Remembering Rabindranath Tagore Volume - High Commission of ...

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Remembering Rabindranath Tagore
almost a period of apprenticeship, as he drew on multiple sources - western, classical,
regional and folk for his musical inspiration. He had discovered his natural gift of combining
poetry with music to express his innermost thoughts, often recasting existing songs to
create new musical pieces, which were called bhanga gān or broken verses and composing
prayer songs for Brahmo congregations.
In the second period 1901-1920, with his stay in Santiniketan, where his university Visva
Bharati was established, Tagore’s song creation would find new energies and inspiration.
He never moved away from classical music and frequently acknowledged how it formed
the foundation of his music. He was also moved by songs in the semi classical genre like
bhajans and thumris many of which inspired his song composition. The wide range of deaths
and tragedies in his personal life in this period and the complexity of emotions that he felt
made it necessary to create new melodic phrases moving beyond the traditional classical
formulations of music. His songs now expressed a new urgency. With these successive
familial losses he became increasingly more detached within attachment – alone and yet
never lonely. It is this that kept his creativity alive. Viewing life from the prism of death
his songs often displayed raw emotion but in these sentimental and emotional outbursts he
tried to find a spiritual meaning. He explained that life’s path was not strewn with flowers
but with thorns. Man had to go through the test of treading that thorny road with a smiling
face, converting pain to awareness. There was a great need to experience sorrow for through
its unbearable anguish one could eventually confront oneself. 10
Tagore’s stay in Santiniketan with its wide horizons, and extreme weather conditions gave him
a greater feel for nature. He would keep his windows wide open to the glare of the midday
sun in the extreme heat of summer and to gusts of rain- bearing winds during the monsoons.
Each morning he woke up before dawn so that the first rays of the sun would stream in
through the open windows onto his face. 11 His affinity to nature and sense of connect with
life primordial found expression in some of his best nature songs that he wrote now.
In his spiritual music he moved beyond congregational requirements of the Brahmo Samaj
to subtle themes. Nature and man, the poet seemed to suggest, were one, breathing the
same life and experiencing the same joys, sorrows and passions. There was a total merging
of the individual (jivatma) with the infinite (paramatma), both having an equal role in finding
creative fruition.
While patriotic songs of the first phase had been encouraged principally by his involvement
in the Swadeshi movement of Bengal brought on by the partition of Bengal in 1905, his later
songs in this genre were primarily of inspiration and courage. Singularly free of jingoism,
they had no trace of Hindu chauvinism and exclusivity. They were soul-strengthening
resolutions. Tagore was convinced that unity of the Hindu and Muslim communities could
not be ensured by political pacts alone. Instead, he felt that the inclusive wisdom of the
bauls, whose songs were sung by Hindus and Muslims alike, held the key to peace. 12