Birth in Calcutta
He was born into the Tagore family of Jorasanko, the youngest son of the Brahmo Samaj leader Debendranath Tagore.
Universal humanism · Bengal Renaissance · 1861–1941
Rabindranath Tagore
Seek the infinite within the finite world.
Calcutta · Shelaidaha · Santiniketan
Biography
The thread of a life.
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, songwriter, novelist, educator and painter whose essays and lectures develop a philosophy of unity between the individual, nature and humanity. Drawing on the Upanishads, devotional song and long years among Bengali villagers, he founded a school and then a university at Santiniketan and became one of the earliest and sharpest critics of aggressive nationalism.
Studies in England
He studied in Brighton and London but returned to Bengal without a degree.
Estates in East Bengal
Managing the family lands near Shelaidaha, he wrote short stories drawn from village life.
Santiniketan and Swadeshi
He opened his school at Santiniketan and lent songs and speeches to the protests against the partition of Bengal.
Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize
His English Gitanjali appeared in London, and he then received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Protest, university and final years
He renounced his knighthood in 1919, founded Visva-Bharati and died in Calcutta in 1941.
Understanding a life in depth
01A Calcutta household and a poet’s apprenticeship
Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta on 7 May 1861, the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the reformist Brahmo Samaj, which read the Upanishads as the core of a purified Hindu monotheism. Educated chiefly at home, amid the music, theatre and literary journals of the family house, he spent 1878 to 1880 in England, attending classes in Brighton and London without taking a degree. He married Mrinalini Devi in 1883. His early collections, culminating in Manasi in 1890, were already reshaping Bengali poetry.
02Rural Bengal, a school and the Swadeshi years
From 1891 Tagore managed the family estates in East Bengal, often living on a houseboat on the Padma river near Shelaidaha. Contact with villagers fed his short stories and a lasting concern with rural poverty. In 1901 he opened a small school at Santiniketan, where pupils were taught in the open air, close to nature and the arts. In 1905 he supported the protests against the partition of Bengal with songs and speeches, then withdrew when the movement turned to coerced boycotts and violence. Between 1902 and 1907 he lost his wife, a daughter, his father and his youngest son.
03World fame and the critique of nationalism
In 1912 Tagore brought his own English prose versions of his songs to London, where the painter William Rothenstein and the poet W. B. Yeats championed them. Gitanjali earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first awarded to a writer from outside Europe. Lecture tours in Japan and the United States in 1916 and 1917 produced Nationalism, an indictment of the Nation as an organization of power and commerce. In 1919, after the Amritsar massacre, he renounced the knighthood conferred on him in 1915. His public exchanges with Gandhi in 1921 concerned non-cooperation, the burning of foreign cloth and the place of reason in politics.
04Visva-Bharati, travels and last warnings
Tagore turned his school into Visva-Bharati, a university inaugurated in 1921 as a meeting place of cultures, and in 1922 founded the rural reconstruction institute at Sriniketan with the English agronomist Leonard Elmhirst. He travelled from China and Argentina to Europe and the Soviet Union, gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, later published as The Religion of Man, and discussed truth and reality with Albert Einstein that same summer. Late in life he took up painting and first exhibited in Paris. In Crisis in Civilization, read months before his death in Calcutta on 7 August 1941, he condemned imperial domination while refusing to lose faith in humanity.
The first non-European Nobel laureate in literature, Tagore wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh and reshaped modern Bengali poetry, music, prose and education. His ideas feed current debates on cosmopolitanism, ecology and schooling, while his Western image as a mystic sage has been criticized for obscuring a modern, experimental and self-critical writer.
Sources & reference points