Debendranath Tagore
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Debendranath Tagore (Bangla:দেবেন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর, Debendronath Ţhakur)(May 15, 1817 - January 19, 1905) was a Bengali philosopher from current-day West Bengal, in India.
He was born in Calcutta, India. His father, Dwarkanath Tagore was a rich and famous Bengali landlord.
Debendranath was an active Brahmo, and was against sati, idol worship and the concept of multiple gods. He came to the Brahmo Samaj ten years after the death of it's founder, Raja Ram Mohan Roy. It had fallen away from its original practices put forth in its trust deed, such as the renunciation of all idols; however, Tagore brought back the importance of this deed. However, when the Vedanta of Ram Mohan Roy was attacked by a Presbyterian minister, Duff, Tagore abandoned it in favor of direct contact with the divine. His experiences were fleeting contact, and this love in separation, known in Hindu poetry as mullai, caused him to strive to regain the bliss of that contact. When Keshub Chunder Sen rose to power in the Brahmo Samaj, it caused a split between Sen's followers and Tagore's followers, which started the downfall of the Samaj as the leading force in modern Hindu thought.
Debendranath's spiritual prowess was of the highest order, even while he maintained his worldly affairs - not renouncing his material possessions as some Hindu traditions prescribed but rather continuing to enjoy them in a spirit of detachment. He received approbation from no less a spiritual master than Sri Ramakrishna who compared him to the Puranic king Janaka, father of Sita, the heroine of the epic Ramayana, extolled in the scriptures as an ideal man who perfectly synthesized material and spiritual accomplishments.
His considerable material property included several estates spread over the districts of Bengal; most famously, the later acquisition Santiniketan estate near Bolpur in the Birbhum district where his youngest son, the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore set up his school and later, the Visva-Bharati University.
What is remarkable in this achievement is that he excelled his father, who received the title Prince from the British colonial government owing to his large fortune and yet retained his dignity before them, famously wearing an all-white outfit bereft of all jewellery in a party attended by the Queen of England, with only his shoes studded with two diamonds bettering the Koh-i-noor in the Queen's crown. This was a gesture symbolising the mastery of wealth, as opposed to its slavish pursuit.
Debendranath was a master of the Upanishads and played no small role in the education and cultivation of faculties of his sons, the scholar-sage Dwijendranath, the Indian Civil Servant Satyendranath, the musically and literally talented Jyotirindranath and the world-famous poet Rabindranath. The latter recorded in his memoirs the encouragement of his earlier poetic endeavours by his father.
His part in creating the legacy of Thakurbari - the House of Tagore - in the cultural heritage of Bengal, centred in Kolkata, was not negligible. It was largely through the influence of the Tagore family, following that of the writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, that Bengal took a leading role on the cultural front as well as on the nationalistic one, in the Renaissance in India during the nineteenth century.
His house in Jorasanko in North-western Kolkata was later converted into a campus of the Rabindra Bharati University, eponymously named after Rabindranath.