ABSTRACT
Rabindranath Tagore died on 7 August 1941, at his ancestral residence at Jorasanko in Calcutta. As the news of his death spread, the city witnessed scenes of intense mass frenzy on an unprecedented scale. Rabindranath Tagore's death was a different case altogether. He was no politician; he had always been critical about the nature of anticolonial agitations and was distant from the established nationalist groups, both Gandhian and revolutionary. In September 1937, in the middle of a conversation with the inmates of Santiniketan, Rabindranath suddenly lost consciousness. There are many first-hand reports of Tagore's death, recorded by persons close to him and who were prepared to document almost every moment of his last journey. One such memoir is by Rani Chanda. The expression of public sorrow at the death of Tagore was all the more a shocking experience for the people close to him, because Tagore himself had few warm associations with the city of Calcutta which he cherished.
