ABSTRACT
A poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, composer,
painter and educationalist, Rabindranath
Tagore was a modern-day Renaissance man,
who dominated the cultural life of Bengal for
the first half of the twentieth century. He was
the seventh, and the youngest, son of
Debendranath Tagore, a wealthy Brahmin
landlord of Calcutta, who was a founder of
the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist Hindu move-
ment which emphasizes monotheism. He was
tutored at home, and became proficient in
Bengali, Sanskrit and English. At sixteen he
was sent to England to study law, a subject
that failed to interest him. After his marriage
at twenty-three he left Calcutta to manage
the family estate at Silaidaha. He did so for
seventeen years, and then moved to
Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), the family
retreat near Bolpur, about a hundred miles
north of Calcutta. Here he founded an
experimental school for boys which blos-
somed into an international university,
Visvabharati, twenty years later.
