My Boyhood Days (Chhelebela, 1940) is Tagore’s second memoir of his childhood days, written when he was nearing eighty. He amusingly called his early days as being under “servocracy”, his word for the reign of servants. He describes, without a trace of self-pity the Spartan life he had to lead under his father’s instruction. He was a lonely boy and his only playmate was his own soul. In this atmosphere he found two of the major motives of his creative life-joy and mystery. This sense of wonder and this delight in the seemingly commonplace experiences of boyhood helped him become a great poet.
One of India’s most cherished renaissance figures, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) put us on the literary map of the world when his Gitanjali was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1913. A poet’s poet, he is a maker of not only modern Indian literature but also the modern Indian mind and civilization. Myriad-minded, he was a poet, short writer, novelist, dramatist, essayist, painter and composer of songs. Gandhi called him the “Great Sentinel”. He world wide acclaim as a social, political, religious and aesthetic thinker, innovator in education and a champion of the “One world” idea makes him a living presence.
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