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Melvyn Bragg

Chandrika Kaul

Bashabi Fraser

John Stevens

Simon Tillotson

In Our Time: Tagore

Tagore

07/05/2015

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Tagore

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rabindranath Tagore.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been called one of the outstanding thinkers of the 20th century and the greatest poet India has ever produced. His Nobel followed publication of Gitanjali, his English version of some of his Bengali poems. WB Yeats and Ezra Pound were great supporters. Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861 and educated partly in Britain; King George V knighted him, but Tagore renounced this in 1919 following the Amritsar Massacre. A key figure in Indian nationalism, Tagore became a friend of Gandhi, offering criticism as well as support. A polymath and progressive, Tagore painted, wrote plays, novels, short stories and many songs. The national anthems of India and Bangladesh are based on his poems. 

With

Chandrika Kaul
Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews

Bashabi Fraser
Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University

And

John Stevens
Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS, University of London


Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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