Where the mind is without fear - Ravindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear

—Ravindranath Tagore (BORN: May 7, 1861   Kolkata, India- DIED: Aug 7, 1941 (aged 80)  Kolkata, India)

—Nobel Prize (1913)

—Knighted (1915)

—Tagore: Life & Works

—Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter

—introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit.

—He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India.

—In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

—Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915,

—but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre.

NOTABLE WORKS

— Manasi (1890) – collection of poems

—Chitrangada (1892; Chitra) - play

— Sonar Tari (1894; The Golden Boat) – collection of poems

—Gitanjali (Bengali) (1910)

—Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (English) (1912)

— short stories- Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire (1916)

Shantiniketan

—In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at Shantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions.

—He settled permanently at the school, which became Visva-Bharati University 

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.

—Analysis

—'Where the mind is without fear'  is a prayer to God, the Father and it appears in Tagor's Gitanjali (song-offerings).

—The poem was written when India was under British colonial rule, struggling for freedom. But for Tagore, freedom was more than merely political; it was to be truly spiritual. The present poem reads like a prayer for that spiritual freedom.

—True freedom means liberation from the shackles of fear.  The head 'held high' is a manifest posture of that liberated mind.

—The whole world of man must be re-integrated; narrow, parochial walls fragmenting the world are to be demolished for achieving this holistic oneness.

—Words must issue forth from 'the depth of truth'; that is to say, language shall have to be liberated from the half-truths and lies of expediency.

—Untiring efforts should be directed towards the goal of perfection.

—Reason is like a 'clear stream', the transparency of which should not have been swallowed up by outdated and irrelevant customs--'the dreary desert sand of dead habit'.

—Analysis

—True freedom lies in the mind which is always led forward by the universal mind of the Father into 'ever-widening thought and action'.

—Tagore prays for 'that heaven of freedom', seeks the grace of the Father, to be awakened to a new spiritual consciousness.

—The poem combines patriotic zeal with fervent spritual longing. The urge for political freedom is enhanced and tranformed into a moral-intellectual freedom of the mind.

—The poem is also remarkable for its simplicity of diction and images.

(This content is published for educational purpose only with due acknowledgment to the sources used.)