Happy Saturday, everybody. Before we get to today's classic. This week, we put out a playlist of some of our otter and mostly more upbeat episodes out of the archive. We called that playlist Offbeat History. With this ongoing coronavirus pandemic, we thought it might give folks who are practicing some social distancing or sheltering in place, or otherwise having some more time in relative isolation a little something extra to help pass the time. UH and several of our colleagues other shows in our I Heart Podcast family have done the same thing, and so we've launched a new feed for all of those. So it's all of those pandemic collections. It's called the best of Stuff, and you should be able to find it wherever you get your podcasts. And now we'll move on to today's Saturday Classic. It is World Poetry Day, so today we're sharing an episode from the archive that's on a poet, rebind Er, not Tagore, who was a Bengali poet and was the first Asian Nobel laureate. This episode originally came out on November and it is from previous hosts Sarah and Deablina, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm very happy to be joined by my new co host today. Yep, I'm Deblina Chokate boardy I will be joining Sarah and talking about history stuff with you. Yeah. Debilina is the homepage editor here at How Stuff Works. Um, so she basically programs the whole homepage every day. So if you've ever visited the site, you have seen Debilina's handiwork. Yes, and I hope you've clicked on lots of things, clicked lots of links. That's what we all want you to do. But um, Debilina, why don't you give us a little background on this topic and explain why you picked it today? Sure? Well, today's topic is a little bit maybe appropriately maybe inappropriately personal to myself. My parents are from India, there Bengali, and our topic today is Rabat Nath Tagore, who is a well known Bengali figure, probably best known for being the first Asian Nobel laureate. And it's the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth. So it's been in the news a lot lately. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on to celebrate his birth this year, UM, including the Kolkata Film Festival, has showed movies that are based on his works. Um. People are performing his plays, school children are performing his songs and his dance dramas, and so it's a big to do. There's even a traveling train, which seems like probably the best part of the celebration in my opinion. The traveling train is indeed awesome. It is visiting cities throughout India until next May, and each car features kind of a different aspect and it's featuring mostly arts type of stuff. Like the other celebrations are like a museum on the move essentially exactly great. Um, but a lot of people don't really appreciate how just how much of an accomplished artist this guy was. How much of an accomplished poet he was. He was a singer, a philosopher, he was interested in politics, he was an educator, a reformer. Um, he wasn't a politician exactly, but I mean his influence there is pretty great too. He he just touched on so many different things. It's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of inspiring. When you start looking at his life and also sort of makes you feel like not up to that, what have I done? Right? So his work in the political arena and his reformation efforts that you mentioned last, those are probably the things that are lesser known about him. Most people know about his arts, his involvement in the art scene in India, all his contributions, there's far songs, plays, dramas, everything goes. But I think that people don't know what he contributed as far as politics well, and he's not that well known in the West at all. So I mean, we have a lot to explore, even the things he's famous for in India. Definitely one of the things that he is famous for that will take a look at today he was knighted by the British government and some accused him of being a pro British elitist, and there's some controversy around that nighting to tring to talk about a little later we will, um. But really what we're gonna look at is just was he a nationalist or not? Um? Was this just a different approach to nationalism for him? His involvement in politics and um look at his renunciation of the of the knighthood and what surrounded that. So before we get into that, let's look at his beginnings. He was born May six, eighteen sixty one, in Calcutta into a well to do, well educated, very artistic, progressive family. Yeah, he was really exposed to a lot as a kid too. I mean his family would have been reading Sanskrit and ancient Hindu text and Persian literature and known Islamic tradition. So imagine it this really melting pot in his home of learning and um, just a lot of intelligent discussion, I imagine, definitely. I think it was unique to any culture at the time. And let's talk about that time a little bit. It was during British rule in India when he was born, and his family, the two Gores, they were very active in the Bengal Renaissance, which was basically a movement that began in the mid eighteen sixties to protect national culture. It was really to preserve, um, the local culture, the arts, all the things that his family wanted to celebrate, the traditional heritage, and it was a response to Anglicization. So they would throw festivals every year that featured Angian songs and poems and dances, and you mentioned wrestling matches when we were talking about this earlier. I thought that was kind of a surprise thrown in there, but hey, it's a part of culture, right, balanced the arts with a little wrestling boards and aspect of culture. I like sports. So in addition to being an involved in this yearly cultural event to Gore's father, Deba's or not to Gore, he was very involved in something called the Brahmo somag. The Brahma Somaj was basically a movement within Hinduism which was established around or so, and it was an attempt to reform Hinduism. What I mean by that is that it incorporated some aspects of Christianity. It denounced things like polytheism and idol worship, and it also denounced the cast system. So through this they were trying to um enact some sort of social reform. But it never really became that widely popular. Um, yeah, I mean it, even though I guess it's still technically around today, it didn't really grow much past the twentieth century or the early twentieth century. Yeah, it's definitely recognized as a movement within Hinduism, um, but I don't think it reached maybe the heights that to Gore's father wanted it to the Brahmi Smudge movement. It did loose steam the