To go I said I'm not a philosopher. I mean people regarded him as a philosopher, but he rejected that label

So I think his whole view of life was profoundly influenced by the fact that he was an artist

There seems to be practically no aspect of life that he didn't

Try to touch to alter to somehow

Bring around to his ideal of how things should be

That's the writer Anita Bessai on Rabindranath Tagore

This is our we pull back what Anita Dessai calls the dusty veils that have hidden his memory from history

This is the man who bestowed the title Mahatma on Gandhi

Tagore was championed by yates and pound to become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature in

1913 the Indian and Bangladesh National Anthems today are Tagore's compositions and you may have seen a

Picture of him without knowing it a famous photo of Tagore in long gray beard and flowing robe

Sitting with Einstein in a suit and tie in Einstein's Berlin home where they debated the deepest nature of reality

I'm Christopher Tippet and this is on being

Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 5th 1861 in Calcutta his wealthy Bengali family also owned vast estates in what is now Bangladesh

As an adult he managed these estates and conducted social and educational experiments there

Some of which have remnants in India today later will draw out Anita Dessai on Tagore as a figure in her Bengali heritage

And for her as a modern Indian writer but first British author Andrew Robinson

He co-authored a biography of Tagore called the myriad-minded man

As we begin I'd love to hear

How you first discovered Tagore what was your earliest awareness of him?

What was the context in which that happened?

That was through the films of

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