Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in Calcutta, the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a reform movement that sought to return Hinduism to the worship of one God as taught in the Upaniṣads. He grew up in a household of poets, musicians and reformers, and began writing as a child.

He wrote poems, songs, novels, stories, plays and essays, mostly in Bengali, and composed more than two thousand songs. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, chiefly for Gitanjali, his own English versions of devotional poems. In 1901 he founded a school at Santiniketan, which grew into the university of Visva-Bharati. He translated, with Evelyn Underhill’s help, a selection of the songs of Kabīr.

He travelled and lectured widely, warning against nationalism and calling for a meeting of East and West. His Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, published as The Religion of Man, set out his religious philosophy. He died in Calcutta in 1941. His songs are the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

Tagore’s religious thought drew on the Upaniṣads, the Vaiṣṇava poets and the wandering Bāul singers of Bengal, whose songs of the “man of the heart” he collected and admired. He was also a painter, beginning in his late sixties, and a critic of both colonial rule and narrow nationalism; he returned his knighthood in 1919 in protest at the massacre at Amritsar.