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Remembering Rabindranath Tagore
Let My Country Awake: 7th May 1861 was a special day in Indian history indeed. Rabindranath Tagore, one of the world’s most prominent polymaths was born. This year, we would be celebrating the 155th birth anniversary of this legendary multifaceted revolutionary.
He was the one who revived Bengali literature, music and other artforms by applying contextual modernism through his teachings and works. He was the first non-European to win a nobel prize in literature in 1913.
Born to a Brahmin family in Kolkata, Tagore started writing poems at an early age of eight. At the age of 16 alone he released his first collection of poems using a pseudonym “Bhanusimha”. In 1877 he released his first book of stories and dramas under his own name. His humanist, universalist and anti-national ideologies perpetuated through the masses through his works as he inspired thousands for the fight against the British Raj. He was an influential activist during the Bengal Renaissance period, during which he made several paintings, poems, stories, cartoons, songs etc.
What distinguished his literary works from the others was the use of colloquial language against the odds of classic Sanskrit and Bengali which was predominantly used before his times. His natural flair for poetry and writing can be profoundly seen in his most loved works like Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) etc.
Let My Country Awake: Poetry by Rabindranath Tagore
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where the words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
∼ Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore or Rabindranath Thakur?
It may be noted that in Bengali, the name is still written as Rabindranath Thakur (রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর), therefore, it is natural for native Bengali speaking people to use the original name, instead of the British given name.
Other then Thakur, some other Bengali surnames which were changed during the British raj are Bandopadhyay (Banerjee), Chattopadhyay (Chaterjee), Mukhopadhyay (Mukherjee), Basu (Bose) etc.
Therefore, like Tagore, the Bengali version of the name of Subhash Chandra Bose is Subhash Chandra Basu, and current CM Mamata Banerjee’s name is written as Mamata Bandopadhyay in Bengali. These are not wrong names as the Zee News anchor thinks, but rather these are native versions of the names, and most native people use these names only while talking in Bengali.
If a Bengali uses Thakur or Basu, it does not mean that person is claiming that Tagore or Bose are not national icons, it is just the use of the native name, without any politics behind it.
