Where the Mind is Without Fear (Poem) by Rabindranath Tagore

This poem was written when the British ruled our country. We were slaves to a foreign power. Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian nationalist and visionary wanted India to awaken to a bright dawn of freedom - freedom from slavery and our own mental chains.

Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken
up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the
depths of truth;
Where tireless striving
stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward
by thee into ever widening
thought and actioninto
that heaven of freedom,
my father,
let my country awake.