Poet, novelist, painter and musician, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is the grand master of Bengali culture, and in the 1890s he concentrated on creating a new form, the short story. Many of his best stories were written during a period of relative isolation spent managing his family's estates in the riverlands of Bengal and they have been acclaimed as vivid portraits of Bengali life and landscapes, brilliantly polemical in their depiction of peasantry and gentry, casteism, corrupt officialdom and dehumanizing poverty. Yet Tagore is first and foremost India's supreme Romantic poet, and in these stories he can be seen reaching beyond mere documentary realism towards his own profoundly original vision.