Rabindranath Tagore is known outside Bengal mainly as the poet of Gitanjali and has been stereotyped in the West as a mystic poet for the deeply spiritual poems in his Nobel Prize winning book. But the principal driving force of his poetry was humanism. Image of women in his poetry is one aspect of this humanism, and is focused in the book. The women’s liberation and the phrase "gender equality" was not in the English vocabulary when these poems were written. Nor did women had the right to vote in many ‘first world countries.’ We hear Tagore’s voice speaking about women in the first phase of his poetry up to 1914. In the second phase, we hear mostly women’s voice, muted in a man’s world, finding expression in the poems. Tagore was a lyric poet. The flow of his poems has an abundance of rushes of rhythm and playfulness with words. His language is musical, resonant and layered. His choice of words and their arrangement are precise. These translations come close to the rich texture and sound of Tagaore’s poetry and they would please or move the reader.
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