Tagore’s Idea of Freedom

 

                Tagore’s Idea of Freedom

In the 35^th song of Gitanjali which won him Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861—7 August 1941) expressed his idea of free India. When he wrote this song in 1913 India was under the British rule. Gitanjali, a collection of sublime songs was published in London in 1912.

              Tagore was a versatile genius. He was a poet, author, playwright, composer. painter,  educationist, social reformer, political thinker, philosopher and a great humanist. He wrote a large number of books including  Gora, a novel on politics and religion (1910), Sadhna, The Realisation of Life (1913) and The Religion of Man (1931).

As an educationist, he founded Visva-Bharati , a central university, in Shanti Niketan, on 23 December 1921. The name of the university suggests the communion of the world with India.

The song Where the mind is without fear,  and which is given below,  dreams of a free India where people have fearless minds, lofty heads, tireless arms , unrestrained reasoning, free knowledge, a liberal unified world, progressive thoughts, perfectly truthful words and  absence of narrow-minded orthodoxy,  

The full song reads as follows :

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; Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert 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.

AMEN!

                                    ********

G. R. Kanwal

14^th August 2023