Robindranath Tagore's Geetanjoli by Monir Hossen

2. Associate Professor, Dept of English,
Faculty of Arts,
The MS University of Baroda, Vadodara
PRESENTED BY:
The SPB College of Business Administration, Udhna ,
Surat
AND

3. Monir Hossen
Department of English
Comilla University

4. Robindronath Thakur
7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941
Gurudev Tagore , was a Bengali
poet, novelist, musician, painter
and playwright

5. Tremendous influence on Bengali
literature, culture & Indian literature
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913
Knighted by the British Crown in
1915, which he returned after the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

6. The only writer who has written
anthems of two countries, India &
Bangladesh.
Founder of Santiniketan – the
Visva Bharati University.
Proponent of Indian independence

7. Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore
travelled to more than thirty
countries, befriending eminent
literary figures like Yeats, Ezra
Pound, Robert Frost, Thomas
Mann, and HG Wells. He met with
Albert Einstein and Mussolini.

8. COMPOSER OF….
POEMS 3,000
SONGA 2,000
VOLUMES OF
ESSAY
40
PLAYS 50
NOVELS 8
NOVELLAS 4

9. Chokher Bali was directed by
Rituparno Ghosh in 2003 and stars
Prasenjit as Mahendra, Aishwarya
Rai as Binodini and Raima Sen as
Ashalata.

10. Accomplished musician
Composed more than 2000 songs,
which constitute a distinctive style
of music -Rabindrasangeet.
They are part of his novels and
stories and have been used in
Bengali movies as well

11. Collection of his songs is known as
Gitabitan (garden of songs).
The Rabindra Sangeet has
influenced the styles of such
musicians as sitar maestro Vilayat
Khan, and the sarodiyas
Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad
Ali Khan.

12. Film "Parineeta's" popular song
"Piyu bole" inspired by Tagore's
"Phule, phule, doley, doley".
SD Burman's "Tere mere milan ki
yeh raina" picturized on Amitabh
Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri in the
film "Abhimaan" is based on
Tagore's "Jodi tare nai chini go
sheki".

13. At age of
sixty,
Tagore
took up
drawing
and
painting

14. A prolific painter and had several
exhibitions around the world
He was said to suffer from color
blindness as he painted with
certain peculiarities in color
schemes and aesthetics

15. THE VEDANTIC SPIRITUALISM
THE BHAKTI POETRY
POETRY OF BAULS
WESTERN LITERATURE

16. "There is in him the stillness of
nature. The poems do not seem to
have been produced by storm or
by ignition, but seem to show the
normal habit of his mind. He is at
one with nature, and finds no
contradictions. And this is in sharp

17. sharp contrast with the Western
mode, where man must be shown
attempting to master nature if we
are to have "great drama."
-Ezra Pound
(Fortnightly Review, 1 March 1913)

18. “The work of a supreme culture,
they yet appear as much the growth
of the common soil as the grass and
the rushes. A tradition, where
poetry and religion are the same
thing, has passed through the
centuries, gathering from learned
and unlearned metaphor and

19. and emotion, and carried back
again to the multitude the thought
of the scholar and of the noble….A
whole people, a whole civilization,
immeasurably strange to us, seems
to have been taken up into this
imagination; and

20. and yet we are not moved because
of its strangeness, but because we
have met our own image…”
- WB YEATS
(PREFACE TO GITANJALI)

21. ““SONG OFFERINGS”SONG OFFERINGS”
A collection of prose translations
made by the author from
the original Bengali
With an introduction by
W. B. YEATS

22. A collection of 103 poems,
Largely translations, by Rabindranath
Tagore himself
The translations were undertaken
prior to a visit to England in 1912,
where the poems were extremely well
received.

23. A slender volume was published in
1913, with a preface by W. B. Yeats.
In the same year, based on a
corpus of translations,
Rabindranath became the first
non-European to win the Nobel
Prize.

