The Author
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), India’s first Nobel Laureate, polymath, philosopher, poet, painter, musician, novelist, essayist, playwright, educationist and more, was a central figure of the Bengal Renaissance, and one of the most influential and creative minds of India. His corpus of work is enormous and astonishing in its range and complexity, including 14 novels, plays, some 60 volumes of verse, more than 100 short stories, over 2,300 songs including the Indian national anthem, and essays on diverse subjects, spanning nationalism, religion and education. He has been translated equally widely, with many of his works being translated into English more than once. Tagore’s stature as a pioneer and founding father of modern India and as an institution remains undiminished.
The Translators
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where he was previously the Director of New Zealand India Research Institute. He has published extensively on the history of Indian nationalism, including From Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India (Second edition, 2014); Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-independence West Bengal, 1947–52 (2009); and (ed) Nationalist Movement in India: A Reader (2009). His other recent works include three co-edited volumes, The Long History of Partition in Bengal: History, Memory, Representations (2024); Caste in Bengal: Histories of Hierarchy, Exclusion, and Resistance (2022); and Calcutta: The Stormy Decades (2015). He is a Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealand and a recipient of the Rabindra Puraskar.
Subhransu Maitra worked as Superintendent (Publication) at Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata. A student of English literature, educated at Presidency College and Banaras Hindu University, Maitra is a poet and a translator between Bengali and English. His published translations include Parineeta: The Betrothed (2017) by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay; Education as Freedom:
Tagore’s Paradigm (2014) by Rabindranath Tagore; Wrong Number and Other Stories (2005) by Mahasweta Devi; and the poems of Sankha Ghosh and Jibanananda Das. When My Mother Sang (2023) is his first collection of poems.