A Love Lost In Time: Rabindranath Tagore, Annapurna Turkhad, And His Poetry Of Yearning

In 2025, we are all yearners — we are all yearning for something. From Sally Rooney's critically acclaimed 'Normal People' (2018) and its subsequent limited series adaptation in 2020, Celine Song's 'Past Lives' (2023), and John Crowley’s We Live In Time (2024), to viral social media posts about yearning, the mood for post-pandemic pop culture has been that of intense romantic longing. But long before Normal People (2020), Aftersun (2022), and All of Us Strangers (2023) made Paul Mescal the face of intense male yearning, there was Rabindranath Tagore.

A prolific polymath, today Tagore's legacy is largely defined by the humanist vision of his vast and enduring body of work spanning poetry, songs, plays, short stories, essays, novels, and paintings. But before he was Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate in Literature and the National Poet of India, he was 'Rabi', the poet laureate of longing. His early writing from his formative years was shaped by his unrequited love for Annapurna Turkhad — the second daughter of physician, social reformer, and Prarthana Samaj founder Dr Atmaram Pandurang Turkhadekar.

Tagore met Annapurna, or Anna, in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1878 on his way to England. Rabindranath's older brother Satyendranath was a friend of Dr Pandurang, and he arranged for the young Rabi to stay with the anglicised Turkhad family in Bombay to improve his English and learn English etiquette. Anna — educated in England and fluent in English, French, German, and Portuguese — was given the responsibility of tutoring Tagore during his two-month stay with the Turkhad family.

Tagore was seventeen years old at the time, and Anna was nineteen, possibly twenty. In his journals, Tagore recalled that he had half expected her to look down on him for what he called his own lack of scholarship, but she didn't. Instead, the two became quite close. She taught him English language and etiquette, and Tagore wrote her love-poems in Bengali. In one of his poems, addressed to 'Nalini' — Tagore's nickname for Anna, meaning 'lotus' in Bengali — he wrote:

Hear, Nalini! Open your eyes! Are you still asleep? / Behold, by your door, beloved, has arrived your sun.

Interestingly, the last part of this couplet can also be translated as "your Rabi" since 'Rabi' is also a synonym of 'sun' in Bengali.

Annapurna, too, was swayed by the shy, introverted young Tagore, and wrote back in one of her letters: poet, I think that even if I were on my death-bed, your songs would call me back to life. According to Krishna Dutta and W. Andrew Robinson's 'Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man', Dr Pandurang even sent a proposal for the marriage of Rabindranath to Anna, but Tagore's father, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore declined the proposal.

Tagore set sail for England on SS Poorna in September 1878. Anna married Harold Littledale, an Irish professor of English Literature and then the vice-principal of Baroda High School and College, in 1880. They had four children: two daughters named Ana Nelline (a name clearly inspired by Nalini) and Olga, and two sons named Harold and Denzil. She left Bombay for Edinburgh in early 1891, and died at the age of 33 on 2nd July of the same year in Marchmont from nervous exhaustion and septicaemia lasting six days, after giving birth to her son Denzil. Anna's grave in the Morningside Cemetery in South Edinburgh, once thought lost, was recently rediscovered by genealogist Caroline Gerard. Today, a commemorative plaque installed in 2023 marks her burial spot in the cemetery.

Tagore and Anna never met again. Today, while Tagore is celebrated across the world on his birth anniversary (7th May on the Gregorian calendar and 25th of Boishakh according to the Bengali calendar), this remarkable woman is all but forgotten. Yet, her fleeting but profound presence in his life and his lasting, lonesome love for her permeates many of his poems and novels. Nalini remained a recurring figure in Tagore's writing, and his yearning for her shaped the intense romantic longing in his poems, songs, plays, and novels like 'Shesher Kobita' (translated as 'Farewell Song') and 'Nouka-Dubi' ('Boat-wreck', adapted into a critically acclaimed period drama of the same name by Rituporno Ghosh in 2011) where almost-lovers come together only for life, obligation, duty, or social customs to separate them. This yearning is perhaps best encapsulated in Tagore's 1887 love-song 'Tobu Money Rekho', where he writes:

তবু মনে রেখো যদি দূরে যাই চলে।
যদি পুরাতন প্রেম ঢাকা পড়ে যায় নবপ্রেমজালে।
যদি থাকি কাছাকাছি,
দেখিতে না পাও ছায়ার মতন আছি না আছি —
তবু মনে রেখো।

Remember me, even if I stray far, far away.
Remember me, even if this old love is buried under the web of a new passion. Even if I remain close, yet hidden from you, unseeable like a shadow —
Still, remember me.

Listen to the song in Tagore's own voice here.

Learn more about Anna Turkhad here.

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