6 h 55 minAudiobook13 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What teaches a poet to see when school teaches him only to long for escape?
In My Reminiscences, Rabindranath Tagore returns to childhood in a crowded Calcutta mansion alive with music, theatre, and talk. Servants rule the nursery, tutors bore him, and family life fills his days. Beyond the classroom, songs, rooftops, and journeys offer a different kind of education.
Tagore follows the pictures memory keeps rather than a steady line of dates. His father, Debendranath, takes him away from Calcutta; his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi, becomes a close friend. Through these early relationships and discoveries, the memoir explores how a boy begins to find his own voice as a poet.
What you’ll discover
- A house full of life Enter Jorasanko, where a large family surrounds the young Tagore with music, theatre, and conversation.
- Learning beyond the classroom Follow a reluctant schoolboy who finds his education in songs, rooftops, and long journeys.
- The first delight of rhyme Share the young poet's discovery that matching sounds can turn ordinary lines into verse.
- Friendship close to home Meet Kadambari Devi, the sister-in-law whose lively friendship holds a close place in his youth.
- Memory as a painter Discover a memoir that lets remembered pictures, rather than public milestones, shape its telling.
Who will love it
For readers who love childhood memoirs and discovering how an artist finds a voice, and anyone curious about Bengal in the 1800s. Family life, poetry, songs, and journeys shape this portrait of Tagore’s youth.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A boy raised in a crowded mansion
- School fails him but learning does not
- Rhyme, rooftops, and the first poems
- A journey with his father to the hills
- Writing for the public and meeting Bankim
- Seeing England and learning from it
- Moonlit gardens and a deepening sorrow of feeling
- The sunrise on Sadar Street
- A life told as a poem, and how it lasts
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- Audiobook
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- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 13 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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My Reminiscences
by Rabindranath Tagore · 1912
In a crowded Calcutta mansion, a boy who hates school discovers a world of songs, rooftops, and poetry.
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In short
My Reminiscences is the memoir of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, songwriter, and educator. He wrote it in Bengali as a series of chapters for a magazine and published it as a book in 1912, when he was past fifty.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A boy raised in a crowded mansion
Tagore was born in 1861 into a large and gifted family at Jorasanko, in the north of Calcutta. The house held many uncles, aunts, cousins, and brothers, and it hummed with music, theatre, and talk. His father, Debendranath Tagore, was a religious thinker who led a reform movement, and his elder brothers were writers, musicians, and thinkers. Yet the youngest boy often felt left on the edge of all this.
The first chapters describe his world as seen from a very low height. He recalls the servants, who were given charge of the children and who kept them in line with small rules and small cruelties. One servant would draw a chalk circle on the floor and forbid the child to step out of it. The boy sat inside the circle, watching the world through a window.
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What is My Reminiscences about?
It is Tagore's memoir of his early life, from his childhood in a large Calcutta household through school, travel, and a stay in England, to the time he found his own poetic voice as a young man.
Is My Reminiscences a true story and when was it written?
Yes, it is autobiography. Tagore wrote it in Bengali, under the title Jibansmriti, and published it in 1912. An English version followed a few years later. He calls it pictures from memory, not a formal history.
What years of Tagore's life does the book cover?
It covers his first twenty years or so, from his birth in 1861 to his early twenties. It stops long before his Nobel Prize and his later fame as a writer and educator.
The author
Rabindranath Tagore
1861–1941 · Bengali poet and philosopher
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet and writer born in Calcutta, British India, where he also died. He lived in Bengal and founded a school at Santiniketan in 1901. He wrote poetry, stories, plays and essays. His Bengali collection Gitanjali appeared in 1910; his English version appeared in 1912.
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