Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children of Debendranath Tagore, in a family at the heart of the Bengal Renaissance. He loathed the classroom and was educated largely at home and through travel; he was writing verse at eight, and at sixteen published poems under the pseudonym Bhanusimha that were taken for rediscovered old masterpieces. A period in England, at school in Brighton and briefly at University College London, ended without a degree.

Managing the family estates at Shelaidaha in the 1890s brought him close to the life of rural Bengal, and much of his finest short fiction dates from those years. His output was immense: poetry, some two thousand songs, two of which became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, plays such as The Post Office (1912), and novels including Gora (1910), a searching study of identity and faith, and The Home and the World (1916), a critique of militant nationalism. In 1901 he founded a school at Santiniketan that grew into Visva-Bharati University.

In 1912 he brought his own English prose renderings of poems from Gitanjali and other collections to London, where Yeats wrote an introduction to them. The following year he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Knighted in 1915, he renounced the honour in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. He travelled widely, speaking against nationalism, and in later life took up painting. He died in August 1941 in the house where he was born.