NEW DELHI: Bengali literature maestro Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, 1913. The Swedish Academy presented the renowned award to him for his work in ‘Gitanjali‘.
Gitanjali is a compilation of poems which were later turned into English prose poems by Tagore, titled Gitanjali: Song Offerings. The English version was released in 1912, featuring a preface by William Butler Yeats.
The poems in Gitanjali drew inspiration from medieval Indian devotional songs, accompanied by Tagore’s own musical compositions. While love remains the central subject, several poems explore the tension between spiritual aspirations and worldly inclinations.
WB Yeats, in his introduction to ‘Gitanjali’, wrote: “We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics – all dull things in the doing – while Mr Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity.”
The academy on Nobel Prize website mentioned that he was awarded the prize “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”
Interestingly, the original Nobel Prize medal awared to Tagore was stolen along with several other belongings from Visva-Bharati University’s security vault on March 25, 2004. However, later that year on December 7, the Swedish Academy presented the university with two replicas of Tagore’s Nobel Prize – one in gold and another in bronze.
Born in Kolkata in 1861, Tagore’s influence on Bengali literature, music and art was profound, although he was never officially designated as India’s national poet.
His work includes over 2,000 songs, collectively known as ‘Rabindra Sangeet’, alongside numerous novels, short stories, dance-dramas, poems, essays and travelogues.
