Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941) was a Bengali
polymath-poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social
reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well
as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful"
poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the
first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic
songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant
prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He was
a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of
Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi.
A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan
district and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At the
age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the
pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary
authorities as long-lost classics. By 1877 he graduated to his first
short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist,
universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist, he
denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an
exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that
comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some
two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in his founding of
Visva-Bharati University.
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and
resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs,
dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal.
Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home
and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories,
and novels were acclaimed-or panned-for their lyricism, colloquialism,
naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by
two nations as national anthems: India's "Jana Gana Mana" and
Bangladesh's "Amar Shonar Bangla". The Sri Lankan national anthem was
inspired by his work. (wikipedia.org)
