Panchatantra’s Influence in Rabindranath Tagore’s Work : On Baishe Srabon, Remembering the Storyteller Before the Poet (08 August 2026)

Table of Contents

• 1. Tagore and the Panchatantra
• 2. Some reading material

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Tagore and the Panchatantra

Thinking about Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore makes us think about the Nobel prize, Gitanjali, Shantiniketan, Rabindrasangeet and his paintings. As I have been posting on Tagore, I thought I would try and touch upon how works like the Panchatantra affected his works.

When Rabindranath was born, his eldest sister Saudamini looked after him because his mother was ailing. Along with his sister, he was raised by domestic help and relatives. Tagore would have been less than fourteen when his mother passed away. Debendranath Tagore, his father, taught him Sanskrit and he heard stories from many others in the evening. In a joint family set-up, in the days before radio, entertainment for the young ones was oral storytelling, delivered by servants, aunts and grandmother-like relatives.

In his work Jivan Smriti, translated into English as My Reminiscences, and in his later works written for children, Chhelebela, Tagore describes how the elders would gather the children and tell them stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and from other texts.

Tagore's own schooling was brief and unhappy; he found the structured classroom stifling. He attended Sanskrit College only for a short period and later had a short stint studying law at University College, London.

With the arrival of printing, Fort William College in Calcutta and the Serampore Mission Press in the early eighteen-hundreds produced some of the very first printed Bengali primers, and the books, the Panchatantra and the Hitopadesha. The first printed edition of the Hitopadesha was printed around 1803 by Serampore Mission Press. Fort William College printed the Panchatantra around 1805.

At the same time, a parallel set of Bengali folk tales was later gathered together and published as Thakurmar Jhuli, meaning Grandmother's Bag of Tales. Tagore himself wrote the foreword to this very collection, praising how such tales saturate a child with the living spirit of Bengal. I plan to share these tales later here.

The Panchatantra is famous the world over for its structure, a story inside a story inside a story, where Vishnu Sharma tells a set of tales to instruct three princes, and inside each of those tales, animals and humans appear and prove their point.

Tagore used this idea. His book for children called Shey, meaning He, written for his own granddaughter, was built on a similar pattern – a tale inside a tale.

The Panchatantra taught children to accept the fact that a crow, a tortoise, a jackal or a mouse could stand in for a human being, complete with vanity, greed and cleverness. This pattern is visible in works like Sahaj Path which he wrote for the pathshala at Santiniketan.

An important feature of the Panchatantra is its purpose, that these are not stories told for amusement alone but stories meant to teach Niti. When Tagore set up his school at Santiniketan, he wrote that children should not be given information directly but should be allowed to discover facts through stories, through nature and through experience, rather in the way the Panchatantra does.

Panchatantra’s characters (the animals mostly) are witty, sometimes cynical, outsmarting one another with dry humour. This appears throughout Tagore's lighter writing where a simple remark by a minor character often carries a moral sting, like a jackal flattering a lion.

Panchatantra is unsentimental about virtue. It is not really about being good, it is about being shrewd, about understanding a situation correctly. Tagore shared this comfort with moral complexity. His novel Ghare-Baire warns against simple, flag-waving patriotism.

While Tagore never translated the Panchatantra, he used animals in his stories and songs. Here are some examples. I mentioned Shey earlier, so I will not touch on that.

• Tota Kahini (1918). A king decides that a free bird needs a proper, useful education. Singing songs is useless. Scholars are hired and the bird gets fed pages from the book and dies.
• Sahaj Path, his primer for teaching young children to read Bengali, is filled with small rhymes and tales about animals and birds behaving like humans.
• "Khanchar Pakhi Chhilo Sonar Khanchay" is a Rabindrasangeet (Tagore song), and talks about two birds – one which lives in the forest and the other which lives in a cage. The song is called Dui Pakhi (two birds) where a caged bird and a free bird debate the comforts of security against the risks of freedom.

For a blog such as mine, which retells stories from the Panchatantra, the point of tracing this influence on someone like Tagore is not to add a famous name. It is to show that the Panchatantra was never a closed book. It was, and still is, a living text. It entered the mind of a boy in nineteenth-century Calcutta.

When you read about the monkey and the crocodile, or the tale of the tortoise who could not keep his mouth shut (these will come later in the blog), you are getting the same ideas that a young Rabindranath got once.

It is also worth remembering that Tagore is only one example. Practically every major Indian writer who grew up in a traditional household encountered the Panchatantra or its close relatives, the Hitopadesha, at an early age. What makes Tagore's case worth studying is that he, almost alone among his contemporaries, went on to write extensively and self-consciously about the psychology of storytelling for children, so that we actually have his own words, in essays and memoirs, explaining why the method of teaching through animal stories worked better on a child's mind than direct instruction.

The Panchatantra says it is capable of sharpening the intellect of even the dullest person within six months. Among the many minds it touched, few carried it forward as richly, and as thoughtfully, as Tagore, even though he never once mentioned the name. The next time you read one of the posts, spare a thought for that small boy in Jorasanko listening to a story that would, many years later, help the songs and stories of a Nobel laureate.

It feels fitting to share these thoughts on Baishe Srabon, the day Bengal remembers each year as Tagore's passing, and to let the tradition of storytelling salute the man who carried it forward into a new age.

Some reading material

• Rabindranath Tagore, Jivan Smriti (My Reminiscences), 1907
• Rabindranath Tagore, Chhelebela (My Boyhood Days)
• Rabindranath Tagore, foreword to Thakurmar Jhuli, Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, 1907
• Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, essays
• Joanna Tuczynska, on animals and spiritual humanism in Tagore's work, Rupkatha journal