Rabindranath Tagore
1861 – 1941 · India
Known for: Bengali poet, first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
“The poet whose songs became the anthems of two nations.”
Biography
Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 at the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, the youngest of the thirteen surviving children of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi, in a house that stood at the centre of the Bengal Renaissance. Literary magazines were published there, Bengali and Western classical music was performed there, and Dhrupad musicians lived in the household to teach the children. His mother died while he was small and his father travelled for months at a time, so he was raised largely by servants and taught at home rather than in a classroom, an arrangement he preferred; his career at Presidency College lasted a single day, and he held ever after that good teaching does not explain things but stirs curiosity. He was writing poetry at eight, and at sixteen he published his first substantial poems under the name Bhanusimha, which literary authorities took for the work of a forgotten master.
Tagore's work is hard to hold in a single view. He wrote poems, novels, short stories, plays, dance dramas and essays, painted and drew in his later years, and composed some two thousand songs that Bengalis still sing as Rabindra Sangeet. Against the rigid classical forms of Bengali letters he set a colloquial, lyrical, philosophically restless voice. Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare Baire remain his best known books. In 1913 the English Gitanjali brought him the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first awarded to an Indian, the first to anyone outside Europe, and the first to a writer of songs. He was knighted in 1915 and gave the honour back in 1919 in protest at the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. A humanist and an internationalist, he condemned British rule and argued for independence while remaining a critic of nationalism itself, and he put his convictions into a school at Santiniketan that grew into Visva-Bharati University.
His last decades were spent lecturing and reading across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and returning to Santiniketan to teach. He died at Jorasanko on 7 August 1941, at the age of eighty. His songs outlasted every argument about his poetry: India took Jana Gana Mana as its national anthem and Bangladesh took Amar Sonar Bangla, and the Sri Lankan anthem was inspired by his work. Visva-Bharati still teaches at Santiniketan, and in Bengal he is still called by the names given to him there, Gurudeb and Kobiguru and Bishwokobi.