Rabindranath Tagore (1961) watch online

Rabindranath Tagore is a 1961 Indian documentary film written and directed by Satyajit Ray about the life and works of Bengali author and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Ray started working on the documentary in early 1958. Shot in black-and-white, the finished film was released during the birth centenary year of Rabindranath Tagore, who was born on 7 May 1861. Ray avoided the controversial aspects of Tagore's life in order to make it as an official portrait of the poet. Though Tagore was known as a poet, Ray did not use any of Tagore's poetry as he was not happy with the English translation and believed that "it would not make the right impression if recited" and people would not consider Tagore "a very great poet," based on those translations. Satyajit Ray has been reported to have said about the documentary Rabindranath Tagore in his biography Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by W. Andrew Robinson that, "Ten or twelve minutes of it are among the most moving and powerful things that I have produced."

Often regarded as polymath, author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse," Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. The first stanza of Tagore's five-stanza Brahmo hymn has been adopted as the National Anthem of India, "Jana Gana Mana." The first ten lines of another Tagore song, "Amar Shonar Bangla" were adopted in 1972 as the Bangladesh's national anthem. Incidentally, Sri Lanka's national anthem "Sri Lanka Matha" was written and composed by Tagore's student, Ananda Samarakoon.

Academy Film Archive, part of the Academy Foundation, took an initiative to restore Satyajit Ray's films and could successfully restore 19 Ray films, Rabindranath Tagore is restored though its original print was found to be badly damaged. The film's original script was included in a book named Original English Film Scripts Satyajit Ray, put together by Ray's son Sandip Ray.

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