twentieth century. But the important thing about that is that we can see into Gore's life is that it was combining these Eastern and Western ideals that will see kind of throughout his development and in his work and his philosophy. So it's the beginnings of that, I guess. Yeah. But I mean, if we're talking about his childhood intellectual life aside um, he was kind of lonely. He wasn't that close to his parents. This is according to his own memoirs. His dad was gone a lot, traveling on business and um. Some people have suggested that he just didn't really get much attention and love growing up and sort of felt neglected in that respect. Yeah, he did. He does give us accounts of traveling with his father and his adolescence, but from what we can tell, he wasn't really that close to anyone. Roby as he was sometimes called, wasn't really close to his folks. But that might have been a good thing because he was given a lot of freedom. Because of that, he was given a lot of space to develop creatively. And to write, and that's exactly what he did. Yeah, So he started writing at a very young age and kept on doing it over six decades. He ended up writing about two thousand, five hundred songs and twenty eight volumes of poetry, drama, opera, short stories, novels, essays and diaries, plus a bunch of letters. So this is what we meant at the beginning when we're saying this can make you feel a little inadequate. He lived a very long time, but he was writing for his entire life pretty much NonStop, definitely. In eight seventy seven he actually went to England to study for about a year at the University College of London, and while he was there he wrote some more too. He wrote some plays and he was introduced to the western style of music there, but it didn't really last. He ended up coming back after a year, and Um, the only thing that I could find on that is that he thought it was too cold. Legitimate complaints. It's legit. I mean, I've lived in cold places. It's tough. But that was definitely an influence in his life though, I think. Yeah, Um, so you know, he came back to India after just about a year of studies, but he kept on writing and he published his first book of poetry when he was only about seventeen, and then throughout the eighteen eighties he kept on putting out books, all leading up to Manasci, which was published in eighteen nine. And that's sort of one of his first works that is fairly well known, right yep. A lot of his well known poems and some of his well known political satire and commentary is in that book. Uh. And that satire did take kind of a critical tone towards towards his fellow Bengalis, and so we see kind of his starting of his evolution of his political views social views there. Yeah, because that tone starts to change too in the eighteen nineties because of his traveling and a few events that happened. Yep, as we mentioned earlier to Gore's family was pretty wealthy, so they had both a home in the city and they had some estates in East Bengal, which we know today is Bangladesh. So he went for a while in the eighteen nineties to manage his father's estates there and he stayed there for about a decade. But this area was pretty rural, pretty poverty stricken, and he was in close contact with the villagers while he was there, so it really gave him a new outlook, so to speak. He gained a lot of sympathy for the plight of the locals there, I think, and this began to inform his writing a lot, Yeah, and change his style a little too, even. Yeah, well, he started writing in a little bit of a new style at that time. He started experimenting a little bit more with free verse as opposed to earlier when he was I think when he was younger, he was mostly writing in traditional classical Indian forms. Um. Again, part of this whole Bengal Renaissance thing, the idea of preserving culture. It as he got more into the eighteen nineties, started being a little more flexible with his form. So that was one thing. But then also his subject matter I think started to explore more of what he had seen, um, some of more of the issues that he had seen in rural Bengal. And so this informed his work. Yeah, And I mean it wasn't just limited to his own experiences too. He started to be influenced by some world events that were going on, namely the Boer War in eighteen ninety nine and just a little I've tried to do a real podcast on the Bower War before and it didn't really work out. But to give you a basic rundown of it, it was a conflict between the two independent Dutch speaking Bauer republics of South Africa and the British Empire, and it was very bloody. At the end, the Boer Republics agreed to come under the sovereignty of the British Crown. So to Gore was already starting to get kind of interested in politics and political writing when this was going on, but the Boer Are really it got him more interested in it. It it made him look more into world politics, world events. Yep. So let's talk about two Gore's politics a little bit, just to give people an idea of what was going on in his mind and what point of view he was coming from. A lot of people, as we said before, especially anti colonial nationalists, they accused to Gore of being pro British and against the nationalist movement, and this wasn't kind of had some truth to it maybe, but wasn't exactly true. To Gore was against colonialism. Just put that out there. He wanted India to be an independent nation. But he didn't think that the confrontation and non cooperation UM tactics that were used by some of his contemporaries Gandhi obviously a very famous one, Mahandas Gandhi, who was actually his friend UM. So they differed in this way. He was one who who did use these tactics and and they disagree ead on on this, but they were still very good friends. He was actually the first to call Gandhi Mahatma which means great soul, which I just learned that in this podcast. So it wasn't it fun fact. But he certainly wasn't pro British. He wanted India to be its own country exactly. He just didn't think that a change, a straight change in political regime is all that they needed. His answer to the problem of India was education. He proposed that only through education could the their nation really affect true change. UM. Actually, as an example of this, UM I found a statement that he made in nineteen o nine which was actually a letter to an American lawyer who had written him talking about the problem of India and what was going on with colonialism. And it was from a lawyer named Myron H. Phelps and to Gore put it this way to him, he said, for us, there can be no question of blind revolution, but