"Where the mind is without fear" (Bengali: চিত্ত যেথা ভয়শূন্য, romanized: Chitto Jetha Bhoyshunno) is a poem written by 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore before India's independence. It represents Tagore's vision of a new and awakened India. The original poem was published in 1910 and was included in the 1910 collection Gitanjali and, in Tagore's own translation, in its 1912 English edition. "Where the mind is without fear" is the 35th poem of Gitanjali, and one of Tagore's most anthologised poems.
It is an expression of the poet's reflective spirit and contains a simple prayer for his country, the India of pre-independence times.
Original Bengali script - By Rabindranath Thakur or Tagore
Tagore's own translation, in the 1912 English edition of Gitanjali:[1]
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.
This poem was most likely composed in 1900. It appeared in the volume Naivedya in the poem titled "Prarthona" (July 1901, Bengali 1308 Bangabda). The English translation was composed around 1911 when Tagore was translating some of his work into English after a request from William Rothenstein. It appeared as poem 35 in the English Gitanjali, published by The India Society, London, in 1912.[2][3] In 1917, Tagore read out the English version (then titled 'Indian Prayer') at the Indian National Congress session in Calcutta.[4]
As in most of Tagore's translations for the English Gitanjali, almost every line of the English rendering has been considerably simplified. Line 6 in the English version omits a reference to manliness (পৌরুষ), and the stern ending of the original, where the Father is being enjoined to "strike the sleeping nation without mercy" has been softened.
This poem often appears in textbooks in India and is also popular in Bangladesh. There is a Sinhala translation of this song by the name "Mage Deshaya Avadi Karanu Mana Piyaneni" (Sinhala: මාගේ දේශය අවදි කරනු මැන පියාණෙනි; lit. "My father, let my country awake") which was translated into Sinhala by Mahagama Sekara.
A more recent translation by Niladri Roy (who also translated Sukumar Ray's Abol in its entirety) – much truer, literally, to the original Bengali verse – and which preserves the rhymes in the original Bengali verse, can be found in the attached image (used with permission from the translator) .
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