Title of Book

Gitanjali

Publication

Rupa Publications

Author of Book

Rabindranath Tagore

Brief Information about Author

Rabindranath Tagore also written Rabndrantha Thkura (7 May 1861 7 August 1941
was a Bengali polymath who 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 the first nonEuropean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was
viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry"
remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms
and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from
traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing
the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the
outstanding creative artist of the modern Indian subcontinent.
A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote
poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under
the pseudonym Bhnusiha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities
as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramasand the aegis of
his birth nameby 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident
nationalist he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an
exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings,
sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy
endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic
strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political
and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home
and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were

acclaimedor pannedfor their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural

contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's
Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The lyrics and music for the
original song of Sri Lanka's National Anthem were also the work of Tagore.
Review of the Book Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
You need to have a big appetite to digest each and every word of Gitanjali written by
Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941). The work was originally written in
Bengali published over different Bengali books on poetry from where 103 poems have
been picked, compiled and consolidated in this book. The translation has been done from
Bengali to English by Rabindranath Tagore himself. Gitanjali in literal meaning denotes
an offering of a handful of songs.
Gitanjali when was released first in August 1910, just one day before the date that
became our Independence Day later (15th August). And then Gitanjali made
Rabindranath Tagore the first non-European to win a Nobel for Literature in 1913. The
book shook the whole world and placed India, Rabindranath Tagore and Gitanjali on
international arena of literature.
These poems are only numbered, not titled. Hence each poem brings a different meaning
to each of its reader without getting drifted away by the preconception got generated by
reading a title. Each of the poem is thought provoking, intriguing, deeply meaningful and
motivational. These poems in Gitanjali are building blocks of anyone within. You read a
poem post which it forces you to interrogate yourself, discuss it with yourself to get
deeper and deeper to conclude it.
In poem no XXXVI Tagore seems to be interacting/ conversing with God telling to
accept his prayer to him and fill in the unfilled portion within his heart. Tagore prays to
God to give him strength to absorb his joys and sorrows faced in life and not to get
drifted away by them. He further adds to his prayer to God to shower his blessings so that
love becomes meaningful in life.