Biography rabindranath tagore pdf file

1 Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)* A Biographical Sketch Uma Das Gupta Family Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861. He belonged to a remarkable family.

They traced their connection as far back to the end of the seventeenth century with the area now occupied by Calcutta, India.

Biography rabindranath tagore pdf file

Their ancestors migrated from the district of Jessore in Eastern Bengal to the village of Gobindapore on the River Hooghly where Fort William of Calcutta was later built.1 In Rabindranath’s words, his ancestors came with the ‘earliest tide of the fluctuating fortune of the East India Company’.2 They left their inherited priestly duties as high Brahmins to become banians or brokers to the Europeans.

The villagers of Gobindapore addressed their Brahmin guests as thakur or ‘holy sir’ which was anglicised into ‘Tagore’ as the family’s title. In Bengali their title is still Thakur. According to Blair B. Kling, a historian of the ‘age of enterprise’ in Eastern