Rabindranath Tagore

The Bengali poet, songwriter and thinker Rabindranath Tagore dominated the culture of Bengal for half a century and, in 1913, became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Besides poems, stories, novels and plays he wrote more than two thousand songs, two of which became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and he founded a school and university at Santiniketan that tried to join Indian and world learning.

Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the family mansion at Jorasanko in Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo reform movement begun by Raja Ram Mohan Roy. The household was a centre of the Bengal Renaissance, full of music, theatre and magazines. Tagore hated school and was taught mostly at home. He wrote verse as a child, and at sixteen published poems under the invented name Bhanusimha, which some readers took for the lost work of an older poet. In the same period he wrote his first short story. In 1878 he was sent to England to study, attending a school in Brighton and briefly University College London, but returned without a degree.

From 1890 Tagore managed the family estates in what is now Bangladesh, travelling the Padma River on a houseboat. Contact with village life and with the folk songs of the Baul mystic Lalon shaped his work. The years 1891 to 1895 were especially productive, yielding more than half of the stories later collected in Galpaguchchha; he is credited with creating the modern Bengali short story.

In 1901 he moved to Santiniketan, his father's country retreat, and opened an experimental school, run on informal lines with much teaching outdoors. His wife and two of his children died in the following years. In 1912 he took his own English translations of Gitanjali, "Song Offerings", to London, where W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound admired them; the next year he received the Nobel Prize. He wrote Amar Shonar Bangla in protest against the partition of Bengal in 1905, and Jana Gana Mana was first sung at a Congress session in 1911. His novels include Gora and Ghare Baire, The Home and the World, a critical study of the nationalist Swadeshi movement.

Tagore opposed British rule but distrusted aggressive nationalism of every kind, a stance he set out in lectures in Japan and the United States in 1916 and 1917. He accepted a knighthood in 1915 but gave it up in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919. He admired and argued with Mahatma Gandhi: he attacked the spinning-wheel campaign in a 1925 essay and in 1934 rebuked Gandhi for calling an earthquake in Bihar divine punishment for untouchability, yet he helped resolve Gandhi's dispute with B. R. Ambedkar over separate electorates.

Between 1878 and 1932 Tagore visited more than thirty countries on five continents, from Argentina to Japan, Iran and the Soviet Union, raising money for Visva-Bharati, the university whose foundation stone was laid at Santiniketan in December 1918. In 1921 he and the Englishman Leonard Elmhirst founded an institute for rural reconstruction nearby. Around the age of sixty he took up painting, and exhibitions of his pictures were held across Europe.

Tagore's last years were marked by illness: he fell into a coma in 1937 and became gravely ill again in 1940. He died at the Jorasanko house on 7 August 1941. His songs, known as Rabindra Sangeet, remain central to Bengali life in both India and Bangladesh.

Our 1900 and 1930 maps show the British Raj, the world of Tagore's career, with Bengal at its eastern end; today his homeland is divided between India and Bangladesh.