Rabindranath Tagore

May 7, 1861 – August 7, 1941

Bengali poet, writer and composer who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Biography

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861 into a prominent Bengali family. He wrote poems, songs, plays, novels and short stories, and was also a painter, composer and educator.

In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, mainly for Gitanjali, a collection of poems he translated into English. He founded Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan.

He supported Indian independence but criticised narrow nationalism, and gave up his British knighthood in protest at the Amritsar massacre of 1919. His songs became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. He died in 1941.