Sadhana - Tagore, Rabindranath

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Résumé :
One of India's most famous writers offers an articulate and accessible introduction to Indian spirituality. This collection of essays by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore is based on a lecture series he presented at Harvard University. Oriented towards a Western readership, the essays examine different aspects of Indian culture and philosophy. They address as their central concerns the relationship between humanity and the divine, the ultimate goal of human existence, and how this goal can be achieved. An author whose creative works are infused with spirituality, Tagore is uniquely qualified to communicate the sacred underpinnings of Indian life to the outsider. Sadhana is an enjoyable and edifying read.

Biographie:
? Rabindranath Tagore, was a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent. 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 verse of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.[7] Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his elegant prose and magical poetry remain largely unknown outside Bengal.[8] He is sometimes referred to as the Bard of Bengal.[9]
? A Brahmo Hindu from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan District[10] and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.[11] At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhanusi?ha (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. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist, he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
? Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics 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. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work