of steady and purposeful education. He said, that's basically what it would take to snap his people out of the quote trance that cold blooded repression had put them under. Yeah, so, I mean some people see this as just a different approach to nationalism. It's it's not revolution, it's revolution through education. Yeah. He wanted his country not just to be independent, but to be independent and truly truly be independent in every aspect um, you know, not just be free from an oppressive government, but to be able to stand alone as a nation. And he thought education was the only way that they would be able to do that. So, yeah, you're right, some people do just think that this is a different approach to nationalism um that he was taking. So a good thing to do, though, if you're interested in education is to start your own school, why not, which is exactly what he did. And he did just that. He founded an experimental school at Shanta Nikitan. It's a small town in West Bengal which means a bode of peace. And this wasn't his first experience with this town. His dad I had founded a oshroom there, so he founded a school there too. And his whole idea behind the school was pretty much goes along with his philosophy that he's had all along. You know. He felt that the East and West needed each other, and so he wanted to incorporate both types of thought into this school that he had. So what he did is he got both Indiana and Western scholars to teach there. And um, it was a different kind of environment than had outdoor classes. They had outdoor classes. That's pretty neat like the sound of that. Um, But just because he's running this school sounds like that would kind of keep you preoccupied. I don't think he's not writing. He's still writing prolifically. Um and unfortunately going through a few personal tragedies in the early nineteen hundreds. His wife died in nineteen o two. Incidentally, they had gotten married when she was only ten years old and he was twenty two. Um. And then after his wife died, he also lost his father and two of his children, all in this really short period of time. Yes, And it was the sadness resulting from these events that inspired several poems. Song poems as They're sometimes called, which he translated into English and published as a collection called Joy in nineteen twelve. And some have said that the fact that he did translate themselves is not necessarily a good thing. Yeah, I mean they still sold well. Apparently between March and November nineteen thirteen there were ten reprints. Um. But yeah, his his translations came under a lot of scrutiny later. If if you've ever come across him in a literature class or something and you're outside of India, it might be some sort of comparison to WB. Yates. And they were friends, if you could call it that, for about thirty seven years. That had a really long relationship with each other. And Yates is largely credited to exposing him to the West, you know, introducing him to the West and helping make him famous there. But they had kind of a tumultuous friendship to say the least. Yep, they actually met through William Rothenstein. He was an artist who hosted to Gore in London in around thirteen so around the time that he was publishing this translation and When to Go arrived. He gave Rothenstein an English translation of these poems and Rothenstein then sent them to Yates and some other some other people about town. Yates apparently loved them. He was really really into them. He apparently said, quote, I've carried the translations of these manuscripts about with me for days, reading it in railway trains or on top of omnibuses or in restaurants, and I've often had to close it less some strangers see how much it moved me. Um, but I don't know. Maybe we should talk about Yates later. Her opinion in a minute, Because this is the this is to Gore's rising star at this point. This is his fame starting to spread throughout the West as well as the East. So people finally got to know him through this. They finally got to know him through this English translation and through people kind of spreading the word about him, and it led I will not people spreading the word, but just his talent, I guess led to him winning the Noble Price for literature. As we mentioned, he was the first Asian to receive such an honor, and after that his fame kind of grew exponentially, fame outside of India, that is, he was knighted by King George, the fifth of Britain in nineteen fifteen, and he started traveling abroad a lot more. He wasn't in India as much as he used to be. He was doing lectures and readings. He went to Europe, North America, South America, Asia, East Asia, um, all over the place. So yeah, he was one of the most famous Indians in the world at this point, perhaps the most famous. But then, unfortunately, something really bad happened. On April thirteenth, nineteen nineteen, in a Star, which is located in the state of Punjab in India. British soldiers fired on an unarmed gathering of men, women and children who had come into the city to partake in a traditional Sikh festival. There was a peaceful nationalist demonstration going on that day, but many of the people who who were around, who were involved in the shooting, they weren't even really a part of the demonstration exactly. They were completely kind of innocent of whatever was going on. So a lot of lives were lost, and we don't know exactly how many. A lot of sources you look at and I think the official number reported by the British Raj was three seventy nine, but some people say that it could have been as many as a thousand or more well. And then the accounts of it in the British press were especially disturbed, and you know, they were treating it as though it had been a riot and the people who were killed had gotten themselves into trouble essentially, and people just had a very unfortunate reaction to to the whole thing that went down. Yeah, it was weird. It was a big cover up um for obvious reasons. They didn't want people to know that this had gone down the way it had, because there was basically no reason for these people being killed, so they had to spin it. They had to spin it and uh. But then there were murmurings, of course, of what had really happened throughout India and too Core caught wind of this, and he was pretty disgusted by the entire situation and it kind of changed his outlook and it definitely changed the way he felt about being a British night. So he wrote a letter to Lord Chelmsford, who was the Viceroy of India at the time, and renounced his knighthood. And if you read his letter, it's interesting