Bengali poet, song composer, philosopher, mathematician, and a pioneer in Bengali shorthand & musical notation Dwijendranath Tagore. His experiments in poetic composition, ingenious and daring, left a deep impress on the poetic development of his brother, Rabindranath Tagore.
Dwijendranath spent his time in cultivating poetry, acquiring knowledge and conducting various experiments. His first contribution to Bengali literature was the Bengali translation of Kaildasa’s classical Sanskrit work Meghadut in 1860 before the birth of his younger brother Rabindranath. It was the first time that that the great sanskrit poetic work was translated into Bengali. He had used two different Bengali rythmic styles for the translation.
It was an age when Michael Madhusudan influenced all Bengali poets but Dwijendranath was free from any such impact. On the other hand, Michael Madhusudan had hailed Dwijendranath as a poet of the future. Dwijendranath was ‘a true philosopher’.
He was a pioneer in many spheres of far-reaching importance. He invented the shorthand in ‘Bengali and wrote a manual on it in verse! He wrote a book on Geometry in which the 12th Axiom had been replaced by new ones. His writings on Boxometry, or science of paper-folding have fascinated scholars of mathematics.
