Is Rabindranath Tagore South Asia’s greatest literary figure?

[cricketjoshila]

Is rabindranath Tagore south asias biggest literary figure

Received nobel prize for literature

Wrote national anthem of two countries

Influenced a third national anthem

Thats unmatched

 

[sweep_shot]

Why post this in the cricket section?

Tagore is overrated.

 

[Bhaijaan]

Its Ved Vyas for me bro.

However Tagore da is fighting for the second spot with Chetan Bhagat surely.

 

[DeadlyVenom]

I don't know much about him. Any good places to start?

 

[Local.Dada]

For Bengalis absolutely and one of the most influential to come out of India for sure but there are such revolutionary and beacons of literature in every region/language in South Asia where linguistics/ language is a huge part of culture.

 

[Red-Indian]

I don't particularly like his poetry or his writing (maybe because I can't read them in the original) but there's no doubt he's the most influential.

It's tough though because South Asia is larger and more diverse than Europe. Yes Shakespeare is probably Europe's best known literary figure but every region in South Asia like in Europe has their own revered figures and would barely have read or even heard of even these legendary writers.

 

[cricketjoshila]

For Bengalis absolutely and one of the most influential to come out of India for sure but there are such revolutionary and beacons of literature in every region/language in South Asia where linguistics/ language is a huge part of culture.

Why only bengalis? Read what yeats wrote about tagore,

I am not going to into ancient and medieval history, i am talking about about modern literature as we know it it

 

[Prince of Dorne]

Without even a shadow of doubt, could not care less about the Nobel or any kind of white validation, he is indeed the greatest literary figure from South Asia and arguably the greatest ever to hold the pen, hell, set everything else aside his music composition alone is better than everything else I heard so far except Led Zepp and Ali Akbar Khan.

 

[Prince of Dorne]

I don't particularly like his poetry or his writing (maybe because I can't read them in the original) but there's no doubt he's the most influential.

It's tough though because South Asia is larger and more diverse than Europe. Yes Shakespeare is probably Europe's best known literary figure but every region in South Asia like in Europe has their own revered figures and would barely have read or even heard of even these legendary writers.

He was a polymath and one of the greatest at that, not just a poet. He was a novelist, a playwright, a prose maestro, a storyteller, music composer, a painter, and an educationist. I am probably missing a dozen other things that he excelled at. Imagine a desert storm era Sachin on steroids with no tennis elbow and a dip in performance; hell, even that falls embarrassingly short.

 

[KB]

Tagore is a figure I would like to learn a lot more about.

Tagore loved India deeply - the rivers and villages, the spiritual and philosophical traditions that inspired the lyrics that eventually become national anthems. Yet he was also profoundly and thoughtfully critical of modern political nationalism, turned off by its potential aggressive nature and seeing it as an obstacle to a wider sense of human unity grounded in an appreciation for plurality and complexity.

Tagore never lost sight of the wider human community. In a splendid passage, in one of his letters in January 1921, he acknowledges that while he was once animated by the ‘heat and the movement’ of the Swadeshi era:

“After a certain point is reached, I find myself obliged to separate myself from my own people with whom I have been working, and my soul cries out: The complete man must not be sacrificed to the patriotic man, or even to the merely moral man. To me humanity is rich and large and many-sided.”

Tagore here argues that patriotism could be a reductive identity and refused to shrink his soul to fit within the borders of a map. But he also rejected rigid moralism and dogma (“moral man”) which reduced the great complexity and chaos of our inner selves into a dry checklist of rights and wrongs. Instead life was to be experienced in all its fullness and enjoyed for all its plurality.

His message was that when loyalty to a nation or even moral doctrine begins to shrink our shared sense of humanity, it should give us all pause.

 

[Prince of Dorne]

He was a polymath and one of the greatest at that, not just a poet. He was a novelist, a playwright, a prose maestro, a storyteller, music composer, a painter, and an educationist. I am probably missing a dozen other things that he excelled at. Imagine a desert storm era Sachin on steroids with no tennis elbow and a dip in performance; hell, even that falls embarrassingly short.

Meant *no dip in performance*