Rabindranath Tagore

Their life

Bengali polymath — poet, composer, painter, and educator — who became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913) for Gitanjali. He founded an experimental university at Santiniketan and wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

Known for

• Gitanjali and the 1913 Nobel Prize
• Founding Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati University
• Composing India's and Bangladesh's national anthems
• Rabindra Sangeet — thousands of songs
• Renouncing his knighthood after Jallianwala Bagh
• Pioneering rural education reform in Bengal

The road they walked

Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 into the Jorasanko Tagore household in Calcutta, a family of zamindars, reformers, and Brahmo Samaj intellectuals so accomplished that the city called their mansion a cultural republic unto itself. The youngest of thirteen children, he was largely educated at home by tutors and by the family's own restless creativity — his father a religious philosopher, his brothers scientists, musicians, and civil servants. A brief stint studying law in England in the late 1870s left him more interested in English poetry and music than in a degree, and he returned to Bengal to write.

In his thirties, sent to manage the family's rural estates along the Padma River in what is now Bangladesh, Tagore lived among tenant farmers and boatmen, and that immersion in village life reshaped his poetry, fiction, and politics alike — the rich would later call this his richest creative decade. He wrote in nearly every form available to him: novels, short stories, plays, essays, and above all songs, eventually some two thousand of them, which Bengalis still sing as casually as hymns. In 1901 he opened an experimental school at Santiniketan, rejecting rote colonial-style education for lessons held outdoors under trees, a project that grew into Visva-Bharati University in 1921.

The turning point that made him a world figure came in 1912, when he traveled to England carrying his own English translations of Gitanjali, poems that W.B. Yeats championed and helped bring to a wider audience; the collection won Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first ever given to a non-European. Knighted by the British Crown in 1915, he renounced the honor in 1919 in protest of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, a gesture that made him, alongside his friend and sometime sparring partner Gandhi, one of the moral voices of Indian nationalism — though he remained wary of nationalism's excesses even as he opposed colonial rule. In his last two decades he took up painting, lectured across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and kept writing almost until his final illness.

How their story ended

Tagore died on 7 August 1941 at Jorasanko, the Calcutta family home where he had been born eighty years earlier. His health had declined for years, worsened by a painful surgery in 1937 that left him weakened, and by 1941 he was largely bedridden, dictating poems when he could no longer write. His final poems, composed almost to the end, dwell on mortality and the natural world with the same clear-eyed tenderness that marked his earliest work, closing a life that had already reshaped Bengali literature, Indian education, and the world's sense of what a poet from Asia could be.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

From the Journal