Tanika Gupta on Rabindranath Tagore
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Playwright Tanika Gupta chooses as her Great Life, a man who is a hero to Bengali speakers across the World, Rabindranath Tagore.
Born in 1861, to a wealthy family in Calcutta, Tagore would be the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, his work spanning every genre. He was also a humanist, philanthropist, and thinker, whose friends included Yeats and Gandhi.
Tagore began writing in his boyhood, and his work reflects a deep feeling for the landscape of Bengal. His plays, essays, stories and poetry quickly found a ready audience in Bengali speakers. And in 1913, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his poetry collection ‘Gitanjali', or ‘Song Offerings', his reputation was established world-wide.
Tagore's brand of humanism, his anti-imperial politics, and his literature, took him around the World. It also convinced him of the dangers of European aggression and the need for Indian Independence. He died just six years before it was achieved.
Playwright Tanika Gupta joins Matthew Parris to share her deep love of Tagore's work and her early experiences of performing it. She is joined by Tagore's translator, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, to discuss Tagore's vast legacy to Bengali speakers and beyond.
Produced by Lizz Pearson.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Once you've wrapped up this podcast, how about trying a very British cult? |
| 0:06.0 | What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are? |
| 0:10.0 | I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas. |
| 0:16.4 | Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth. |
| 0:23.0 | Discover more of our biggest podcast from 2003. |
| 0:27.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.0 | Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear. |
| 0:35.0 | On the 7th of August 1941, a man died whom millions would mourn. |
| 0:40.0 | At his funeral, huge crowds gathered to follow the cortege, struggling to pluck hairs from the head of the corpse as it was carried on its way through the dusty Calcutta streets to its destination, the funeral pyre. The body was not yet consumed in the flames, |
| 0:55.8 | yet some of the mourners burst forward, desperate for keepsakes, a fragment, |
| 1:00.0 | something of his they might call their own. Many already had something they'd learnt by heart his songs, his poems, or read his plays, his essays, his short stories, or perhaps they'd studied at the school he set up and the Ashram. |
| 1:13.0 | Rabindranath Tagore was indeed leaving a legacy, a body of work across the disciplines bequeathed |
| 1:19.6 | both to his native Bengal and the world beyond. He was a master playwright, poet, thinker, songwriter. |
| 1:27.0 | The anthems of both India and Bangladesh were written by him. |
| 1:30.0 | He gained international recognition when he became the first non-European to win the |
| 1:35.1 | Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and he's remembered alongside Shakespeare and Goeter, Dante and Tolstoy. |
| 1:42.4 | He's The Great Life chosen this week by our guest, the playwright |
| 1:46.0 | Tanika Gupta M be. |
| 1:48.0 | Tannika, why to go? |
| 1:50.0 | Well, to be honest, I come from a Bengali family my parents came to London in the 60s and |
| 1:58.0 | they were both students at Tagore's Ashram which is called sh Shantinigathan, which means the abode of peace. |
| 2:05.9 | My father was a singer, my mother was a dancer, although they were both studying at the university, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.