WHERE THE

MIND IS
WITHOUT FEAR
Rabindranath Tagore {1861-1941}

NAME: SHREYANSH
PRASAD
ENG-131
12204822
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 He was born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India.
 He is the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1913
 Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of
colloquial language into Bengali literature.
 He wrote over one thousand poems;
 Eight volumes of short stories;
 Almost two dozen plays and play-lets;
 Eight novels;
 And many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education
and social topics

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 The Poet
 Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941] has been regarded as the greatest writer in
modern Indian literature.
 A Bengali poet, novelist, educator and a Nobel Laureate for Literature [1913].
 Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he surrendered it in 1919 in
protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, where British troops killed some 400
Indian demonstrators.
 Tagore's reputation in the West as a mystic has perhaps mislead his Western
readers to ignore his role as a reformer and critic of colonialism.
 Rabindranath Tagore is ranked #8 in the top 500poets

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 IMAGERY
 The poet draws a picture of free INDIA.
 He dreams of a country with no boundaries
 He prays for the welfare of the country

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 Theme

 The poem is a prayer to God.

 The poem was written by Rabindranath Tagore during the time when India was under the
British Rule and people were eagerly waiting to get their freedom from the British Rule.

 This poem had given a lot of strength to the people who were struggling for India’s
independence. It is a prayer to the Almighty for a hassle free nation free from any kind of
manipulative or corrupted powers

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 BACKGROUND
Rabindranath Tagore wrote his poem “Where The Mind Without Fear” in
the first decade of the Twentieth century It is the 35th song in his famous book
Geetanjali which was awarded the
Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. He wrote this poem during the peak hours
of the cruel and brutal British Rule in India.
It is his Utopia, in which he prays God to let his country wake up to a
blissful heaven of freedom that is his dream. The distance between his
dream and the real state of affairs in his country is far, and he skillfully
brings to world’s attention the state into which his great nation has been
fallen into by the British Empire
He does this without offending anyone as is expected from an
England- educated noble genius.
6 years before India achieved Independence, Tagore had died without seeing
A free India
In the present times this poem not only tells us about the horrible downtrodden
Position to which his country and its heritage was brought
To by British but also acts a measure whether India has progressed any
After half a century of her independence

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 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.

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 POETIC DEVICES

 Metaphor

 Alliteration

 Symbolism

 Visual imagery

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