Social Justice in the Writings of Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore is called by the people of India as Maharishi, Gurudev, and
Rishi. He was a very vibrant personality of his time in the Indian Literary World. He was
known to be a multifaceted genius as a dramatist, poet, producer, actor, painter, musician,
social reformer, educationist, prophet, philosopher, story writer, novelist, and a critic of
literature. It is not exaggerated if Tagore is called a phenomenon in the history of India. He
was a freedom fighter, scholar, painter, and writer and yet above all, he was a man with
humility. The contribution of Tagore to the Indian Literature was enormous. He had been a
cultural reformer and renaissance man, who revamped Bengali art by removing the obstacles
that held its progress. Tagore was an undeviating anti-colonialist. He had a profound
understanding of this life. Tagore’s writings are assets of India. He was of the opinion that
improving one’s culture and accepting others’ cultures could be one and the same attitude.
Tagore belonged to the noble society of Bengal, but he never had an elitist view. He believed
that all the problems of the human life could be resolved with the education. He thought that
poverty, pestilence of communal conflicts, and industrial backwardness did stifle the society
because of insufficient education. Also, he advocated against the dilemma of women and
contended for the welfare of women and for their independence by means of his letters,
essays, and short stories. Through his writing, he could build vital and upright women role
models in order to render the social justice that was due to them at that time. Then, through
his act of enrolling the women into his Santiniketan Ashram Education, he was symbolised as
a new thinker and forerunner in the coeducation system. Rabindranath Tagore was one of the
supreme geniuses in the Indian intellectual society, who did play an important role in the
history of Indian Renaissance that happened in the nineteenth and early twentieth century