Rabindranath Tagore was the fourteenth child of a wealthy Indian Family, which after centuries of internal disquiet was experiencing under British rule a necessary breathing space of peace find order. But it was as the author points out, "...the peace of the desert India had ceased to be creative. Politically, she was not even aware of the loss of national freedom, and culturally, she hugged the trappings of the new servitude or blindly clung to the shackles of the old."

He was born, in 1861, eight years before what, Mahatma Gandhi. The Mahatma's place in history ". is secure but his great contemporary is less well known though he won the Nobel Prize and the admiration of the great literary figures of the West among them being. Yeats and Pound, He contrived to show India to herself and the importance of his contribution to her reawakening was subtle and deep - releasing and feeding hidden fountains of creative activity in fields, which the politician is powerless to exploit.

His first impact was followed, in the West, by a decline of interest; but his stature in the East has grown and this detailed study of his life and work gives a picture of the complete man. He was a poet, playwright, storyteller, musician, painter and educator; and his many achievements were but partial expressions of a restless vitality and an inexhaustible zest in living.

Krishna Kripalani, married to Tagore's granddaughter, lived and worked with him at Santiniketan in West Bengal from 1933 until Tagore's death in 1941. He was for some time Rector of the school and Editor for eleven years of the Visva-Bharati Quarterly, a literary journal in English of which Tagore was the founder and the first Editor. He was the Secretary of the National Academy of Letters (Sahitya Academi), New Delhi, and was formerly Secretary to the Minister of Education and Scientific Research, India. He was also for a term a member of the Indian Parliament (Rajya Sabha).

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