Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, writer, composer and painter, born in Calcutta in 1861 into a prominent Bengali family, whose extraordinarily wide body of work reshaped modern Bengali literature and music and made him the most internationally recognized South Asian writer of his era. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded largely on the strength of "Gitanjali" ("Song Offerings"), a collection of devotional and lyrical poems he had himself translated into English shortly before the award, which brought his work rapid international attention. Beyond poetry, he wrote novels, short stories, plays and essays, composed thousands of songs that remain central to Bengali musical culture, and founded an experimental school at Santiniketan that grew into Visva-Bharati University, built around his own progressive ideas about education, nature and creative freedom. He also composed the lyrics and music later adopted as the national anthems of both India and, after his death, Bangladesh, an unusual distinction shared by no other individual, and he used his international standing to speak out on colonialism and nationalism, notably renouncing the British knighthood he had been given after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar. Tagore died in 1941, and he remains one of the most celebrated literary and cultural figures South Asia has produced.