because it is so formal, so polite. It's very written in very precise English, but I don't know. He's clearly very very deeply disturbed by what's happened and can't reconcile being a night with supporting this definitely. Um, we have a little excerpt from the letter just to give you an idea of how incensed he was via the situation. He says, the very least I can do for my country to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of millions of my countrymen surprised into dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honor make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation. And I, for my part, wish to stand shorn of all special distinctions by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings. Yeah. So this was the end of this quote, total cooboration with the British, and it changed people's opinions of him too. Um, he wasn't the same guy anymore. And I mean we can talk about that maybe first in a literary sense with Yates, because people have suggested that this is part of the reason why Yates's opinion of Tore soured. According to Anna Jelna car To, Gore's resigning his knighthood just didn't match up correctly with the idea Yates had of him as this serene mystic from the east who certainly wouldn't get involved in politics, certainly wouldn't do anything as bold as renounced his knighthood. Um, it just didn't match up with Yates is to Gore. And of course, I mean we can assume there's some other reasons in here. Yates really didn't like to Gore's translations. As we mentioned earlier, Um, he was probably bound to be disappointed in this creation he had imagined for himself, because to Gore did write so much more than just romantic poetry. He wrote essays and plays and prose. But I mean we have to assume it did play a role. Yeah, I mean I think it did. But I think at the same time there had to be more to it. I mean, they knew each other, so he must have known that there was more to Gore than just this romantic literature and poetry that he wrote. Um, he did a lot of political writing, a lot of speaking, he was kind of a voice for for the way he movement. He had publicly promoted him though yep, I guess so that's true. But I guess it was bound to happen, since to Gore wrote other things anyway, so there was bound to be some kind of falling out between them at some point. But it changed. It changed what Yates thought of to Gore, at least in the you know, outwardly, and it changed I think what to Gore thought of his own views a little bit too. Definitely, he didn't really he didn't really change his views about the East and West needing each other. He still thought that. He still thought, you know, he wanted to see um kind of a universal land where people all cultures would come together and there weren't all these barriers between them. But at the same time, I think he was very conflicted about the situation that happened, especially because he had English friends and so it made the situation kind of difficult for them, And he tried to express these feelings through his work after the fact. Yeah, and after this he kept on traveling, so he was still out and about in the world very much. So Um he said to have visited more than thirty countries on five continents of lecturing and having these extended conversations with people like Einstein on truth and beauty. They have this amazing debate and music. I mean stuff that you wouldn't even you know, think of Einstein talking about. Yeah, but um, I mean to Gore's is all over the world. He meets Mussolini and it takes them a little while before he starts hearing reports about the fascism that's going on in Italy from some exiles and denounces Mussolini. But yeah, even and you know his his denunciations are still very polite and proper interesting to read them. Yep. He never loses his smooth talking never. Um. But so he this going around the world is partially to speak because he's asked and to to speak on behalf of the independence movement UM. But it's also to earn money for his school. He's still stumping for his cause, which is education, and he's still out there trying to keep the school, the six centric school that he started going UM and later this school in Shanthan ni Kitan it becomes a university called Visba Barathi University in nine UM and so he has some success with that, but it's sort of peters out as he. Um. Yeah, you were talking about able to support it. What it's like today kind of more of a place where you can learn about him than a university. I think it's more to study his philosophies and so forth than necessarily. But it does still exist. Yes, you can still visit it today. Actually, I think that India's recently nominated to be a World here UNESCO World Heritage Site. You've been there. I've been there. I went there when I was fourteen, Um, although I can't remember too much unfortunately, but I do remember it being very serene and um and uh liking it a lot. That's the rule of the podcast. You always have to mention the places have been too. It makes everybody think we're going all over the world seeing all this stuff. Oh dear, not really, guys, Um, But I don't know. Even with all of this traveling around the world and promoting his school and promoting his writings, he kind of kept his distance from the more confrontational side of the nationalist movement. He didn't get super involved in that. Even after this, renouncing his knighthood and all that, No, he still to his distance. Um. He was still part of it through his writings and through his talks that he gave Um and he was still friends with Gandhi of course, even though he didn't necessarily support a reaction that he did but Um, but he didn't get to to involved, and unfortunately he passed away about seven years before India actually achieved independence in ninety seven. But on the bright side, maybe Um India's national anthem John a Ghanamana is based on one of his song poems, and another of his songs, am are Shownar bang La is Bangladesh's national anthem. Yeah, so that's pretty impressive, I think. So he still gets to be a part of it. It's not easy to forget him at all. He's still a big part of the national culture. Every time they sing the national anthem or hear it, they'll think of him and Um and music art. Actually, an interesting fact about his art he didn't take up painting until he was about seventy years old, which I think is amazing. So he takes a painting at age seventy. Yet somehow he managed to create about two thousand paintings and drawings before he died around age eight. He was busy so that's incredible. