Handwriting of Rabindranath Tagore - a calligraphic legacy

mitradranirban

Rabindranath Tagore (1862-1941) was Asia's first Nobel-Laureate poet, lyricist, musician, story writer, essayist, novelist, dramatist, painter, educationist, social reformer and what not. Today, after 84 years after his death, he still occupies the center stage of Bengali literature and culture.

Due to his iconic stature in Bengal, his handwriting was consider the de-facto standard in Bengali Calligraphy. There is a anecdote that once two students in Calcutta University was accused of cheating as they had identical handwriting. Later it was found that they both followed Tagore's handwriting.

When Government of India created a new terminal building in the International Airport in Kolkata, Tagore's handwriting was chosen as the principle design element


I have embarked on an attempt to create an open source Bengali font by scanning publicly available sample of Tagore's handwriting 

This project is likely to take many years because

* my lack of competence and experience
* lack of enough publicly available samples
* myriad of conjucnts, variant forms and contextual forms involved.

Here I am attaching a very early peek of my project