Chitra, a Play in One Act

Chitra, the warrior princess of Manipur, raised as a son and trained in hunting and war, falls in love with the great hero Arjuna, who has taken a vow of chastity and rejects her because she is plain and boyish. She begs the god of love to give her perfect beauty for a single year, and Arjuna falls in love with her. But as the year passes, Chitra longs to be loved for herself, the strong woman she really is.

Rabindranath Tagore based this lyrical play on an episode of the Mahabharata, wrote it in Bengali in 1892 and published his own English version in 1913. Read Tagore's The Gardener and The Song Celestial, also taken from the Mahabharata.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the youngest son of a great Bengali family of reformers and artists. He wrote poems, stories, novels, plays and some two thousand songs, and his songs became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

He founded a school in the countryside at Santiniketan, which grew into a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali. In 1919 he returned his British knighthood in protest at the massacre at Amritsar. The Home and the World and The Post Office show his range.