Mashi, and Other Stories

by Rabindranath Tagore

Overview

Mashi and Other Stories (1918) is a collection of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore. Published after Tagore received the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, Mashi and Other Stories contains some of the author's most beloved works of short fiction, including "Mashi," "The Skeleton," "The Postmaster," and "The River Stairs." Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941) was a Bengali short-story writer, poet, musician, composer, playwright, essayist and painter from India who was instrumental in transforming Indian art, especially Bengali literature and music, by introducing contextual modernism and new verses and prose. Both his prose and poetry were on varied topics and were considered to be magical and spiritual as visible in some of his noted works such as Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare-Baire. Referred to as the 'Bard of Bengal', his compositions were chosen as national anthems by India and Bangladesh while the Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work. He became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789355468178
Publisher:	Pharos Books
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941), was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.

Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of the modern Indian subcontinent, being highly commemorated in India and Bangladesh, as well as in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan.

A Pirali Brahmin from Kolkata with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym "Bhanusimha" ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramas-and the aegis of his birth name-by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident nationalist he denounced the 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 endures also 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.