About Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. The Tagore family was one of the most wealthy and powerful families of the country. As a child, Tagore was influenced by theatre, music, literature and philosophy, but hated formal education and found inspiration in nature. He began writing poetry from a young age and had early success first within his home region of Bengal, and then across all of India. Throughout his life he published almost 60 volumes of poetry. It was the form of writing he most loved, but Tagore was also a prolific composer, painter, critic, essay and fiction writer, experimenting with many different literary forms. His poems frequently expressed love of nature, mysticism and spirituality.

His poetry collection Gitanjali in 1912 brought international fame and he became the first non-western writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore travelled to many different countries around the world, meeting a variety of eminent figures from different walks of life from Albert Einstein to the poet Robert Frost and writer H.G. Wells. He was also a strong supporter of Indian independence from the British Empire and was often a political ally of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1919, in response to the killing of over 350 Indian civilians by the British army – the Amritsar Massacre – Tagore gave up the knighthood he had been awarded by Britain in 1915. As a man of enormous literary and political accomplishments, Tagore became an iconic figure of Indian heritage and culture in later life. He died in 1941 aged 80, and is regarded as one of the outstanding literary figures in the history of India. He had a lasting impact on the language and culture of his home region Bengal, as part of a movement that provided an example to the whole country.