Late 20th Century Ghosh, S. Rabindranath Tagore, Poet/Philosopher, Bengali. Lithograph, Inscribed, Framed

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Inscribed Lithograph (signed S. Ghosh) of Rabindranath Tagore, a renowned Bengali polymath who significantly influenced Indian culture and literature.

Inscription … Read more Inscribed Lithograph (signed S. Ghosh) of Rabindranath Tagore, a renowned Bengali polymath who significantly influenced Indian culture and literature.

Inscription is in Bengali, and states that the two photographs taken by S. Ghosh are "extremely beautiful and skillful."
The author was "astonished and delighted" upon seeing them. This is signed in plate by the subject (Tagore).

Nobel Laureate:
Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his collection of poems, Gitanjali.

Literary Contributions:
Tagore was a prolific writer, composing over 50 volumes of poetry, as well as short stories, novels, plays, and essays.

National Anthems:
He composed the national anthems of both India ("Jana Gana Mana") and Bangladesh ("Amar Shonar Bangla").

Cultural Impact:
Tagore played a leading role in the Bengal Renaissance, introducing new forms and colloquial language into Bengali literature and promoting Indian culture internationally.

Educational Visionary:
He also founded Visva-Bharati University in rural Bengal, aiming to provide an alternative to colonial education.

He was a Nobel Laureate in Literature (1913) for his collection of poems, Gitanjali.

Tagore was a prolific writer, poet, playwright, composer, and painter, and played a significant role in the Bengal Renaissance.

He composed the national anthems of both India ("Jana Gana Mana") and Bangladesh ("Amar Shonar Bangla").
Tagore is regarded as a key figure in modern Indian history, alongside Mahatma Gandhi, for his contributions to literature, art, and social reform.

Rabindranath Tagore (born May 7, 1861, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died August 7, 1941, Calcutta) was a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who 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 Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Early life and education

The son of the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, he early began to write verses, and, after incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India. There, he published several books of poetry in the 1880s and completed Manasi (1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius.

In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family’s estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the Padma River (the main channel of the Ganges River), in close contact with village folk, and his sympathy for them became the keynote of much of his later writing. Most of his finest short stories, which examine “humble lives and their small miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy, laced with gentle irony, that is unique to him (though admirably captured by the director Satyajit Ray in later film adaptations). Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside, most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these years he published several poetry collections, notably Sonar Tari (1894; The Golden Boat), and plays, notably Chitrangada (1892; Chitra). Tagore’s poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his more than 2,000 songs, which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali society.

In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at Shantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled permanently at the school, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. Years of sadness arising from the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907 are reflected in his later poetry, which was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (1912). This book, containing Tagore’s English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections, including Gitanjali (1910), was hailed by W.B. Yeats and André Gide and won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre.

Bengali: Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur
Born: May 7, 1861, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India
Died: August 7, 1941, Calcutta (aged 80)
Awards And Honors: Nobel Prize (1913)
Notable Works: “Gītāñjali” “Gitanjali (Song Offerings)” “Manasi”
Notable Family Members: father Debendranath Tagore See less