Originally written in Bengali in 1911, this is a spiritual play about a child (Amal), who is confined to his uncle’s home with an incurable disease. He watches the villagers pass, and dreams of the postman bringing him a letter from the King. In his introduction to the English version (1912), W.B. Yeats writes that the “play conveys to the right audience an emotion of gentleness and peace” which is epitomised by Amal’s character.
Tagore was a Bengali polymath who also wrote poetry, music and plays. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), awarded for “his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”