It would not be wrong, however, to hear a certain irony in that last question. If spiritual sustenance was what Europeans and Americans needed from Tagore, that is what he would give them; it was a way of serving mankind, and his own ambition as well. But Tagore knew that the role he was playing in the West was not his real self—just as the prose translations he made in “Gitanjali,” with their old-fashioned diction and Biblical echoes, were not much like the original Bengali verse. He confessed as much to his English friend and biographer Edward Thompson: “In my translations I timidly avoid all difficulties, which has the effect of making them smooth and thin. I know I am misrepresenting myself as a poet to the western readers.”

Yeats, for his part, was happy to acknowledge that it was only his ignorance—of Indian literature and culture, of Tagore’s actual life—that made it possible to see the poet as such a gratifying symbol. “I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought,” Yeats wrote. “But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveler will not tell me.”

There have been a number of attempts, in the century since Yeats made that request, to give the English reader a fuller and more accurate sense of Rabindranath Tagore—through new translations, anthologies of his work, critical studies, and biographies. But “The Essential Tagore” (Harvard; $39.95), published to coincide with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Tagore’s birth, is the most substantial one yet. Eight hundred pages long, it is divided into ten sections, each devoted to a different facet of Tagore’s achievement: not just poems but fiction, plays, essays, autobiography, letters, even light verse and comic sketches.

The word “essential” might seem to call for a more parsimonious selection, until you realize that Tagore’s collected works in Bengali fill eighteen thousand pages. And that only begins to suggest the breadth of his activities, and his central place in modern Indian culture. He also composed more than two thousand songs, two of which are now the national anthems of India and Bangladesh; made hundreds of paintings; founded an experimental school and university; edited journals; participated in political debates, often as a sympathetic critic of Gandhi, whose title Mahatma he popularized; and managed his family’s estates in East Bengal. Not even Goethe or Tolstoy was quite so omnicompetent. To Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, the editors of “The Essential Tagore,” he is an “incomparable genius.”

Quite obviously, this is not the curriculum vitae of a wizard or a saint. What comes across most clearly in “The Essential Tagore,” in fact, is not so much his literary genius—which remains elusive in translation—as his sheer human scale. Just as there was hardly a literary genre that he did not attempt, so there wasn’t a cultural or political question that he did not engage with, from the condition of women to the rise of nationalism, from the Hindu-Muslim divide to the need for industrial development. In seeing Tagore as an unworldly mystic, the West made the mistake of identifying the man with his literary persona—much as if one were to imagine Yeats, the theatre producer and Irish senator, forever planting bean rows on Innisfree.

Modernity, one might say, is the central theme and problem of Tagore’s work, and it is inextricably bound up with the problem of India’s relationship to the West, especially Britain. If India was a mythic land to the English, England was a still more powerful imaginative presence in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. Among the Bengali upper classes, to which Tagore belonged, education and public life were conducted largely in English. “Before I came to England,” he wrote during his first visit to the country, in 1878, “I supposed it was such a small island and its inhabitants were so devoted to higher culture that from one end to the other it would resound with the strains of Tennyson’s lyre.”

The Tagore family had long been at the forefront of India’s encounter with modernity, and with England. The poet’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was one of Calcutta’s richest men, thanks to his connections with the East India Company and his investments in banking and mining. On a visit to England in 1842, Dwarkanath was presented to Queen Victoria and met celebrities like the Duke of Wellington and Dickens, who joked about how hard it was to pronounce his name: “I have spelt it backwards, but it makes no less tremendous nonsense that way.”

The son of this glamorous figure, the poet’s father, Debendranath, became still more important to Indian life, though in a very different way. In his twenties, growing tired of the spoiled existence of a rich young man, he had a religious epiphany and devoted himself to the religious society known as the Brahmo Samaj. Brahmoism, which became highly influential in nineteenth-century Bengal, can be seen as a kind of Hindu Unitarianism. It preached the worship of one God, as opposed to the populous Hindu pantheon, and sought to reform Brahmin caste taboos, but its theological radicalism was accompanied by a commitment to middle-class sobriety and uplift. In his memoir “My Reminiscences,” Tagore remembers his father, known as Maharshi (“great sage”), as a distant and austere figure: “He had a well-defined code to regulate his relations with others and theirs with him. In this he was different from the generality of his countrymen. With the rest of us a little carelessness this way or that did not signify; so in our dealings with him we had to be anxiously careful.”

No wonder that, in the very first piece in “The Essential Tagore,” an autobiographical talk delivered in China in 1925, Tagore proclaims, “I am modern. . . . I was born into a family which rebelled.” The man honored as Gurudev, “great teacher,” was also a scathing satirist and social critic, and it is not without satisfaction that he notes, “I have never had complete acceptance from my own people.” This sense of being at odds with his country, especially with Bengali society, is most obvious in some of the early letters included in “The Essential Tagore.” “Ours is the most wretched country,” he wrote in 1893. “It is very difficult here to keep one’s strength of mind. There is no one to really help you. You cannot find anybody with whom one can exchange a few words and feel alive within ten or twenty miles—nobody thinks, nobody feels, nobody works; nobody has any experience of a great work or a life worth living. . . . They eat, go to [the] office, sleep, smoke, and chatter and chatter like complete idiots.”

This is the eternal intellectual’s complaint: it could be Joyce on the Irish, or Mencken on the Americans. But it took a special confidence for Tagore to call attention to his country’s vices, at a time when India was just beginning to unite in the struggle for independence from Britain. Tagore was a strong supporter of the independence movement, playing a prominent part in the agitation that swept Bengal in 1905. Nothing about his countrymen enraged him more than obsequiousness toward the British. “The moment we feel the slightest handshake of a favor on their part, why immediately are our entire selves transformed into a mass of jelly, trembling and wobbling from top to toe?” he demanded.