Rabindranatha Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7th May, 1861, at Calcutta [now Kolkata], India was a multi-talented artist. Tagore was the son of religious and social reformer Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. Tagore was the youngest of 13 surviving children, and he was nicknamed as "Rabi". He was strongly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West. Tagore is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. Tagore became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1913.

Tagore lost his mother during his infant days and as his father travelled widely, Tagore was raised mostly by servants. After his basic education, Tagore was sent to England for his studies. At the age of eleven, after his upanayan, Tagore and his father left Calcutta in February 1873 for an all India tour for several months, visiting his father's Santiniketan estate and Amritsar before reaching the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie. There at Dalhousie, Tagore read biographies, history, Sanskri, astronomy and modern science and examined the classical works of poet Kālidāsa. Tagore did not complete his studies at England and he returned to India in the late 1870s. He published several poetry books in the 1880s and completed Manasi - a collection that marks the maturing of his genius in 1890. In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now Bangladesh) to manage his family’s estates there at Shilaidah and Shazadpur till 1901. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the Padma River (the main branch of the River Ganges), in close contact with villagers, and his sympathy for them reflected in his later writing. Tagore came in love with the Bengali countryside, most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his artistic works.

In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at Shantiniketan –means “Abode of Peace”, where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled forever at the school, which later became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. From 1912 Tagore spent long periods outside India, lecturing and reading from his work in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia and became an active participant in the Indian independence movement. During the late 1920s, when he was in his early 60s, Tagore took up painting and produced works that won him a place among India’s foremost contemporary artists. Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his collection of poems, Gitanjali. This marked the first time a Nobel Prize was awarded to an Indian or a non-European author. The award was primarily given for his English translation, "Song Offerings," of the original Bengali Gitanjali. In 1915, Tagore was awarded a knighthood, but he renounced it in 1919 as a protest against the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre. At the age of 80, Rabindranath Tagore died on August 7, 1941.