(Extracted From Wikipedia)
Rabindranath Tagore was a poet, musician and artist. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse”, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tagore’s poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his “elegant prose and magical poetry” remain largely unknown outside Bengal.
Gitanjali (Bengali: গীতাঞ্জলি, lit. ”Song offering”) is a collection of poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the book. And is part of the Collection from the UNESCO of Representative Works.
The original Bengali collection of 156/157 poems was published on August 14, 1910. The English Gitanjalior Song Offerings is a collection of 103 English poems of Tagore’s own English translations of his Bengali poems first published in November 1912 by the India Society of London. It contained translations of 53 poems from the original Bengali Gitanjali, as well as 50 other poems which were from his drama Achalayatan and eight other books of poetry — mainly Gitimalya (17 poems), Naivedya (15 poems) and Kheya (11 poems).
Songs (Rabindra Sangeet)
Tagore was a prolific composer with around 2,230 songs to his credit.[122]His songs are known as rabindrasangit(“Tagore Song”), which merges fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems or parts of novels, stories, or plays alike—were lyricised. Influenced by the thumri style of Hindustani music, they ran the entire gamut of human emotion.
In 1971, Amar Shonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh. It was written — ironically — to protest the 1905 Partition of Bengal along communal lines: cutting off the Muslim-majority East Bengal from Hindu-dominated West Bengal was to avert a regional bloodbath. Tagore saw the partition as a cunning plan to stop the independence movement, and he aimed to rekindle Bengali unity and tar communalism.
My golden Bengal, I love you.
Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune as if it were a flute
O mother! the aroma of the mango orchard in the springtime drives me crazy,
Ah, what a thrill!
O mother! in Late, Autumntime sees smiles all through mature fields of paddy.
What beauty, what shades, what affection, what tenderness!
What a quilt have you spread at the feet of banyan trees and along the bank of every river
Oh mother mine, words from your lips are like nectar to my ears.
Ah, what a thrill!
If sadness, O mother! casts a gloom on your face, my eyes are filled with tears!
Spending my childhood in your playhouse
Your dirt and soil smeared all over my body, I consider myself privileged.
The wonderful lamp you light up at dusk,
Ah, what a thrill!
I quit play and sprint back to your lap at once, O mother!
In the cattle grazing field, on the pier for crossing stream,
Shaded village walkways, serene with calling birds,
Open porch with heaped ripe paddy my life goes on.
Ah, what a thrill!
All your shepherds and farmers are my brothers.
This time I offer my head beneath your feet,
Bless me with your dust, I shall be obliged to flaunt overhead.
I shall offer you meagrely whatever I have at home,
Ah, what a thrill!
Never bother to buy you, from others, a hanging rope disguised as a crown.