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Happy Saturday, everybody. Before we get to today's classic. This week, we put out a playlist of some of our otter and mostly more upbeat episodes out of the archive. We called that playlist Offbeat History. With this ongoing coronavirus pandemic, we thought it might give folks who are practicing some social distancing or sheltering in place, or otherwise having some more time in relative isolation a little something extra to help pass the time. UH and several of our colleagues other shows in our I Heart Podcast family have done the same thing, and so we've launched a new feed for all of those. So it's all of those pandemic collections. It's called the best of Stuff, and you should be able to find it wherever you get your podcasts. And now we'll move on to today's Saturday Classic. It is World Poetry Day, so today we're sharing an episode from the archive that's on a poet, rebind Er, not Tagore, who was a Bengali poet and was the first Asian Nobel laureate. This episode originally came out on November and it is from previous hosts Sarah and Deablina, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm very happy to be joined by my new co host today. Yep, I'm Deblina Chokate boardy I will be joining Sarah and talking about history stuff with you. Yeah. Debilina is the homepage editor here at How Stuff Works. Um, so she basically programs the whole homepage every day. So if you've ever visited the site, you have seen Debilina's handiwork. Yes, and I hope you've clicked on lots of things, clicked lots of links. That's what we all want you to do. But um, Debilina, why don't you give us a little background on this topic and explain why you picked it today? Sure? Well, today's topic is a little bit maybe appropriately maybe inappropriately personal to myself. My parents are from India, there Bengali, and our topic today is Rabat Nath Tagore, who is a well known Bengali figure, probably best known for being the first Asian Nobel laureate. And it's the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth. So it's been in the news a lot lately. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on to celebrate his birth this year, UM, including the Kolkata Film Festival, has showed movies that are based on his works. Um. People are performing his plays, school children are performing his songs and his dance dramas, and so it's a big to do. There's even a traveling train, which seems like probably the best part of the celebration in my opinion. The traveling train is indeed awesome. It is visiting cities throughout India until next May, and each car features kind of a different aspect and it's featuring mostly arts type of stuff. Like the other celebrations are like a museum on the move essentially exactly great. Um, but a lot of people don't really appreciate how just how much of an accomplished artist this guy was. How much of an accomplished poet he was. He was a singer, a philosopher, he was interested in politics, he was an educator, a reformer. Um, he wasn't a politician exactly, but I mean his influence there is pretty great too. He he just touched on so many different things. It's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of inspiring. When you start looking at his life and also sort of makes you feel like not up to that, what have I done? Right? So his work in the political arena and his reformation efforts that you mentioned last, those are probably the things that are lesser known about him. Most people know about his arts, his involvement in the art scene in India, all his contributions, there's far songs, plays, dramas, everything goes. But I think that people don't know what he contributed as far as politics well, and he's not that well known in the West at all. So I mean, we have a lot to explore, even the things he's famous for in India. Definitely one of the things that he is famous for that will take a look at today he was knighted by the British government and some accused him of being a pro British elitist, and there's some controversy around that nighting to tring to talk about a little later we will, um. But really what we're gonna look at is just was he a nationalist or not? Um? Was this just a different approach to nationalism for him? His involvement in politics and um look at his renunciation of the of the knighthood and what surrounded that. So before we get into that, let's look at his beginnings. He was born May six, eighteen sixty one, in Calcutta into a well to do, well educated, very artistic, progressive family. Yeah, he was really exposed to a lot as a kid too. I mean his family would have been reading Sanskrit and ancient Hindu text and Persian literature and known Islamic tradition. So imagine it this really melting pot in his home of learning and um, just a lot of intelligent discussion, I imagine, definitely. I think it was unique to any culture at the time. And let's talk about that time a little bit. It was during British rule in India when he was born, and his family, the two Gores, they were very active in the Bengal Renaissance, which was basically a movement that began in the mid eighteen sixties to protect national culture. It was really to preserve, um, the local culture, the arts, all the things that his family wanted to celebrate, the traditional heritage, and it was a response to Anglicization. So they would throw festivals every year that featured Angian songs and poems and dances, and you mentioned wrestling matches when we were talking about this earlier. I thought that was kind of a surprise thrown in there, but hey, it's a part of culture, right, balanced the arts with a little wrestling boards and aspect of culture. I like sports. So in addition to being an involved in this yearly cultural event to Gore's father, Deba's or not to Gore, he was very involved in something called the Brahmo somag. The Brahma Somaj was basically a movement within Hinduism which was established around or so, and it was an attempt to reform Hinduism. What I mean by that is that it incorporated some aspects of Christianity. It denounced things like polytheism and idol worship, and it also denounced the cast system. So through this they were trying to um enact some sort of social reform. But it never really became that widely popular. Um, yeah, I mean it, even though I guess it's still technically around today, it didn't really grow much past the twentieth century or the early twentieth century. Yeah, it's definitely recognized as a movement within Hinduism, um, but I don't think it reached maybe the heights that to Gore's father wanted it to the Brahmi Smudge movement. It did loose steam the