Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 7, 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Kolkata. He was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. His father was a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social reform movement in Bengal. His mother died when he was very young and his father travelled extensively. He was mostly raised by his servants and maids. He started writing poetry at the age of eight and published his first poems under the pseudonym Bhanusimha at the age of sixteen. He attended several schools but did not complete his formal education. He disliked the rigid methods of teaching and preferred to learn from nature and his own imagination. Tagore married Mrinalini Devi in 1883 when he was twenty-two and she was ten. They had five children, two of whom died in childhood. In 1890, he moved to Shilaidaha (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family's estates. There he wrote many of his famous poems, stories and songs. He also came in contact with the rural folk and developed a sympathy for their lives and struggles. He experimented with various forms of Bengali poetry and prose and introduced new styles and rhythms. He also translated some of his works into English. In 1901, he founded an experimental school at Santiniketan near Bolpur in West Bengal. He envisioned it as a place where children could learn in harmony with nature and culture. He later expanded it into a university called Visva-Bharati in 1921. He invited many eminent scholars, artists and thinkers from India and abroad to teach and collaborate at his institution. He also travelled widely across India and the world to spread his ideas and vision. Tagore was a prolific writer who produced works in almost every genre of literature. He wrote over a thousand poems, eight novels, eight volumes of short stories, more than two thousand songs, dozens of plays and dance-dramas, hundreds of essays and letters, and several books on philosophy, religion, education and social issues. He also painted over two thousand paintings and sketches in his later years. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest literary figures of modern India and the world. Tagore was also a visionary who advocated for humanism, internationalism, nationalism, freedom, peace and harmony. He denounced the British colonial rule and supported the Indian independence movement. He also criticized the communal violence and partition of India and Pakistan. He composed the national anthems of both countries: Jana Gana Mana for India and Amar Shonar Bangla for Bangladesh. He also influenced the national anthems of Sri Lanka and Nepal. Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his collection of poems Gitanjali (Song Offerings), which he translated from Bengali into English himself. He was the first non-European and the first Asian to receive this honour. He was also knighted by the British government in 1915 but he renounced his knighthood in 1919 as a protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Tagore died on August 7, 1941 at the age of eighty in his ancestral home in Kolkata. He was cremated at the premises of Visva-Bharati University. His legacy lives on in his works, his institution, his followers and admirers, and his influence on Indian and world culture.