Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore, born in Calcutta, British India, in 1861, was a renowned Bengali writer and a stalwart of the Bengal renaissance, a period in which Bengal art and culture flourished during the reign of the British Indian Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Born into a wealthy, educated family active in the Bengal literary scene, Tagore is best known for his 1910 collection of poems entitled Gitanjali (meaning “Song offering”), for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore was educated both in India and England—in Calcutta, East Sussex, and at University College London—and was seen by many in the literary modernist movement as an artist capable of bridging the gap between British and Bengal literary traditions. Yet Tagore (often called “the Bard,” or the Shakespeare, of Bengal) was also openly critical of the British Raj, or British colonial rule in India. Though he developed relationships with the British writers H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats (who helped to publish Gitanjali and wrote an introduction to the text), Tagore firmly opposed British imperialism, and he declined the British government’s offer of Knighthood in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, in which British troops in India fired on peaceful protesters. Tagore is celebrated today for his insightful lyrical poetry, as well as for his prolific work in other genres: essays, short stories, plays, lectures, drawings, and paintings.