Our attempt in Reliving Tagore: This book is to make our 21st century readers relive Tagore, get a feel for his life and times, his paintings, his romanticism, his obsession with afterlife, his radical thinking, his gender-sensitivity, his connotations and nuances, his rebellion against classicism in art and language, his diversity of thought and feeling, his simplicity of ideas and complexities of presentation, the stories within stories, his perception of caste, class, community,the inconclusiveness in the endings at times. In this collection we try to bring all of this together in just one book, a book that will give the modern reader a glimpse of the literary span Tagore encompassed, avant-garde. At sixteen, Tagore released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha (Sun Lion), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.[By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays were political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, ‘and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation’, Wikipedia tells our net-loving generation. The evils of caste and religious persecution did not escape him as we find in the stories The Uninvited and The Handmaiden’s Prayer, nor did the evil of dowry , all practices that exist eventoday .The need for truth and justice continues as seen in the stories, Ramkanai’s Folly and Gandhari’s Plea, a play Tagore had written as early as in 1898.
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