<P> Tagore began his career in short stories in 1877--when he was only sixteen--with "Bhikharini" ("The Beggar Woman"). With this, Tagore effectively invented the Bengali - language short story genre . The four years from 1891 to 1895 are known as Tagore's "Sadhana" period (named for one of Tagore's magazines). This period was among Tagore's most fecund, yielding more than half the stories contained in the three - volume Galpaguchchha (or Golpoguchchho; "Bunch of Stories"), which itself is a collection of eighty - four stories . Such stories usually showcase Tagore's reflections upon his surroundings, on modern and fashionable ideas, and on interesting mind puzzles (which Tagore was fond of testing his intellect with). Tagore typically associated his earliest stories (such as those of the "Sadhana" period) with an exuberance of vitality and spontaneity; these characteristics were intimately connected with Tagore's life in the common villages of, among others, Patisar, Shajadpur, and Shilaida while managing the Tagore family's vast landholdings . There, he beheld the lives of India's poor and common people; Tagore thereby took to examining their lives with a penetrative depth and feeling that was singular in Indian literature up to that point . In particular, such stories as "Kabuliwala" ("The Fruitseller from Kabul", published in 1892), "Kshudita Pashan" ("The Hungry Stones") (August 1895), and "Atottju" ("The Runaway", 1895) typified this analytic focus on the downtrodden . </P> <P> In "Kabuliwala", Tagore speaks in first person as town - dweller and novelist who chances upon the Afghani seller . He attempts to distill the sense of longing felt by those long trapped in the mundane and hardscrabble confines of Indian urban life, giving play to dreams of a different existence in the distant and wild mountains: "There were autumn mornings, the time of year when kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the whole world . At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it...I would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the mountains, the glens, the forest...". </P> <P> Many of the other Galpaguchchha stories were written in Tagore's Sabuj Patra period from 1914 to 1917, also named after one of the magazines that Tagore edited and heavily contributed to . </P> <P> Tagore's Galpaguchchha remains among the most popular fictional works in Bengali literature . Its continuing influence on Bengali art and culture cannot be overstated; to this day, it remains a point of cultural reference, and has furnished subject matter for numerous successful films and theatrical plays, and its characters are among the most well known to Bengalis . </P>

Rabindranath tagore in the field of art and culture