Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861, the youngest of thirteen children. Because his father travelled widely and his mother died when he was small, he was largely raised by servants. He hardly went to school, as it bored him. In later life, he argued that the purpose of education was to make students curious, not to give them information. Various members of his family helped to train both his mind and his body through programmes of reading and sport, but Tagore was already writing poetry and stories when he was as young as eight. Tagore’s reputation today is not limited to his writing. It is true that he transformed Bengali literature by breaking away from the styles of classical Sanskrit. But although he wrote more than two thousand songs, many volumes of poetry, novels, drama and short stories in Bengali – in fact, two of his works are now the national anthems of Bangladesh and India – he is equally famous as a freedom fighter, opposing both British rule of India and Indian sectarianism. Tagore was world-famous in his lifetime. He was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913) and travelled widely all over the world. His works have been translated into many foreign languages. His last years produced some of his best poetry, but were marked by debilitating illness and pain. He died in 1941.