Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, composer, painter and educator, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, for Gitanjali. He wrote thousands of songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and founded a university at Santiniketan.
Works
Gitanjali, Fruit-Gathering
A Calcutta family
Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861, the youngest of thirteen surviving children of Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer, in a wealthy and cultured family. He disliked school and was educated mostly at home, writing poems from the age of eight.
In 1878 he went to England to study law, but returned without a degree. In 1890 his father sent him to manage the family estates in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, where life on the rivers and among the villagers inspired many of his stories and poems.
Santiniketan and the Nobel Prize
In 1901 Tagore founded a school at Santiniketan, west of Calcutta, where children learned in the open air, close to nature; it later became the international university of Visva-Bharati. Between 1902 and 1907 he lost his wife, two of his children and his father.
In 1912 he took to England his own English prose translations of poems from Gitanjali, Song Offerings. Read by W. B. Yeats, who wrote the introduction, they caused a sensation, and in 1913 Tagore became the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tagore travelled all over the world, lecturing on the unity of mankind and against narrow nationalism. He was knighted in 1915 but renounced the title in 1919 after the Amritsar massacre, in which British troops fired on an unarmed crowd.
A friend and sometimes a critic of Gandhi, he wrote novels, plays and essays, composed more than two thousand songs and took up painting at nearly seventy. He died in Calcutta in 1941. His songs, Rabindra Sangeet, are still sung throughout Bengal.
Anecdotes
Two national anthems
Tagore wrote the words and music of Jana Gana Mana, adopted as India's national anthem in 1950, and of Amar Shonar Bangla, which became the national anthem of Bangladesh in 1971. Sri Lanka's anthem was also written by one of his students and is said to be inspired by him.
A stolen medal
Tagore's Nobel Prize medal was stolen from the museum at Visva-Bharati University in 2004. It has never been found; the Swedish Academy later presented the university with replicas.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Tagore win the Nobel Prize?
For Gitanjali, a collection of devotional poems which he translated himself into English prose, praised for its profound sensitivity and beauty.
What is Santiniketan?
The place in West Bengal where Tagore founded a school in 1901, which grew into the international university of Visva-Bharati.
Did Tagore translate his own poems?
Yes. The English Gitanjali of 1912 and Fruit-Gathering of 1916 are his own translations from Bengali.