Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (Calcutta, 1861 – Calcutta, 1941) was a Bengali poet, philosopher, playwright, novelist, painter and composer, and one of the central figures of the Bengal Renaissance. In 1913 he became the first non-European and the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work reshaped Bengali literature and music, and his name remains the best known of modern Indian culture outside India.

He was born in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta into a household at the heart of the Brahmo reform movement, founded by Rammohun Roy and later led by his father, Debendranath Tagore. The house was full of literary magazines, classical music and theatre. Tagore was the youngest of a large family and was taught largely at home; he preferred wandering and reading to the classroom and learned drawing, mathematics, Sanskrit and English. He began publishing verse as a boy and, by the late 1870s, his first stories and plays. He was sent to England to study law, but he never completed a degree and returned to Bengal in 1880, carrying a varied education that would become a defining feature of his work.

He married Mrinalini Devi in 1883, and the deaths of his wife, a beloved daughter and a son in the following years left him deeply shaken. Between 1890 and 1901 he managed the family estates at Shilaidaha, in what is now Bangladesh, living on a houseboat on the Padma River. That period brought him close to rural life and to folk song, including the songs of the Bauls, which left a lasting mark on his writing. It was also the time of collections such as Manasi and of many short stories that portrayed rural Bengal with irony and compassion.

In 1901 he founded an experimental school at Santiniketan, modelled on the ancient ideal of teacher and pupils living together in a community. It grew into Visva-Bharati University, and Tagore devoted much of his energy to keeping it going. In 1912 he travelled to England with translations of his poems in free verse, which moved W. B. Yeats, who later wrote the preface to the English edition of Gitanjali. The Nobel Prize followed soon after and greatly widened his international reputation. He then travelled widely across Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East, lecturing and meeting many of the intellectuals of his day.

His thought combined a universalist humanism with suspicion of exclusive nationalism. During his 1916 journey to Japan and the United States he criticised jingoism, including that of the Japanese and the Americans, which brought him criticism at home but also praise from pacifists such as Romain Rolland. He supported India's independence from British rule without embracing a narrow nationalism, and he was a sharp critic of the Europeanisation of Indian culture. He renewed Bengali poetry by freeing it from the models of classical Sanskrit and by adopting the spoken language in verse and prose.

His influence has lasted. Two of his songs are now the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and another was adopted as the anthem of West Bengal. His paintings, still little studied outside Asia, are attracting growing attention. Tagore remains a reference for anyone seeking dialogue between cultural traditions.