Reading Notes W11: Rabindranath Tagore, Part X

Tagore (889-904)

  • Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861, into one of India's most famous families
  • His grandfather had a great fortune in agriculture, mining, banking, and trade in British India, and helped establish Hindu College, Calcutta Medical College, the National Library, and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (889)
  • His grandfather also co-founded the Brahmo Sabha - an influential association dedicated to far-reaching reforms of Hindu religions and social life, which his father expanded and renamed
  • Tagore was educated in several schools in Calcutta but rebelled against formal education so strongly that after 14 years old, he was trained by tutors at home in history, science, mathematics, literature, and art
  • Through 1875-1880, he spent his time in England, first in Brighton and then in London, but returned to India after failing his law degree
  • In 1880, he published his first two book of poems in Bengali
  • His family arranged his marriage to Mrinalini Devi, with whom he had 3 daughters and 2 sons
  • Tagore founded a school at Shantiniketan, about a 100 miles northwest of Calcutta in 1901
  • 20 years later,  he launched a college called Vishwa Bharati at the same site, which became Vishwa Bharati University in 1951
  • In 1902 his wife died, his middle daughter the following year, and his father in 1905, and his younger son 2 years later
  • Despite all of the deaths, Tagore remained productive and innovative during his first decade of the 20th century 
  • He was was fluent in Bengali and English, but he wrote almost all of his literary works originally in Bengali
  • His insights and intuitions ran deep, and he was able to express them in imaginative structures of startling originality (891)
  • "Punishment" is set in the Bengal countryside in the late 19th century and it is told from the perspective of the narrator whose omniscience and veracity play crucial roles in the story (891)
  • It is in the first modern short story in world literature about the legal phenomenon that lawyers and judges call "the Rashomon effect"
  • "The narrative combines social realism to confront the troubling questions of what constitutes justice under such circumstances and how we might solve this most intractable of problems" (891)

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