Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, and Sarada Devi. His mother died in 1875. The family played an important role in the cultural renewal of Bengal, the so-called Bengal Renaissance.

He was educated mostly at home, read history, science and Sanskrit, and wrote poems from an early age. In 1878 he was sent to England to study law; he attended classes briefly at University College London but returned in 1880 without a degree. In 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi; the couple had five children, two of whom died in childhood.

From 1890 he managed the family estates at Shelaidaha (now in Bangladesh), where he came into close contact with the life of ordinary people in the countryside and wrote many poems, stories and songs. In Bengali he wrote poetry, short stories, novels (including Gora and Ghare-Baire), plays and essays, and some two thousand songs, known as Rabindrasangeet.

In 1901 he founded an experimental school at Santiniketan that sought to combine Indian and Western educational traditions; in 1921 Visva-Bharati University grew out of it. In 1912 he translated Gitanjali into English; William Butler Yeats wrote the preface to the India Society's edition in London. Late in life he also began to paint; his paintings were exhibited in Paris and London.

Bengal was part of British India, with Calcutta as its capital until 1911. The Bengal Renaissance produced reform movements, a modern Bengali literature and debates about education and identity. The Brahmo Samaj, to which Tagore's father belonged, sought a revival of the monistic basis of Hinduism as set out in the Upanishads.

British rule provoked resistance. The partition of Bengal in 1905 led to the Swadeshi movement, and later events such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919) strengthened nationalism. From time to time Tagore took part in the nationalist movement, but in his own way and not without criticism.

In Bengal Tagore was successful early on; his songs and poems were widely sung and read. After the English translation of Gitanjali (1912) he also became known in the West. In 1913 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first non-European to win it; the Swedish Academy described his verse as sensitive, fresh and beautiful and as having made his poetic thought, in his own English words, part of Western literature.

In 1915 he was knighted, but in 1919 he renounced that honour in a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar (13 April 1919), in which troops of the British Indian Army under Reginald Dyer fired on a crowd. Estimates of the number killed range from 379 to over 1,500. Tagore travelled to more than thirty countries and spoke with thinkers such as Albert Einstein.

After a long period of illness Tagore died on 7 August 1941 in Calcutta, aged eighty, in the house at Jorasanko where he had grown up. He left an extensive body of work: poems, stories, novels, plays, essays, paintings and sketches, and some two thousand songs.

His texts form the national anthems of two countries: 'Jana Gana Mana' (India) and 'Amar Shonar Bangla' (Bangladesh). Visva-Bharati has been a central university of India since 1951. His English versions, which he made himself, do not always correspond to individual Bengali collections, which raises questions about the relationship between the originals and the translations.