Rabindra Jayanti 2023

Rabindra Jayanti is celebrated annually to mark the birth anniversary of the Bengali poet, philosopher, novelist and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Every year, this day is celebrated on the 25th of the Bengali month Boishakh. This year we celebrate the 162nd birth anniversary of the creative genius. 

Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in Calcutta and was the youngest of 13 siblings. Because his mother died when he was a child and his father had to travel frequently, Tagore was mostly brought up by house helpers. As a child, Tagore disliked formal education systems and was homeschooled by private tutors. He wrote his first poem at the age of 8 and did not publish his first poetry collection until he was 16, under the pseudonym Bhanushingo, meaning Sun Lion. 

Throughout his life, Tagore wrote several plays, poems, novels and composed many songs, which are popularly called Rabindra Sangeet. In 1913, Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his famous work Gitanjali, which is a collection of poems. This made him  the first Indian and Asian to win the Nobel Prize.

With British colonialism in India, and the rise in freedom struggle, Rabindranath Tagore actively preached his political views through speeches, songs, poems and news articles. Tagore met Gandhi in 1915 at Shantiniketan. Although they had similar views regarding India being a free nation, they engaged in a great debate regarding the Charkha movement started by Gandhi. 

In the same year he was awarded Knighthood for his literary works by King George V. Four years later, in 1919, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre took place, in protest of which Tagore renounced his title of knighthood. 

Towards the end of his life, he went into a coma and passed away in 1941, at the age of 80.