Gitanjali

Gitanjali is a collection of Bengali devotional poems, songs of longing and surrender addressed to a God the poet speaks to like a close friend. Rabindranath Tagore published the Bengali volume in 1910, drawing on verses written in the preceding years, a period marked by heavy personal loss. He had buried his wife, a daughter and a son in quick succession. The poems came out of that grief, though they are not laments. They read more like a conversation continued in the dark.

Tagore was not a private hobbyist. He came from a wealthy, reform-minded Calcutta family, ran a school at Santiniketan, and was already famous in Bengal as a poet and songwriter. Outside Bengal, almost nobody had read him, because his work existed only in Bengali.

That changed on a boat. In 1912, ill and told to rest, Tagore sailed for England and began putting some of his poems into English prose while at sea. He carried the notebook with him. In London he showed it to the painter William Rothenstein, who passed it to the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Yeats was astonished. He edited the selection lightly and wrote an introduction, and the India Society printed a small limited edition in 1912, followed by a wider Macmillan edition in 1913.

The English Gitanjali is not a straight translation of the Bengali book. Tagore reshaped it, dropping poems and adding others from different collections, and turned rhymed song into free-flowing prose.

The reception was extraordinary. In November 1913 Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first person from Asia to do so. He was suddenly read across Europe and America. The fame later became a burden, since Western readers cast him as a mystic sage and often ignored the sharp social and political writer he also was. He returned his British knighthood in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar.

The poems live on most strongly as music. Tagore set many of his verses to melodies, and Rabindrasangeet remains sung daily in Bengal. Two countries, India and Bangladesh, sing national anthems written by him.