The Man Who Wrote the Indian and Bangladeshi National Anthems By Russell Shortt Platinum Quality Author

The man is Rabindranath Tagore, the man who linked West and East. But like so many that went before him, and indeed many that came after him, he may very well have being completely overlooked by the Western world. He was born in Calcutta in 1861 into a very wealthy and prominent family, his grandfather had built a huge financial empire, controlling much of what went on in Calcutta. His father was a religious scholar and reformer, his progressive ideas were endemic of the Tagore family, all were forward thinking, all attempted to combine their traditional Indian culture with Western ideas.

Tagore, writing in the language of the common people of Bengal was to link the two worlds, it was to come late in his life when a book of his poetry landed in the lap of a certain WB Yeats who thought the words incredible. Such a vindication, can move mountains, Yeats made him the next best thing, writing the introduction to Gitanjali (1912), Tagore was handed the Nobel Prize the following year, the first non-Westerner to be honoured. Don't get me wrong, he earned it, he deserved it but he would have being simply by-passed by the West if had not being for Yeats' realisation of his greatness. Yet almost as quickly as the West picked him up, they dropped him, he is no longer much read in the West and has being out of fashion since the 1930s. But not in Bengal, not in India, not in Bangladesh, where they have not forgotten his genius.

It's the mistake of the West, not Tagore's, he remains relevant, he remains multi-faceted, he appeals to Hindu and Muslim alike, both India and Bangladesh using his poetry for their national anthems. Tagore is so complete, so ancient, perhaps too much so for the popular, throwaway, all the rage fads which the West so loves to gorge itself on. Tagore is etched from the centuries, drawn from the winds of time, he was well versed in ancient Sanskrit and Hindi texts, possessed a solid understanding of Islamic traditions and was comfortable with early Persian literature. I think Tagore did not hold the West's attention, because he was unquantifiable, he was difficult to box, indeed, the West's analysis of him is simply as an Eastern mystic, which in my opinion is a lazy and boring analysis.

Tragically, even his early patron and one of the West's greatest wordsmiths to have ever dipped the quill, turned upon Tagore to some extent, Yeats castigating a perceived narrowness and repetition. Perhaps, it was the very fact that Tagore was simply Tagore and nothing else that got on the wick of the illustrious scholars of the West. When they first discovered him, they admired his naturalism, his ability to write without igniting or scorning, there was no invention, he was in sync with the world. This is not the normal way of a writer, indeed it goes completely against the grain, did they hate him for what they perceived as his lack of effort or for the fact that it was not what a writer should be or indeed is?