Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the only person to have written the national anthems of two countries. Born in Calcutta in 1861, the youngest of thirteen surviving children of a leading Brahmo family, he disliked formal schooling, was largely taught at home, and abandoned a law degree in London. He published poetry from his teens in Bengali, and his output over sixty years covers poetry, short stories, novels, essays, drama, and some two thousand songs — Rabindra Sangeet — which remain a living tradition in Bengal. He managed the family estates in East Bengal from 1891, which brought him into daily contact with rural poverty and shaped both his fiction and his later work on cooperatives and village reconstruction. He translated a selection of his own devotional poems into English prose as Gitanjali, and W. B. Yeats promoted it. The Nobel Prize followed in 1913, and made him a global figure lecturing across Europe, the Americas and Asia. He founded a school at Santiniketan in 1901 on principles opposed to the colonial system — lessons outdoors, arts at the centre, no rote learning — which became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. His politics were complicated. He supported the swadeshi movement but withdrew when it turned communal, and he argued publicly with Gandhi about non-cooperation, the charkha and the interpretation of the 1934 Bihar earthquake. He was a persistent critic of nationalism as such, which he regarded as a European disease. He renounced his knighthood in 1919 in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Jana Gana Mana and Amar Sonar Bangla became the anthems of India and Bangladesh. He died in 1941.
- Lived: 1861 CE – 1941 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: poet, polymath, nobel_laureate
