Rabindranath Tagore's Unfulfilled Aspiration for an Independent India
Rabindranath Tagore singing the poem which later became the Indian national anthem.
August 15, 2022
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote the poem which became the national anthem of India after its independence from British rule. One of his other poems is the national anthem of Bangladesh and the Sri Lankan poet, who wrote his country’s anthem, was also influenced by Tagore.
Today, as India celebrates its 75th anniversary of Independence from British rule, here is what Tagore envisioned in a free India:
Where The Mind Is Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
This poem is included in Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, which was published in 1912. The next year the Bengali writer won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Tagore also wrote dramas, novels, short stories, critical reviews, philosophical treatises, journals and memoirs. In addition, he was a musician, painter, actor-producer-director and educator.
He set up the Santi Niketan School and the Vishva-Bharati University in Bolpur, near Kolkata, at an ashram founded by his father.
Tagore made notable contributions as a social reformer. In 1915, the British Government honored him as a knight. He returned the award in 1919 to protest the Massacre in Amritsar, at Jallianwalla Bagh, where British troops shot and killed around 400 unarmed Indian demonstrators.
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