ABSTRACT
Rabindra Niith Tagore is known in the West chiefly as a writer of lyric poetry, but he is very much more than a poet. Indeed, there are probably very few living men who have exhibited such remarkable versatility. How many-sided are his activities will be realized when one remembers that besides being a poet, he is also a dramatist of real distinction, a novelist, a literary critic, a renowned educationist, a religious teacher, a social reformer, and a writer of political and historical tracts, ethical treatises, children's books and poems and miscellaneous essays. But one thing is common to every field of his literary effort, which is that it is always unmistakably affected by his own personal resthetic outlook and philosophical ideas. Through each one of his mediums of expression, he discloses the innermost workings of his mind and his life's varied experiences, and by the sheer magic of words he weaves all his work into forms of rare beauty and meaning. The form may differ endlessly, but the essence remains always the same, namely, the expression of his own self. Primarily he is a critic of life-not merely life as we see it, clothed in its physical trappings and social and moral conventions, but life that is much larger and deeper than the human mind can comprehend. Our object is to discuss his dramatic work in close relation to this particular aspect of his creative consciousness, which is all the while seeking to express in his works his literary ideas, resthetic beliefs, and the spiritual
meaning of his philosophy of life. It should be pointed out at the very outset that Rabindra Nath has tried to keep himself scrupulously aloof from the professional Bengali stage. He has written and produced most of his plays independently. His dramatic work has developed along lines of its own, quite distinct from those which have hitherto marked the evolution of the main body of the modern Bengali drama. He has not written plays for the public but has rather created a public for his plays. So from a purely professional point of view his dramatic work may be said to have made very little impression on the ordinary Bengali play-goer, although its originality and power of appeal are almost undisputed among those whom we may regard as the" high-brow" enthusiasts of the Bengali drama.
