Where The Mind Is Without Fear
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.
Rabindranath Tagore, one of India’s greatest literary exponents, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913—the first Asian person to receive the honour. He wrote poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and songs; promoted reforms in education, aesthetics and religion; and in his late 60s he even turned to the visual arts, producing 2,500 paintings and drawings before his demise.