Kabuliwallah Stories – Rabindranath Tagore

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Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861. He was the fourteenth child of Debendranath Tagore, head of the Brahmo Samaj. The family house at Jorasanko was a hive of cultural and intellectual activity and Tagore started writing at an early age. In the 1890s he lived in rural East Bengal, managing family estates. He was involved in the Swadeshi campaign against the British in the early 1900s. In 1912 he travelled to England with Gitanjali, a collection of English poems, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore was knighted in 1915, an honour he repudiated in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. In the 1920s and 1930s he lectured extensively in America, Europe, the Far East and Middle East. Proceeds from these and from his Western publications went to Visva-Bharati, his school and university at Santiniketan. Tagore was a prolific writer; his works include poems, novels, plays, short stories, essays and songs. Late in his life Tagore took up painting, exhibiting in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London and New York. He died in 1941.

William Radice, born in 1951, has pursued a double career as a poet and as a scholar and translator of Bengali. He has been a lecturer of Bengali at SOAS, University of London, since 1988, and from 1999 to 2002 was head of the departments of South and South East Asia. Well known for his translations of Tagore’s works, he has also published nine books of his own poems. His literary work in recent years include Myths and Legends of India, Teach Yourself Bengali, A Hundred Letters from England, The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad, which is a translation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnadbadh kabya, and opera libretti. He has lectured widely in Europe, North America and South Asia, and has been given prizes and honours in both India and Bangladesh.

Penguin Evergreens are collections of classic stories-fiction and non-fiction – that build on Penguin’s original paperback mission of publishing the best books for everyone to enjoy. The Evergreens are drawn from Penguin’s wide-ranging list of classics and bestsellers by some of the most recognized writers in the Indian Subcontinent.