Including The Home and the World & The Red Oleander

Rabindranath Tagore: A BBC Radio Collection

A comprehensive anthology of dramatisations and readings of Tagore's finest works, plus bonus documentaries 
 
Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. A novelist, poet, playwright, composer, artist and philosopher, he wrote both the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems; exchanged ideas with Yeats, Einstein and Gandhi, and was hugely influential in promoting Indian culture to the West. This collection includes some of Tagore's key novels, plays and short stories, as well as his best-known poem and four fascinating biographical programmes. 
 
We begin with two adaptations by award-winning dramatist Tanika Gupta. The Home and the World, starring Indira Varma and Sacha Dhawan, relocates Tagore's classic 1916 novel of love, power and political awakening to a contemporary British Muslim setting. Often acclaimed as Tagore's best play, The Red Oleander stars Saeed Jaffrey and Aileen Gonsalves, and tells the story of a beautiful girl who comes to a gold mining community and foments a revolution against its tyrannical king. 
 
Next up is a dramatisation of the novelette Farewell, My Friend, a romantic, delightful tale of two young lovers starring Sam Dastor and Shireen Shah. It is followed by three short stories: 'The Postmaster' and 'The Kabuliwalah', read by Ronny Jhutti, and 'Wealth Surrendered', read by Renu Setna. 
 
Tagore bared his musical soul in the poem 'Broken Song', read here by Peter Barker, and in Centurions: Rabindranath Tagore, poet William Radice and theatre director Jatinder Verma explain why it ranks as one of the 100 greatest art works of the 20th Century. Tanika Gupta joins presenter Matthew Parris and translator Ketaki Kushari Dyson to share her love of Tagore's writing in Great Lives: Tanika Gupta on Rabindranath Tagore, and Zia Mohyeddin reads a selection of his epistolary observations on English society and customs in Letters from Europe. Concluding the collection, Rabindranath Tagore: The Bard of Bengal explores the life and legacy of South Asia's Shakespeare. 
 
First published 1891 ('The Postmaster'), 1891-2 ('Wealth Surrendered'), 1892 ('The Kabuliwalah'), 1910 ('Broken Song'), 1916 (The Home and the World), 1925 (The Red Oleander), 1929 (Farewell, My Friend) 
 
Contents 
The Home and the World 
The Red Oleander 
Farewell, My Friend 
'The Postmaster' 
'The Kabuliwalah' 
'Wealth Surrendered' 
'Broken Song' 
Centurions: Rabindranath Tagore 
Great Lives: Tanika Gupta on Rabindranath Tagore 
Letters from Europe 
Rabindranath Tagore: The Bard of Bengal 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

The Best of Tagore

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

I know of no man in my time who has done anything in the English language to equal these lyrics. Even as I read them in these literal English translations, they are exquisite in style and thought

W. B. Yeats, introduction to first English edition of Tagore’s Gitanjali (1913).

Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Anthology Editor, Introducer) RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE is Chancellor and Professor of History at Ashoka University of which he was the founding Vice Chancellor. He holds a D. Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. He taught at the University of Calcutta and has held visiting appointments at Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Cruz amongst others. He was the Editor, Editorial Pages, The Telegraph. He is internationally acclaimed as a historian of the revolt of 1857 in India, on which he has published six books. He has also written on other themes relating to the history of modern India. His most recent book is Tagore &amp; Gandhi: Walking Alone, Walking Together. Rabindranath Tagore (Author) Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Rabindranath Tagore published his first volume of poetry at the age of thirteen. He went on to become a towering figure in Bengali and world literature. 
 
Tagore was remarkably productive over his long life; his complete works fill 32 large volumes and include 60 collections of verse and more than 2,000 songs, two of which have become the national anthems of India and of Bangladesh. In both his poetry and prose he was a great innovator, continually breaking with tradition, endlessly changing his own style, so this volume is full of variety and surprise. If lyric poetry was the anchor of Tagore's creativity, he also wrote devotional, satirical, humorous and even nonsense verse. 
 
His themes were as varied as his forms - love, the beauty of nature; philosophy, politics, his hopes and fears for his country, and for the future of mankind. In his fiction he showed profound sympathy for the perspectives of women, children and the poor. This selection - a substantial 900+ pages - offers a representative overview of his work, including his best-known novel, The Home and the World, and his best-known play, Red Oleander, as well as many short stories, novellas, essays, poems and songs. 
 
Rudrangshu Mukherjee has drawn on the work of various translators, from early renderings by Surendranath Tagore, the author's nephew, to modern ones by William Radice, Kaiser Haq and Madhuchchhanda Karlekar. Tagore translated some of his work himself, and all the essays and lectures were composed in English

Nationalism

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A cultural icon of Bengal and India, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

Tagore was a fierce opponent of British rule in India. In this work he discusses the resurgence of the East and the challenge it poses to Western supremacy, calling for a future beyond nationalism, based instead on cooperation and racial tolerance. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Selected Short Stories

'Like Gandhi and Nehru, Tagore devised a toolkit with which to fashion the modern Indian self' Sunil Khilnani, Independent

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Nobel laureate for literature (1913), was one of modern India's greatest poets and writers

Poet, novelist, painter and musician, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is the grand master of Bengali culture. Written during the 1890s, the stories in this selection brilliantly recreate vivid images of Bengali life and landscapes in their depiction of peasantry and gentry, casteism, corrupt officialdom and dehumanizing poverty. Yet Tagore is first and foremost India's supreme Romantic poet, and in these stories he can be seen reaching beyond mere documentary realism towards his own profoundly original vision.

The Home and the World

A leading figure in the Indian nationalist movement and a friend of Gandhi, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Nobel laureate for literature (1913), was one of the greatest writer in modern Indian literature.

Set on a Bengali noble's estate in 1908, this is both a love story and a novel of political awakening. The central character, Bimala, is torn between the duties owed to her husband, Nikhil, and the demands made on her by the radical leader, Sandip. Her attempts to resolve the irreconciliable pressures of the home and world reflect the conflict in India itself, and the tragic outcome foreshadows the unrest that accompanied Partition in 1947.

Selected Poems

'An important book ... William Radice's introduction is excellent' Sunday Times

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A cultural icon of Bengal and India, he became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. 
 
 
William Radice was born in 1951 in London. He is a poet and a scholar and translator of Bengali, and has written or edited nearly thirty books. He has also translated Tagore's short stories and his novel, The Home and the World, for Penguin.

The poems of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) are among the most haunting and tender in Indian and in world literature, expressing a profound and passionate human yearning. His ceaselessly inventive works deal with such subjects as the interplay between God and the world, the eternal and transient, and with the paradox of an endlessly changing universe that is in tune with unchanging harmonies. Poems such as 'Earth' and 'In the Eyes of a Peacock' present a picture of natural processes unaffected by human concerns, while others, as in 'Recovery - 14', convey the poet's bewilderment about his place in the world. And exuberant works such as 'New Rain' and 'Grandfather's Holiday' describe Tagore's sheer joy at the glories of nature or simply in watching a grandchild play.

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors of his generation. In these two short stories – ‘The Broken Nest’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ – he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is lost.

Rabindranath Tagore

Books by Rabindranath Tagore

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