Rabindranath Tagore - Nobel Laureate| Learn English from His Inspiring Life with Prof. Sumita Roy

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]One of the best ways to practice your speaking is to talk about the lives of great people.

[00:00:08]On this channel, we have a series called Learn English from inspiring lives.

[00:00:15]Today, we shall have the life of Rabindranath Tagore.

[00:00:23]Because today, the 9th is celebrated as his birthday.

[00:00:32]Rabindranath Tagore was a great poet and composer of songs, a dramatist, a novelist.

[00:00:43]He was also a painter, philosopher, and visionary genius who brought honor to the colonized Indian nation.

[00:00:55]He introduced new forms of prose and poetry into Bengali literature.

[00:01:03]He started using colloquial language in writing stories.

[00:01:09]Colloquial, check the meaning. It means informal, everyday, common spoken language.

[00:01:18]His writings include social and political satire.

[00:01:24]Check the meaning of satire. It is to talk about something which is wrong and show how to correct it.

[00:01:33]Tagore's collection of poetry titled Gitanjali won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

[00:01:44]He was the first non-European to win the prestigious Nobel Prize.

[00:01:53]Rabindranath Tagore was much inspired by Indian culture.

[00:01:59]He carried Indian culture to the West.

[00:02:04]He also brought the best of Western culture to India.

[00:02:12]The British government knighted him in 1915.

[00:02:17]Knighthood is when you get the title of sir. The king of England or the queen of England gives this title.

[00:02:27]Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 where many people were innocent people were killed. Renounce is to give up.

[00:02:44]This inspiring Indian personality that is Rabindranath Tagore was born in Kolkata then called Calcutta on 7th May 1861.

[00:02:59]His birthday is usually celebrated on 8th or 9th depending on the Indian calendar.

[00:03:05]This year it is on 9th May.

[00:03:09]The well-known spiritual leader of the Brahmo Samaj Debendranath Tagore was his father.

[00:03:17]And his mother was Sarada Devi.

[00:03:22]Rabindranath was not much interested in formal education in his childhood.

[00:03:31]He attended different schools for some time, but later was tutored at home.

[00:03:40]Rabindranath was extremely creative right from his childhood.

[00:03:46]He started writing poetry by At he was about 8 years old.

[00:03:54]At the age of 16, he published some very interesting compositions.

[00:04:04]Rabindranath's grandfather, Raja Dwarkanath Tagore, was a Western-educated industrialist.

[00:04:18]He made great effort to establish the reputation of India abroad.

[00:04:28]According to the family tradition, Rabindranath was also sent to London in 1878 to study law.

[00:04:40]But young Rabindranath had no interest in law.

[00:04:46]He shifted to literature and studied this with special reference to Shakespeare.

[00:04:54]Rabindranath returned to India after his brief stay and study in London.

[00:05:02]In 1891, he was sent to East Bengal, now Bangladesh.

[00:05:11]He stayed there for a decade managing his family estates.

[00:05:19]He sometimes lived in a houseboat on River Padma during this period.

[00:05:26]Here he became close to rural people.

[00:05:31]Many of his stories are about village life and rural people.

[00:05:39]In these 10 years, he wrote some of his best poems.

[00:05:46]The play Chitra Angada, based on the Mahabharat, was written at this time.

[00:05:54]Tagore was passionate about new forms of education.

[00:06:01]In 1901, Tagore started an experimental school.

[00:06:08]He named it Shantiniketan, which means the abode of peace.

[00:06:16]Here he experimented with a combination of Western and Indian education.

[00:06:26]The British missionary, C.F. Andrews, was a close friend of Tagore.

[00:06:35]He supported Tagore in his educational, social, and international work.

[00:06:44]In 1921, the school became a university called Visva-Bharati.

[00:06:54]Tagore's famous collection of poems, Gitanjali, was introduced to the West in 1912.

[00:07:04]It was greatly appreciated by W.B. Yeats, the Irish Nobel laureate, and many others in the West.

[00:07:16]Tagore spoke strongly about nationalism and Indian independence.

[00:07:25]But, he did not live till 1947 to see the liberation of India from the British rule.

[00:07:36]From the time he won the Nobel Prize, Tagore began traveling globally.

[00:07:44]He was invited to Europe, America, and East Asian countries.

[00:07:53]He gave lectures in different parts of the world.

[00:07:59]He also read his poems at many of these meetings.

[00:08:07]During all these events, he spoke eloquently about India's independence.

[00:08:16]Eloquent means very powerful, very inspiring.

[00:08:22]Tagore is considered a prominent leader of India's independence movement.

[00:08:32]Gandhiji was deeply influenced by the ideas of nationalism of Tagore.

[00:08:39]He respectfully called Tagore Gurudev.

[00:08:46]Tagore, Gandhi, and C.F. Andrews exchanged letters on various important topics.

[00:08:56]These are valuable historical documents today.

[00:09:04]These three leaders dreamt of an India where everyone lived like a single family.

[00:09:16]Tagore's poem Where the mind is without fear talks about his vision of free India.

[00:09:28]The national anthem of free India, Jana Gana Mana, is composed by Rabindranath Tagore.

[00:09:39]At the age of 60, Tagore took up painting.

[00:09:46]In the last 17 years of his life, he painted more than 2,000 pictures.

[00:09:57]The first exhibition of his paintings was held in Paris in 1930.

[00:10:07]At the age of 80, Tagore passed away in the same house where he was born.

[00:10:17]The inspiring life of Rabindranath Tagore is a role model for everyone even today.

[00:10:27]With that, we come to the end of this video.

[00:10:31]Please try to speak in English about Rabindranath Tagore based on all the ideas which I have given you. Then comment and let me know how you benefited in speaking about this great person. Thank you.

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