Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta to one of Bengal's most prominent intellectual families, and began publishing poetry in Bengali as a teenager, going on to write across nearly every literary form — poetry, song, the novel, drama, the short story — alongside painting and composing music (he wrote what are now the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh). He managed his family's rural estates for much of his thirties and forties, an experience that shaped his lifelong commitment to village self-reliance and to the school he founded at Santiniketan, later expanded into Visva-Bharati University. Gitanjali ("Song Offerings"), a collection of devotional lyrics first published in Bengali in 1910, became widely known in the West only after Tagore's own English prose recasting of the poems appeared in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats; it won him the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first ever awarded to a non-European. He renounced the British knighthood he had accepted in 1919, in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of unarmed civilians in Amritsar, and remained an influential public voice on Indian nationalism and education until his death in Calcutta at seventy-nine.