Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (Bangla: ??????????? ?????, Robindronath ?hakur) (May 7, 1861 – August 7, 1941) (in the Bangla Calendar, 25 Baishakh, 1268 – 22 Srabon, 1348), also called Gurudev, was a Bengali poet, Brahmo philosopher and nationalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, becoming the first Asian to

Public life

Tagore wrote a number of songs in support of the Indian independence movement. He renounced the knighthood conferred by the British Crown in 1915

Related Topics:
Indian independence movement - Knighthood - 1915

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in protest against the 1919 Jaliyaanwala Bagh Massacre (Amritsar), where, without warning, British soldiers opened fire upon an unarmed gathering of civilians, killing

Related Topics:
1919 - Jaliyaanwala Bagh Massacre

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over 500 innocent men, women and children.

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He felt strongly that the nation could be uplifted only through widespread

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education. Writing of the rote-oriented education system introduced in

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India under the British Raj, he once said:

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We pass examinations, and shrivel up into clerks, lawyers and police

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inspectors, and we die young ... Once upon a time we were in possession

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of such a thing as our mind in India. It was living. It thought, it felt,

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it expressed itself. But it has been thrust aside, and we are made to

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tread the mill of passing examinations, not for learning anything, but

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for notifying that we are qualified for employment under organisations

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conducted in English. Our educated community is not a cultured community,

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but a community of qualified candidates.

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These views crystallized in the experimental school at Santiniketan,

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(????????????, "abode of peace") in West Bengal in 1901, where his father had left a landed estate in his possession.

Related Topics:
West Bengal - 1901

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This school, established in the traditional Brahmacharya structure of the student living together with his Guru in a self-sustaining community,

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became a magnet for a talented International group of

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scholars, artists, linguists, and musicians. Tagore spent prodigious amounts of energy obtaining funds for this school (contributing all his Nobel monies).

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Today this institution is known as Visva Bharati University(??????????, 'India in the World"), a Central University under the Government of India.

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