The Bengali Gitanjali of 1910 and the English collection of 1912 are not identical books in different languages. That distinction matters when discussing the poems associated with the Nobel period.

Tagore’s school at Santiniketan preceded Visva-Bharati. These institutions gave his educational work a lasting form alongside his poems, songs and visual art.

The English Gitanjali is a selection of Tagore’s own prose translations drawn from several Bengali collections. It is not a page-for-page English version of the Bengali book bearing the same title. This changes how the two should be compared: a difference in selection or arrangement may be deliberate, rather than a missing poem in an otherwise identical edition.

Visva-Bharati’s discussion of Gitanjali also emphasizes the musical life of the Bengali poems and songs. Reading an English prose rendering and hearing a Bengali performance are different encounters with the work. Neither should be presented as a transparent substitute for the other. For a reader beginning in English, a short group of poems read slowly can reveal recurring relations among the speaker, the natural world and an addressed presence without requiring every poem to yield a single paraphrasable message.

Visva-Bharati’s bibliography identifies translations by other people as well as Tagore’s own. It credits Devabrata Mukhopadhyaya for The Post Office and specifically notes an erroneous author-translation credit on an edition of The King of the Dark Chamber. Check the work and translator before attributing English wording to Tagore alone. His educational work at Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati is another substantial part of the record, beyond the Nobel-era collection most widely associated with his name.