Hello and thank you for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service.

All this week we're bringing you programmes related to India because the partition of

India happened 75 years ago in August 1947. Today we go back to August 1941 and the death

of one of the greatest poets the country has ever produced.

The Bindranath Tagore, Fahana Hyder, has been speaking to Professor Barsha Bifraza,

director of the Scotty Centre of Tagore Studies.

The voice of Robindranath Tagore singing in Bengali, a song that he'd written and composed himself.

He was a most remarkable figure of a man.

With his high headdress, his magnificent forehead, his flowing hair and beard,

and his great flashing eyes, there was indeed nothing small or petty about Robindranath Tagore.

He was a poet, a painter, a novelist, a songwriter, a dramatist and a musician.

That was the Francis Law, a newspaper editor in Mumbai, speaking to the BBC about Tagore.

Known as the Bard of Bengal or South Asia's William Shakespeare,

Tagore penned over a thousand poems and two thousand songs, including the National Anthems of

India and Bangladesh. He was born in 1861 to a wealthy family in Kolkata or Calcutta as it was

then known. Professor Barsha Bifraza is director of the Scotty Centre of Tagore Studies at Edinburgh

Napier University. It was a household where there was a meeting of the East and the West.

Robindranath says that he was born in that confluence of cultures, Hindu, Muslim and English.

Robindranath Tagore started writing when he was a boy. The Tagores were an extremely cultured

family, hosting plays and recitals of Bengali and Western classical music. Artists often

passed through the Tagore home. He was very loved in his family. He was the 14th child,

the last surviving child. Everybody loved Ruby. He came to Britain for the first time in 1878

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