Where the Mind is Without Fear
Rabindranath Tagore
Text : Poem
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free:
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action —
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
About Rabindranath Tagore:
Rabindranath Tagore was born at Jorasanko in Kolkata on May 7 1861. He received no regular school education. Under the personal care of his father Debendranath Tagore and the guidance of some efficient , he gained a profound knowledge in Bengali, Sanskrit and English. He was a poet, a dramatist, a composer of songs, writer of short stories, a novelist, a critic, an essayist and a painter.
Some of his best poems are found in the Gitanjali, Sonar Tori, Kheya, Kalpana, Balaka etc. For his English version of Gitanjali, he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1913. He was a great educationist and established a school at Shantiniketan. Afterwards he founded the Visva-Bharati University to actualise his own idea of education. This great poet breathed his last on 7th August 1941.
Source of the poem:
The poem ‘Where the Mind is without Fear’ is a remarkable poem included in Tagore’s ‘Naivedya’ as poem No 72. This poem is a free translation made by the poet himself, of a Bengali Sonnet, ‘Prarthana’. The present English version of the poem, ‘Prarthana’, found its place in English Gitanjali.
Substance:
The poet prays that India should attain ideal freedom for her people. He desires that his country should be an ideal place where people are free from all sorts of fear and bondage, where knowledge is free, where people are not confined to their own narrow, social barriers of caste, creed, race and religion, where people will be allowed to speak spontaneously without any restrictions, where tireless striving of people has its goal towards perfection, where the outdated prejudices and worn-out customs do not choke the development of free thinking, where unbiased reasoning may have full play in the cultivation of truth and where the mind of people is led forward into ever-widening thought and action under the guidance of God himself.
Thank You.
God bless you all..
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