twentieth century. But the important thing about that is that we can see into Gore's life is that it was combining these Eastern and Western ideals that will see kind of throughout his development and in his work and his philosophy. So it's the beginnings of that, I guess. Yeah. But I mean, if we're talking about his childhood intellectual life aside um, he was kind of lonely. He wasn't that close to his parents. This is according to his own memoirs. His dad was gone a lot, traveling on business and um. Some people have suggested that he just didn't really get much attention and love growing up and sort of felt neglected in that respect. Yeah, he did. He does give us accounts of traveling with his father and his adolescence, but from what we can tell, he wasn't really that close to anyone. Roby as he was sometimes called, wasn't really close to his folks. But that might have been a good thing because he was given a lot of freedom. Because of that, he was given a lot of space to develop creatively. And to write, and that's exactly what he did. Yeah, So he started writing at a very young age and kept on doing it over six decades. He ended up writing about two thousand, five hundred songs and twenty eight volumes of poetry, drama, opera, short stories, novels, essays and diaries, plus a bunch of letters. So this is what we meant at the beginning when we're saying this can make you feel a little inadequate. He lived a very long time, but he was writing for his entire life pretty much NonStop, definitely. In eight seventy seven he actually went to England to study for about a year at the University College of London, and while he was there he wrote some more too. He wrote some plays and he was introduced to the western style of music there, but it didn't really last. He ended up coming back after a year, and Um, the only thing that I could find on that is that he thought it was too cold. Legitimate complaints. It's legit. I mean, I've lived in cold places. It's tough. But that was definitely an influence in his life though, I think. Yeah, Um, so you know, he came back to India after just about a year of studies, but he kept on writing and he published his first book of poetry when he was only about seventeen, and then throughout the eighteen eighties he kept on putting out books, all leading up to Manasci, which was published in eighteen nine. And that's sort of one of his first works that is fairly well known, right yep. A lot of his well known poems and some of his well known political satire and commentary is in that book. Uh. And that satire did take kind of a critical tone towards towards his fellow Bengalis, and so we see kind of his starting of his evolution of his political views social views there. Yeah, because that tone starts to change too in the eighteen nineties because of his traveling and a few events that happened. Yep, as we mentioned earlier to Gore's family was pretty wealthy, so they had both a home in the city and they had some estates in East Bengal, which we know today is Bangladesh. So he went for a while in the eighteen nineties to manage his father's estates there and he stayed there for about a decade. But this area was pretty rural, pretty poverty stricken, and he was in close contact with the villagers while he was there, so it really gave him a new outlook, so to speak. He gained a lot of sympathy for the plight of the locals there, I think, and this began to inform his writing a lot, Yeah, and change his style a little too, even. Yeah, well, he started writing in a little bit of a new style at that time. He started experimenting a little bit more with free verse as opposed to earlier when he was I think when he was younger, he was mostly writing in traditional classical Indian forms. Um. Again, part of this whole Bengal Renaissance thing, the idea of preserving culture. It as he got more into the eighteen nineties, started being a little more flexible with his form. So that was one thing. But then also his subject matter I think started to explore more of what he had seen, um, some of more of the issues that he had seen in rural Bengal. And so this informed his work. Yeah, And I mean it wasn't just limited to his own experiences too. He started to be influenced by some world events that were going on, namely the Boer War in eighteen ninety nine and just a little I've tried to do a real podcast on the Bower War before and it didn't really work out. But to give you a basic rundown of it, it was a conflict between the two independent Dutch speaking Bauer republics of South Africa and the British Empire, and it was very bloody. At the end, the Boer Republics agreed to come under the sovereignty of the British Crown. So to Gore was already starting to get kind of interested in politics and political writing when this was going on, but the Boer Are really it got him more interested in it. It it made him look more into world politics, world events. Yep. So let's talk about two Gore's politics a little bit, just to give people an idea of what was going on in his mind and what point of view he was coming from. A lot of people, as we said before, especially anti colonial nationalists, they accused to Gore of being pro British and against the nationalist movement, and this wasn't kind of had some truth to it maybe, but wasn't exactly true. To Gore was against colonialism. Just put that out there. He wanted India to be an independent nation. But he didn't think that the confrontation and non cooperation UM tactics that were used by some of his contemporaries Gandhi obviously a very famous one, Mahandas Gandhi, who was actually his friend UM. So they differed in this way. He was one who who did use these tactics and and they disagree ead on on this, but they were still very good friends. He was actually the first to call Gandhi Mahatma which means great soul, which I just learned that in this podcast. So it wasn't it fun fact. But he certainly wasn't pro British. He wanted India to be its own country exactly. He just didn't think that a change, a straight change in political regime is all that they needed. His answer to the problem of India was education. He proposed that only through education could the their nation really affect true change. UM. Actually, as an example of this, UM I found a statement that he made in nineteen o nine which was actually a letter to an American lawyer who had written him talking about the problem of India and what was going on with colonialism. And it was from a lawyer named Myron H. Phelps and to Gore put it this way to him, he said, for us, there can be no question of blind revolution, but