Rabindranath Tagore (film)

Rabindranath Tagore
Title card of the film
Directed by	Satyajit Ray
Produced by	Films Division of India
Written by	Satyajit Ray
Screenplay by	Satyajit Ray
Based on	Life and works of Rabindranath Tagore
Starring	Raya Chatterjee, Sovanlal Ganguli, Smaran Ghosal, Purnendu Mukherjee, Kallol Bose, Subir Bose, Phani Nan, Norman Ellis
Narrated by	Satyajit Ray
Music by	Jyotirindra Moitra
Cinematography	Soumendu Roy
Edited by	Dulal Dutta
Distributed by	Films Division of India
Release date	1961 (1961)
Running time	54 minutes
Country	India
Language	English

Rabindranath Tagore is a 1961 black-and-white short film directed by an Indian director Satyajit Ray on the life and works of noted Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore. Ray started working on the documentary in the beginning of 1958 and it was released during the birth centenary year of Rabindranath Tagore, who was born on 7 May 1861. Ray avoided the controversial aspects of Tagore's life in order to make it as an official portrait of the poet. Though Tagore was known as a poet, Ray did not use any of Tagore's poetry as he was not happy with the English translation and believed that "it would not make the right impression if recited" and people would not consider Tagore "a very great poet", based on those translations. Satyajit Ray has been reported to have said about the documentary Rabindranath Tagore in his biography Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by W. Andrew Robinson that, "Ten or twelve minutes of it are among the most moving and powerful things that I have produced".

Often regarded as polymath, author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. The first stanza of Tagore's five-stanza Brahmo hymn has been adopted as the National Anthem of India, "Jana Gana Mana". The first ten lines of another Tagore song, "Amar Shonar Bangla" were adopted in 1972 as the Bangladesh's national anthem. Incidentally, Sri Lanka's national anthem "Sri Lanka Matha" was written and composed by Tagore's student, Ananda Samarakoon.

Academy Film Archive, part of the Academy Foundation, took an initiative to restore Satyajit Ray's films and could successfully restore 19 Ray films but Rabindranath Tagore is yet to be restored as its original print was found to be badly damaged. The film's original script was included in a book named Original English Film Scripts Satyajit Ray, put together by Ray's son Sandip Ray.