Rabindranath Tagore (born May 7, 1861,Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died August 7, 1941, Calcutta) was a Bengali poet, short-story writer,song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use ofcolloquial language intoBengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classicalSanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing Indianculture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-centuryIndia. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive theNobel Prize for Literature.

Early life and education

The son of the religious reformerDebendranath Tagore, he early began to write verses, and, after incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India. There he published several books ofpoetry in the 1880s and completedManasi (1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some of his best-known poems, including many in verse forms new toBengali, as well as some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.

Life in East Bengal and literary maturity

In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family’s estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed in a houseboat on thePadma River (the main channel of theGanges River), in close contact with village folk, and his sympathy for them became the keynote of much of his later writing. Most of his finest short stories, which examine “humble lives and their small miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy, laced with gentleirony, that is unique to him (though admirably captured by the directorSatyajit Ray in later film adaptations). Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside, most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these years he published several poetry collections, notablySonar Tari (1894;The Golden Boat), and plays, notablyChitrangada (1892;Chitra). Tagore’s poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his more than 2,000 songs, which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali society.

Britannica Quiz

Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Shantiniketan and educational vision

1 of 2

2 of 2

In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in ruralWest Bengal atShantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled permanently at the school, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. Years of sadness arising from the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907 are reflected in his later poetry, which was introduced to the West inGitanjali (Song Offerings) (1912). This book, containing Tagore’s English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections, includingGitanjali (1910), was hailed byW.B. Yeats andAndré Gide and won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but herepudiated it in 1919 as a protest against theAmritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre.

RabindranathTagore’s prose translation of Verse XXXIX fromGitanjali (Song Offerings) (1912)

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.
When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.
Whentumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.
When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.
When desire blinds the mind withdelusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

Later works and artistic pursuits

From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India, lecturing and reading from his work inEurope, the Americas, andEast Asia and becoming aneloquent spokesperson for the cause of Indian independence. Tagore’s novels in Bengali are less well known than his poems and short stories; they includeGora (1910) andGhare-Baire (1916), translated into English asGora andThe Home and the World, respectively. In the late 1920s, when he was in his 60s, Tagore took up painting and produced works that won him a place among India’s foremost contemporary artists.