ABSTRACT
In an article in Bengali on Rabīndrasangīt, published in 1967, the great film director Satyajit Ray distinguished between Tagore the poet, Tagore the composer of songs, and Tagore the painter, according to his technical proficiency. As a poet-and indeed as a writer of fiction and drama-Tagore was an absolute virtuoso. He could do anything with language, could write in any number of verse-forms and metres, and invented many new forms of his own. As a singer and composer, Tagore was extremely accomplished too. His knowledge of India’s musical traditions, both classical and folk, was profound, and recordings that have survived show him to be a singer of great flexibility and subtlety. He was however somewhat impatient with rigid musical orthodoxy, adopting an innovative and creative approach in his use of rāga and tāla. As a painter, Tagore was largely self-taught. He lacked academic training in draughtsmanship (though some early sketches that have been discovered show him to be more skilled in that area than was previously thought), and by his unique, expressionist style he made a virtue of his technical limitations.2
