist, and a philosopher.
Nicknamed "Rabi," he was the youngest of fourteen children born in Calcutta's (now Kolkata's) Joransanko section to Debendranath and Sarada Tagore. A Pirali Bengali Brahmin by birth, he began writing poems at the age of eight. Using the pseudonym Bhanushingho ("Sun Lion"), he wrote many works as a teenager. Home-schooled, he wrote Bhikharini (1877, The Beggar Woman), the first short story in the Bangla language. In 1882 he wrote Sandhya Sangit that contains well-known for its poem, "Nirjharer Swapnabhanga" (The Rousing of the Waterfall).
He was sent by his father to study at University College London to become a barrister, but in 1880 returned to Bengal because his father had arranged a marriage to Mrinalini Devi, a 10-year-old. They had five children, four of whom died before reaching full adulthood. In 1890 he began managing his family's estates in Shilaidaha (in what now is Bangladesh).
He was the author of more than fifty dramas, one hundred books of verse, forty volumes of novels and other fiction, much of which denounced nationalism and violence.
In Sadhanaq: The Realization of Life (1913), Tagore emphasized philosophic sentiments in keeping with sacred Hindu writing. Writing in Bengali, he translated his work into English.
Tagore traveled widely, liked the West’s ability to industrialize but deprecated what he said was its lack of spirituality.
In 1913, he received a Nobel Prize in Literature, especially for Gitanjali (1912), his collection of poetry. According to Joseph McCabe, Tagore had rejected both Christianity and all forms of the Hindu religion, and his biographer, H. D. Brown, shows that Tagore had no belief in any future life.
McCabe calls Tagore an atheist, the Unitarians claim he was a Unitarian, and some say he was a unitarian atheist, a category not uncommon among Unitarians. The Tagore Center in Urbana, Illinois, holds annual festivals in Tagore’s honor. When Tagore visited Urbana in 1912, he addressed the Unitarian congregation and returned several times to lecture.
Details of His Life
Wikipedia has extensive details about his life, including his meetings with Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and others. Although Tagore was knighted by the British Crown in 1915, he renounced the honor in 1919 to protest against the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in which colonial troops killed an estimated 379 unarmed civilians [[1]].
(For a discussion of Tagore’s differences with Gandhi, for whom he had popularized the descriptive term “Mahatma,” or great soul, see “Tagore and His India,” by Amartya Sen [[2]] in The New York Review of Books, 27 June 1997.)