24. Gitanjali (Gitanjoli) is also the title
of an earlier Bengali volume (1910)
of 157 mostly devotional songs.
The word ‘gitanjoli’ is composed
from "git", song, and "anjoli",
offering, and thus means - "An
offering of songs"

25. The word for offering, anjoli, has a
strong devotional connotation, so
the title may also be interpreted as
"prayer offering of song"
TheEnglish collection is not a
translation of poems from the
Bengali volume of the same name.

26. Half the poems (52 out of 103) in
the English text were selected from
the Bengali volume, others were
taken from these works (given
with year and number of songs
selected for the English text):
Gitimallo (1914, 17), Noibeddo
(1901, 15), Khea (1906, 11) and some
from other works.

27. The translations were often
radical, leaving out or altering
large chunks of the poem and in
one instance even fusing two
separate poems (song 95, which
unifies songs 89, 90 of naivedya).

29. THEME OF GOD AS LOVER AND
GOD LIVING WITHIN

30. Life of my life, I shall ever try to
keep my body pure, knowing that
thy living touch is upon all my
limbs.
I shall ever try to keep all untruths
out from my thoughts, knowing
that thou art that truth which has
kindled the light of reason in my
mind.

31. I shall ever try to drive all evils away
from my heart and keep my love in
flower, knowing that thou hast thy
seat in the inmost shrine of my
heart.
And it shall be my endeavour to
reveal thee in my actions, knowing
it is thy power gives me strength to
act.

32. THE THEME OF ONENESS WITH
NATURE AND NATURE
AS EMBODIMENT OF DIVINE
INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH
ROMANTICISM

33. The same stream of life that runs
through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances
in rhythmic measures.

34. It is the same life that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth in
numberless blades of grass and
breaks into tumultuous waves of
leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in
the ocean-cradle of birth and of
death, in ebb and in flow.

35. I feel my limbs are made glorious by
the touch of this world of life. And
my pride is from the life-throb of
ages dancing in my blood this
moment.

36. THEME OF CREATIVITY AS
BHAKTI AND GOD AS MASTER
CREATOR

37. My song has put off her
adornments. She has no pride of
dress and decoration. Ornaments
would mar our union; they would
come between thee and me; their
jingling would drown thy whispers.

38. My poet's vanity dies in shame
before thy sight. O master poet, I
have sat down at thy feet. Only let
me make my life simple and
straight, like a flute of reed for thee
to fill with music.

39. THEME OF FREEDOM FROM
MATERIAL BONDAGE

40. The child who is decked with
prince's robes and who has
jewelled chains round his neck
loses all pleasure in his play; his
dress hampers him at every step.
In fear that it may be frayed, or
stained with dust he keeps himself
from the world, and is afraid even
to move.

41. Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of
finery, if it keeps one shut off from
the healthful dust of the earth, if it
rob one of the right of entrance to
the great fair of common human
life.

42. THEME OF FREEDOM
FROM EGO

43. He whom I enclose with my name is
weeping in this dungeon. I am ever
busy building this wall all around;
and as this wall goes up into the
sky day by day I lose sight of my
true being in its dark shadow.

44. I take pride in this great wall, and I
plaster it with dust and sand lest a
least hole should be left in this
name; and for all the care I take I
lose sight of my true being.

45. THEME OF LOVE FOR NATION
AND FREEDOM FROM SLAVERY
OF ALL KINDS

46. Where the mind is without fear and
the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been
broken up into fragments by
narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the
depth of truth;

47. Where tireless striving stretches its
arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has
not lost its way into the dreary desert
sand of dead habit; Where the mind
is led forward by thee into ever-
widening thought and action
- Into that heaven of freedom, my
Father,
Let my country awake.

48. THE THEME OF DEATH

49. Death, thy servant, is at my door.
He has crossed the unknown sea
and brought thy call to my home.
The night is dark and my heart is
fearful - yet I will take up the lamp,
open my gates and bow to him my
welcome. It is thy messenger who
stands at my door.

50. I will worship him placing at his feet
the treasure of my heart.
He will go back with his errand
done, leaving a dark shadow on my
morning; and in my desolate home
only my forlorn self will remain as
my last offering to thee.