Who Was Rabindranath Tagore?

1. Jorasanko: childhood in a house of artists

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in Calcutta, in the family house at Jorasanko, into one of the most remarkable families of nineteenth-century India. His father, Debendranath Tagore, was a religious reformer and a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, and his family was wealthy, cultured and deeply involved in the intellectual life of Bengal. The house was full of music, theatre and debate, and the young Rabindranath grew up among painters, musicians and writers, receiving much of his education at home rather than in school, which he disliked and left early.

He began writing poetry as a boy, publishing his first poems at sixteen under a pseudonym, and by his twenties he was already a leading figure in Bengali literature. His early work was lyrical and romantic, full of the rivers and monsoons of Bengal, and it broke with the formal conventions of the time, using a simpler, more musical Bengali that ordinary readers could understand. He married Mrinalini Devi in 1883, and in 1890 he took charge of the family estates at Shilaidaha, in what is now Bangladesh, where he lived among the peasants and the river people, an experience that deepened his writing and gave him a lifelong concern for the lives of ordinary Indians.

The deaths that marked his life came early and often. His wife died in 1902, his daughter Renuka died in 1903, his youngest son Samindranath died in 1907, and his father died in 1905. The grief of those years is present in his work, above all in Gitanjali, the book of devotional poems that would make him famous, and it gave his writing a quality of acceptance and of spiritual calm that readers around the world recognised at once.

2. Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize of 1913

In 1912 Tagore travelled to England, carrying with him a notebook of English translations of his Bengali devotional poems, which he had made himself. The poems were shown to the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who was deeply impressed, and to the painter William Rothenstein, and they were published in London as Gitanjali, or Song Offerings, with an introduction by Yeats. The book was an immediate success in England and America, and its poems, which speak of a direct, personal relationship with the divine, without priests or ritual, struck a chord with readers who were looking for a spirituality outside the churches.

In 1913 Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali, the first time the prize had gone to a writer from outside Europe. The award made him world famous overnight, and it was a moment of great significance for India, because it showed that an Indian writer, writing in an Indian language, could be recognised as the equal of the best writers of Europe. Tagore himself was modest about the prize, and he used the money and the fame it brought to support his school at Santiniketan, the educational project that was becoming the centre of his life.

The Nobel Prize also changed how the West saw India. Before Tagore, Indian literature was known in Europe mainly through translations of ancient texts; after him, it was known as a living literature, written by a man who was alive and who could be met and heard. He toured Europe, America and Asia in the years that followed, lecturing and reading his poems, and he became a familiar figure in the cultural life of the world, a sage from the East who spoke about education, about peace and about the meeting of cultures.

3. The knighthood and Jallianwala Bagh: the break with empire

In 1915 the British government knighted Tagore, a recognition of his literary fame and of his standing in India. Four years later he gave the honour back. In April 1919, British troops under General Reginald Dyer fired on a crowd of unarmed Indians gathered at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing hundreds of people. The massacre shocked India, and Tagore, who had been a loyal subject of the empire in the sense that he believed in its civilising claims, wrote to the Viceroy renouncing his knighthood in protest, in a letter that is still quoted as one of the great statements of moral protest in Indian history.

The letter said that the time had come when badges of honour made the shame of his country more visible, and that he wished to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of his countrymen. The renunciation was a turning point in Tagore's life and in India's history, because it marked the moment when one of the most respected Indians of his generation publicly broke with the British, and it helped to prepare the ground for the non-cooperation movement that Gandhi would launch the following year. Tagore and Gandhi were friends and admirers of each other, although they disagreed on many things, and Gandhi called Tagore Gurudev, the divine teacher, while Tagore called Gandhi Mahatma, the great soul, a name that stuck.

Tagore's politics were his own, and they did not fit neatly into any party. He opposed British rule, but he also opposed the narrow nationalism that he saw growing in India, and he warned repeatedly that nationalism could become a form of hatred. He believed in the meeting of cultures, in the value of the West as well as the East, and in an India that would be open to the world. His novel Gora, published in 1910, and his essays on nationalism, delivered as lectures in Japan and America in 1916 and 1917, set out these views, and they remain among the most thoughtful criticisms of nationalism ever written by an Indian.

4. Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati: a university of the world

In 1901 Tagore founded a school at Santiniketan, a quiet place in rural Bengal, where children would learn in the open air, under the trees, with music and art as part of their daily lives rather than as extras. The school grew, and in 1921 it became Visva-Bharati, a university whose name means the world in one nest, and whose aim was to bring together the cultures of East and West. Scholars and artists from around the world came to teach there, and students from India, China, Japan and Europe studied side by side, learning each other's languages, arts and ideas.