of steady and purposeful education. He said, that's basically what it would take to snap his people out of the quote trance that cold blooded repression had put them under. Yeah, so, I mean some people see this as just a different approach to nationalism. It's it's not revolution, it's revolution through education. Yeah. He wanted his country not just to be independent, but to be independent and truly truly be independent in every aspect um, you know, not just be free from an oppressive government, but to be able to stand alone as a nation. And he thought education was the only way that they would be able to do that. So, yeah, you're right, some people do just think that this is a different approach to nationalism um that he was taking. So a good thing to do, though, if you're interested in education is to start your own school, why not, which is exactly what he did. And he did just that. He founded an experimental school at Shanta Nikitan. It's a small town in West Bengal which means a bode of peace. And this wasn't his first experience with this town. His dad I had founded a oshroom there, so he founded a school there too. And his whole idea behind the school was pretty much goes along with his philosophy that he's had all along. You know. He felt that the East and West needed each other, and so he wanted to incorporate both types of thought into this school that he had. So what he did is he got both Indiana and Western scholars to teach there. And um, it was a different kind of environment than had outdoor classes. They had outdoor classes. That's pretty neat like the sound of that. Um, But just because he's running this school sounds like that would kind of keep you preoccupied. I don't think he's not writing. He's still writing prolifically. Um and unfortunately going through a few personal tragedies in the early nineteen hundreds. His wife died in nineteen o two. Incidentally, they had gotten married when she was only ten years old and he was twenty two. Um. And then after his wife died, he also lost his father and two of his children, all in this really short period of time. Yes, And it was the sadness resulting from these events that inspired several poems. Song poems as They're sometimes called, which he translated into English and published as a collection called Joy in nineteen twelve. And some have said that the fact that he did translate themselves is not necessarily a good thing. Yeah, I mean they still sold well. Apparently between March and November nineteen thirteen there were ten reprints. Um. But yeah, his his translations came under a lot of scrutiny later. If if you've ever come across him in a literature class or something and you're outside of India, it might be some sort of comparison to WB. Yates. And they were friends, if you could call it that, for about thirty seven years. That had a really long relationship with each other. And Yates is largely credited to exposing him to the West, you know, introducing him to the West and helping make him famous there. But they had kind of a tumultuous friendship to say the least. Yep, they actually met through William Rothenstein. He was an artist who hosted to Gore in London in around thirteen so around the time that he was publishing this translation and When to Go arrived. He gave Rothenstein an English translation of these poems and Rothenstein then sent them to Yates and some other some other people about town. Yates apparently loved them. He was really really into them. He apparently said, quote, I've carried the translations of these manuscripts about with me for days, reading it in railway trains or on top of omnibuses or in restaurants, and I've often had to close it less some strangers see how much it moved me. Um, but I don't know. Maybe we should talk about Yates later. Her opinion in a minute, Because this is the this is to Gore's rising star at this point. This is his fame starting to spread throughout the West as well as the East. So people finally got to know him through this. They finally got to know him through this English translation and through people kind of spreading the word about him, and it led I will not people spreading the word, but just his talent, I guess led to him winning the Noble Price for literature. As we mentioned, he was the first Asian to receive such an honor, and after that his fame kind of grew exponentially, fame outside of India, that is, he was knighted by King George, the fifth of Britain in nineteen fifteen, and he started traveling abroad a lot more. He wasn't in India as much as he used to be. He was doing lectures and readings. He went to Europe, North America, South America, Asia, East Asia, um, all over the place. So yeah, he was one of the most famous Indians in the world at this point, perhaps the most famous. But then, unfortunately, something really bad happened. On April thirteenth, nineteen nineteen, in a Star, which is located in the state of Punjab in India. British soldiers fired on an unarmed gathering of men, women and children who had come into the city to partake in a traditional Sikh festival. There was a peaceful nationalist demonstration going on that day, but many of the people who who were around, who were involved in the shooting, they weren't even really a part of the demonstration exactly. They were completely kind of innocent of whatever was going on. So a lot of lives were lost, and we don't know exactly how many. A lot of sources you look at and I think the official number reported by the British Raj was three seventy nine, but some people say that it could have been as many as a thousand or more well. And then the accounts of it in the British press were especially disturbed, and you know, they were treating it as though it had been a riot and the people who were killed had gotten themselves into trouble essentially, and people just had a very unfortunate reaction to to the whole thing that went down. Yeah, it was weird. It was a big cover up um for obvious reasons. They didn't want people to know that this had gone down the way it had, because there was basically no reason for these people being killed, so they had to spin it. They had to spin it and uh. But then there were murmurings, of course, of what had really happened throughout India and too Core caught wind of this, and he was pretty disgusted by the entire situation and it kind of changed his outlook and it definitely changed the way he felt about being a British night. So he wrote a letter to Lord Chelmsford, who was the Viceroy of India at the time, and renounced his knighthood. And if you read his letter, it's interesting