Jyotirindranath Tagore

The fifth son of Debendranath Tagore, born in 1849, Jyotirindranath was the brother who made room for Rabindranath. He ran the Jorasanko music room, set his younger brother's early lyrics at the piano, edited Bharati, wrote historical plays — Puruvikram, Sarojini, Ashrumati — and translated Kalidasa, Molière and Shakespeare into Bengali.

His importance to this archive is narrower and larger than any of that: he is one of the people who made Bengali song writable. Working in the 1880s, he devised the sangkhyamatrik and akarmatrik systems of swaralipi, and in 1897 published Swaralipi Gitimala, a book of 168 notated songs of which 68 were Rabindranath's — the first substantial body of Tagore's music committed to paper by anyone. The akarmatrik line of that work is the notation Visva-Bharati still prints.

He was also a compulsive draughtsman, leaving roughly two thousand pencil portraits, including the only likeness of the bard Lalon drawn from life. He died at Ranchi in 1925.