The university was Tagore's most practical achievement, and it embodied his belief that education should free the mind rather than fill it with facts. He disliked the British system of education in India, which he thought produced clerks rather than free men and women, and he wanted Santiniketan to be different: a place where learning was joyful, where nature was the classroom, and where the arts were taken as seriously as the sciences. The university survives today as a central university of India, and Santiniketan itself, with its mud houses, its trees and its open-air classes, is still a place of pilgrimage for his readers.

Tagore gave much of his Nobel Prize money and much of his later income to the university, and he spent the last decades of his life raising money for it on his travels. He was not a wealthy man, and the university was often short of funds, but he never lost faith in it, and he regarded it as the most important thing he had built, more important than any single book. It is a measure of his priorities that a poet who could have lived comfortably on his fame chose instead to spend his life building a school in a village.

5. The anthems of two nations

Tagore wrote the words and the music of Jana Gana Mana, the song that became the national anthem of India, and of Amar Sonar Bangla, the song that became the national anthem of Bangladesh. He is the only person in history to have written the national anthems of two countries, and the fact says something about the reach of his work across the whole of Bengal, which was divided by partition in 1947 into the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh. The songs were written as poems of love for the land and its people, not as marching songs, and their gentleness is part of their power.

Jana Gana Mana was written in 1911, in Bengali, and was first sung at a session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta that year. It was adopted as the national anthem of India in 1950, nine years after Tagore's death. Amar Sonar Bangla, written in 1906 during the protest against the British partition of Bengal, became the anthem of Bangladesh when the country won its independence in 1971. Both songs are sung by millions of people who may know little else of Tagore's work, and both are a daily reminder of how deeply his words entered the life of his people.

The anthems are also a reminder of the tragedy of partition. Tagore had spent his life arguing for the unity of Bengal and for the meeting of Hindu and Muslim cultures, and the division of his homeland into two countries was the opposite of what he had hoped for. That his songs became the anthems of both sides is a kind of consolation, and it is fitting that the poet who wrote about the whole of Bengal should be claimed by both of the countries that Bengal became.

6. The later years: painting, travel and the last poems

In his last years Tagore took up painting, almost by accident, beginning in his late sixties when doodles in his manuscripts grew into drawings and then into paintings. He produced more than two thousand paintings, in a style that was strange, expressive and unlike anything else in Indian art, and they were exhibited in Paris, London and Berlin to considerable interest. The paintings are now regarded as an important part of his work, and they show that his creativity did not fade with age but found new forms.

He continued to travel and to write into his seventies, visiting Persia, the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia, and publishing novels, plays and poems at a remarkable rate. His last years were marked by ill health, and he underwent an operation in 1940 from which he never fully recovered. He died on 7 August 1941 in Calcutta, at the age of eighty, and his death was mourned across India as the passing of the country's greatest living figure. His last poems, written in his final months, are among his most moving, and they speak of a man preparing to leave the world with calm and with gratitude.

The volume of his work is extraordinary. He wrote more than two thousand songs, which are known in Bengal as Rabindra Sangeet and are sung at every occasion of joy and sorrow; he wrote novels, short stories, plays, essays and letters; and his collected works in Bengali run to many volumes. He is not only a poet but the founder of modern Bengali literature, and his influence on the language is comparable to Shakespeare's on English.

7. Why Tagore still matters

Tagore matters because he showed that a writer from a colonised country could speak to the whole world in his own voice, and that the world would listen. The Nobel Prize of 1913 was not only a personal honour but a moment in which the literature of Asia was recognised as equal to that of Europe, and it opened a door through which many later writers would pass. His poems are still read in translation around the world, and his songs are still sung in Bengal every day, which is a kind of immortality that few writers achieve.

He also matters because of what he stood for. He believed that education should free people, that cultures should meet rather than fight, and that nationalism, while it could inspire, could also destroy. These are not easy beliefs, and they made him unpopular with extremists of every kind, but they are the beliefs that the world most needs to hear today, when the meeting of cultures is often a meeting of fears. His university, his anthems and his poems are all expressions of the same idea: that the world is one nest, and that we belong in it together.

The best way to remember him is to read the poem that made him famous in the West. 'Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls', he wrote in Gitanjali, in his own translation, 'into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.' The poem is a prayer for India, but it is also a prayer for the world, and it is as relevant now as it was when he wrote it more than a century ago.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Nobel Prize — Rabindranath Tagore facts
• Nobel Prize — Rabindranath Tagore biographical
• Wikipedia — Rabindranath Tagore

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• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.