Indian English Writer
Rabindranath Tagore
Poetry
Tagore's poetic style, which
proceeds from a lineage
established by 15th- and 16th-
century Vaishnava poets, ranges
from classical formalism to the
comic, visionary, and ecstatic. He
was influenced by the atavistic
mysticism of Vyasa and other rishi-
authors of the Upanishads, the
Bhakti-Sufi mystic Kabir, and
Ramprasad Sen.[132] Tagore's most
innovative and mature poetry
embodies his exposure to Bengali
rural folk music, which included mystic Baul ballads such as those of
the bard Lalon.[133][134] These, rediscovered and repopularised by
Tagore, resemble 19th-century Kartābhajā hymns that emphasise
inward divinity and rebellion against bourgeois bhadralok religious and
social orthodoxy.[135][136] During his Shelaidaha years, his poems took on
a lyrical voice of the moner manush, the Bāuls' "man within the heart"
and Tagore's "life force of his deep recesses", or meditating upon the
jeevan devata—the demiurge or the "living God within".[25] This figure
connected with divinity through appeal to nature and the emotional
interplay of human drama. Such tools saw use in his Bhānusiṃha
poems chronicling the Radha-Krishna romance, which were repeatedly
revised over the course of seventy years.[137][138]
The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my
voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a
star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that
training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a
tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and
one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost
shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said 'Here art
thou!'
The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand
streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'
“
”
— Song XII, Gitanjali, 1913.[139]
Tagore reacted to the halfhearted uptake of modernist and realist
techniques in Bengali literature by writing matching experimental
works in the 1930s.[140] These include Africa and Camalia, among the
better known of his latter poems. He occasionally wrote poems using
Shadhu Bhasha, a Sanskritised dialect of Bengali; he later adopted a
more popular dialect known as Cholti Bhasha. Other works include
Manasi, Sonar Tori (Golden Boat), Balaka (Wild Geese, a name redolent
of migrating souls),[141] and Purobi. Sonar Tori's most famous poem,
dealing with the fleeting endurance of life and achievement, goes by
the same name; hauntingly it ends: Shunno nodir tire rohinu poŗi / Jaha
chhilo loe gêlo shonar tori—"all I had achieved was carried off on the
golden boat—only I was left behind." Gitanjali (গীতাঞ্জলি) is Tagore's best-
known collection internationally, earning him his Nobel.[142]
Gloss by Tagore scholar Reba Som:
Forgive me my weariness O Lord
Should I ever lag behind
For this heart that this day trembles so
And for this pain, forgive me, forgive me, O Lord
For this weakness, forgive me O Lord,
If perchance I cast a look behind
And in the day's heat and under the burning sun
The garland on the platter of offering wilts,
For its dull pallor, forgive me, forgive me O Lord.[144]
Tagore's poetry has been set to music by composers: Arthur
Shepherd's triptych for soprano and string quartet, Alexander
Zemlinsky's famous Lyric Symphony, Josef Bohuslav Foerster's cycle
of love songs, Leoš Janáček's famous chorus "Potulný šílenec" ("The
Wandering Madman") for soprano, tenor, baritone, and male chorus—
JW 4/43—inspired by Tagore's 1922 lecture in Czechoslovakia which
Janáček attended, and Garry Schyman's "Praan", an adaptation of
Tagore's poem "Stream of Life" from Gitanjali. The latter was
composed and recorded with vocals by Palbasha Siddique to
accompany Internet celebrity Matt Harding's 2008 viral video.[145] In
1917 his words were translated adeptly and set to music by Anglo-
Dutch composer Richard Hageman to produce a highly regarded art
song: "Do Not Go, My Love". The second movement of Jonathan
Harvey's "One Evening" (1994) sets an excerpt beginning "As I was
watching the sunrise ..." from a letter of Tagore's, this composer
having previously chosen a text by the poet for his piece "Song
Offerings" (1985).
Khushwant Singh
Khushwant Singh, one of the best -known
Indian writers of all times, was born in 1915 in
Hadali (now in Pakistan). He was educated at
the Government College, Lahore and at King's
College, Cambridge University, and the Inner
Temple in London. He practiced law at the
Lahore High Court for several years before
joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs
in 1947. He began a distinguished career as a
journalist with the All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been
founder-editor of Yojana (1951-1953), editor of the Illustrated weekly of
India (1979-1980), chief editor of New Delhi (1979-1980), and editor of
the Hindustan times (1980-1983). His Saturday column "With Malice
Towards One and All" in the Hindustan times is by far one of the most
popular columns of the day.
Khushwant Singh's name is bound to go down in Indian literary history
as one of the finest historians and novelists, a forthright political
commentator, and an outstanding observer and social critic. In July
2000, he was conferred the "Honest Man of the Year Award" by the
Sulabh International Social Service Organization for his courage and
honesty in his "brilliant incisive writing." At the award ceremony, the
chief minister of Andhra Pradesh described him as a "humourous
writer and incorrigible believer in human goodness with a devil-may-
care attitude and a courageous mind." The Indian external affairs
minister said that the secret of Khushwant Singh's success lay in his
learning and discipline behind the "veneer of superficiality."
Among the several works he published are a classic two-volume
history of the Sikhs, several novels (the best known of which are Delhi,
Train to Pakistan, and The company of women), and a number of
translations and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs.
The Library of Congress has ninety-nine works on and by Khushwant
Singh.
Khushwant Singh was a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house of
the Indian Parliament) from 1980 to 1986. Among other honors, he was
awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he
returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union
Government's siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar).
