Rabindranath Tagore

Who is Rabindranath Tagore?

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath born in Calcutta into the prominent Tagore family. A poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, composer and painter, he reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1913 he became the first non-European and first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded largely for his collection Gitanjali (Song Offerings), which he himself rendered into English. Tagore composed thousands of songs, a body of work known as Rabindra Sangeet, and wrote the words and music of two national anthems: 'Jana Gana Mana' of India and 'Amar Shonar Bangla' of Bangladesh; the Sri Lankan anthem is also linked to his influence. In 1921 he founded Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan, envisioning an institution that blended Indian and Western learning. Knighted in 1915, he renounced the honour in 1919 in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Sources: Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (Song Offerings), 1912 · The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913, nobelprize.org · Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, 1995