Rabindra Sangeet

Rabindra Sangeet emerged as Rabindranath Tagore began composing songs in the late 19th century, systematizing them in the early 1900s. Drawing on Hindustani ragas and Bengali folk genres such as Baul, Bhatiyali (boatmen’s songs), and Bhawaiya, Tagore also absorbed elements from Scottish/British airs and Western classical harmony. He paired this musical cosmopolitanism with lyrics written in elevated, modern Bengali, creating songs that were both literary and singable.

The repertory was notated and curated within Tagore’s own institutional ecosystem—most notably at Santiniketan/Visva‑Bharati—where Dinendranath Tagore and others standardized notation and pedagogy. Collections such as Gitabitan organized the songs by theme. With gramophone records, radio (All India Radio), and concert culture, the idiom spread widely across Bengal and to diasporic communities. Two anthemic pieces from the corpus later became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, underscoring the music’s civic and cultural reach.

In the mid- to late 20th century a lineage of celebrated singers shaped performance practice—balancing fidelity to notated melodies, diction, and tal (meter) with expressive nuance. Rabindra Sangeet continues to inform modern Bengali light-classical and popular song, stage, cinema, and choral traditions. Conservatories and broadcast media in India and Bangladesh sustain its pedagogy, while contemporary artists arrange the songs with chamber strings, piano, guitar, and choir—retaining the melody-forward ethos at its core.