because it is so formal, so polite. It's very written in very precise English, but I don't know. He's clearly very very deeply disturbed by what's happened and can't reconcile being a night with supporting this definitely. Um, we have a little excerpt from the letter just to give you an idea of how incensed he was via the situation. He says, the very least I can do for my country to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of millions of my countrymen surprised into dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honor make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation. And I, for my part, wish to stand shorn of all special distinctions by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings. Yeah. So this was the end of this quote, total cooboration with the British, and it changed people's opinions of him too. Um, he wasn't the same guy anymore. And I mean we can talk about that maybe first in a literary sense with Yates, because people have suggested that this is part of the reason why Yates's opinion of Tore soured. According to Anna Jelna car To, Gore's resigning his knighthood just didn't match up correctly with the idea Yates had of him as this serene mystic from the east who certainly wouldn't get involved in politics, certainly wouldn't do anything as bold as renounced his knighthood. Um, it just didn't match up with Yates is to Gore. And of course, I mean we can assume there's some other reasons in here. Yates really didn't like to Gore's translations. As we mentioned earlier, Um, he was probably bound to be disappointed in this creation he had imagined for himself, because to Gore did write so much more than just romantic poetry. He wrote essays and plays and prose. But I mean we have to assume it did play a role. Yeah, I mean I think it did. But I think at the same time there had to be more to it. I mean, they knew each other, so he must have known that there was more to Gore than just this romantic literature and poetry that he wrote. Um, he did a lot of political writing, a lot of speaking, he was kind of a voice for for the way he movement. He had publicly promoted him though yep, I guess so that's true. But I guess it was bound to happen, since to Gore wrote other things anyway, so there was bound to be some kind of falling out between them at some point. But it changed. It changed what Yates thought of to Gore, at least in the you know, outwardly, and it changed I think what to Gore thought of his own views a little bit too. Definitely, he didn't really he didn't really change his views about the East and West needing each other. He still thought that. He still thought, you know, he wanted to see um kind of a universal land where people all cultures would come together and there weren't all these barriers between them. But at the same time, I think he was very conflicted about the situation that happened, especially because he had English friends and so it made the situation kind of difficult for them, And he tried to express these feelings through his work after the fact. Yeah, and after this he kept on traveling, so he was still out and about in the world very much. So Um he said to have visited more than thirty countries on five continents of lecturing and having these extended conversations with people like Einstein on truth and beauty. They have this amazing debate and music. I mean stuff that you wouldn't even you know, think of Einstein talking about. Yeah, but um, I mean to Gore's is all over the world. He meets Mussolini and it takes them a little while before he starts hearing reports about the fascism that's going on in Italy from some exiles and denounces Mussolini. But yeah, even and you know his his denunciations are still very polite and proper interesting to read them. Yep. He never loses his smooth talking never. Um. But so he this going around the world is partially to speak because he's asked and to to speak on behalf of the independence movement UM. But it's also to earn money for his school. He's still stumping for his cause, which is education, and he's still out there trying to keep the school, the six centric school that he started going UM and later this school in Shanthan ni Kitan it becomes a university called Visba Barathi University in nine UM and so he has some success with that, but it's sort of peters out as he. Um. Yeah, you were talking about able to support it. What it's like today kind of more of a place where you can learn about him than a university. I think it's more to study his philosophies and so forth than necessarily. But it does still exist. Yes, you can still visit it today. Actually, I think that India's recently nominated to be a World here UNESCO World Heritage Site. You've been there. I've been there. I went there when I was fourteen, Um, although I can't remember too much unfortunately, but I do remember it being very serene and um and uh liking it a lot. That's the rule of the podcast. You always have to mention the places have been too. It makes everybody think we're going all over the world seeing all this stuff. Oh dear, not really, guys, Um, But I don't know. Even with all of this traveling around the world and promoting his school and promoting his writings, he kind of kept his distance from the more confrontational side of the nationalist movement. He didn't get super involved in that. Even after this, renouncing his knighthood and all that, No, he still to his distance. Um. He was still part of it through his writings and through his talks that he gave Um and he was still friends with Gandhi of course, even though he didn't necessarily support a reaction that he did but Um, but he didn't get to to involved, and unfortunately he passed away about seven years before India actually achieved independence in ninety seven. But on the bright side, maybe Um India's national anthem John a Ghanamana is based on one of his song poems, and another of his songs, am are Shownar bang La is Bangladesh's national anthem. Yeah, so that's pretty impressive, I think. So he still gets to be a part of it. It's not easy to forget him at all. He's still a big part of the national culture. Every time they sing the national anthem or hear it, they'll think of him and Um and music art. Actually, an interesting fact about his art he didn't take up painting until he was about seventy years old, which I think is amazing. So he takes a painting at age seventy. Yet somehow he managed to create about two thousand paintings and drawings before he died around age eight. He was busy so that's incredible. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H