Rabindranath Tagore

Chapter 1 · The House at Jorasanko

A boy who ran away from every school

1861 – 1890 · Calcutta · London · Shelaidaha

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 at Jorasanko, the family mansion in Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children. The Tagores were wealthy, and they were also the intellectual engine of the Bengal Renaissance: his father Debendranath led the Brahmo Samaj, a reforming monotheistic movement within Hinduism, and his siblings included novelists, composers, philosophers and the first Indian woman novelist of note.

He hated formal schooling and was withdrawn from several institutions. Instead he was educated by tutors and by the household — literature, music, mathematics, Sanskrit, gymnastics, and long conversations. His mother died when he was fourteen. He described a childhood of servants' care and adult distance, watching the world through window bars.

In 1878 he was sent to England to become a barrister. He attended University College London, disliked the law, enjoyed English poetry and Irish and Scottish folk song, and came home after seventeen months without a degree.

In 1883, aged twenty-two, he was married to Mrinalini Devi, who was ten — the customary age for a bride in that milieu and that decade, and a fact that should be stated plainly rather than smoothed over. They had five children, two of whom died in childhood.

From 1890 he managed the family estates in East Bengal, living for long periods on a houseboat on the rivers. It was, by his own account, transformative: for the first time he saw rural poverty at close range and heard the songs of Baul mystic singers, whose music and imagery entered his own work permanently.

Why this matters

Tagore's years managing rural estates gave a wealthy Calcutta poet direct knowledge of village life — the source of both his politics of rural reconstruction and the folk forms in his songs.

You have the young poet. What would you ask him?

Ask Tagore

• “Why did you run away from every school?”
• “What did the Brahmo Samaj believe?”
• “Why did you leave England without a degree?”
• “What did managing the estates show you?”
• “How do you look back on marrying a ten-year-old?”

Chapter 2 · Gitanjali

A Nobel Prize for a book he translated himself

1901 – 1913 · Santiniketan · London

The first years of the century were devastating. His wife died in 1902, his daughter Renuka in 1903, his father in 1905, and his youngest son Samindranath of cholera in 1907. The poems of *Gitanjali* — Song Offerings — were written through those losses, and they read as a conversation with a God who is sometimes present, sometimes absent, and addressed with startling intimacy.

In 1912, travelling to England, Tagore translated a selection into English prose himself, in a notebook, largely to pass the time. He showed them to the painter William Rothenstein, who showed them to W. B. Yeats. Yeats was overwhelmed, read them aloud to friends, and wrote an introduction saying he had carried the manuscript with him for days and had to close it in case a stranger saw how much it moved him.

The India Society published it in 1912, Macmillan the following year, and in November 1913 Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — the first non-European laureate, and the first Asian. He learned of it from a telegram while at Santiniketan.

There is a complication worth knowing. The English *Gitanjali* is not a translation of the Bengali book of that name; it draws on several collections, and the prose is simpler, more devotional and less formally intricate than the originals. Bengali readers have long argued that the West awarded a prize to a diminished version, and that Tagore's real achievement — the metrical range, the songs, the wordplay — is largely untranslatable.

He used the prize money for his school.

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…”

— Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 35, English edition 1912

Why this matters

Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, on the basis of his own English prose versions — a case study in how translation shapes what the world sees of a literature.

You have the prize. What would you ask him?

Ask Tagore

• “What were you writing through in Gitanjali?”
• “How different is the English Gitanjali from the Bengali?”
• “What did Yeats see in the poems?”
• “Did the Nobel Prize change how India saw you?”
• “Who are you addressing in these poems?”

Chapter 3 · Returning the Knighthood

Amritsar, and a letter to the Viceroy

1915 – 1919 · Calcutta · Amritsar

Tagore was knighted in 1915. He was not a straightforward supporter of British rule, but he had accepted honours and had friends in the administration.

On 13 April 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, troops under Brigadier-General Dyer fired without warning on a crowd of thousands penned into an enclosed garden, blocking the only main exit. Official figures gave 379 dead; Indian estimates were far higher. Dyer stated afterwards that he had intended to produce a moral effect.

News was suppressed for weeks. When it reached Tagore, he tried to organise a protest meeting in Calcutta and could not get support from other leaders, several of whom judged the moment too dangerous.

On 30 May 1919 he wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, renouncing his knighthood. The letter is one of the great documents of the period. He wrote that the time had come when badges of honour made shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and that he wished to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of his countrymen who were liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.

He did not ask others to follow, and did not present it as a political strategy. It was a refusal.

The British administration did not formally accept the renunciation, and continued to list the title. Tagore never used it again.

Why this matters

Tagore's renunciation was the most prominent Indian repudiation of British honours after Amritsar, and it came from a man with no organisational power to protect him.

You have the act of refusal. What would you ask him?

Ask Tagore

• “What did you write to the Viceroy?”
• “Why did other leaders not join your protest meeting?”
• “Why had you accepted a knighthood in the first place?”
• “What did Dyer say he intended at Amritsar?”
• “Does an individual refusal achieve anything?”

Chapter 4 · The Argument with Gandhi

Two men who disagreed about almost everything except each other

1917 – 1941 · Santiniketan · India

Tagore and Gandhi respected each other enormously and disagreed on fundamentals. Tagore is generally credited with popularising the title Mahatma for Gandhi; Gandhi called Tagore Gurudev.

The first disagreement was nationalism itself. In lectures published as *Nationalism* in 1917, Tagore argued that the nation-state was a European invention, an organisation of politics and commerce that turns a people into a machine and produces war — and that India's task was not to become a nation on that model but to build a society on human relationships. He was denounced in India for it and, having said the same things about Japan, in Japan as well.

The second was the non-cooperation movement. Tagore objected to the boycott of schools and colleges, arguing that withdrawing students from education harmed India, and to the burning of foreign cloth when poor people needed clothing. He believed rejection was not a programme, and that India needed engagement with the world rather than withdrawal from it.

The third and sharpest came in 1934, when Gandhi described the Bihar earthquake, which killed tens of thousands, as divine punishment for the sin of untouchability. Tagore published a public rebuke: that it was a great pity such an unscientific view should be held by so influential a leader, and that physical catastrophes have their inevitable and exclusive origin in physical facts. He agreed entirely about untouchability and refused the reasoning.

Gandhi replied in print, and the exchange continued without personal rancour. Gandhi visited Santiniketan and helped raise funds for it; Tagore composed songs used in the movement.

Why this matters

The Tagore–Gandhi exchanges are a model of serious public disagreement between allies, and Tagore's critique of nationalism has been repeatedly rediscovered since.

You have the great argument. What would you ask him?

Ask Tagore

• “Why did you object to nationalism itself?”
• “Why oppose the boycott of schools?”
• “Why publicly rebuke Gandhi over the earthquake?”
• “How did you disagree so sharply and stay friends?”
• “What did you want India to become instead?”

Chapter 5 · Santiniketan

A school under the trees, and two national anthems

1901 – 1941 and after · Santiniketan · Sriniketan

Tagore's most sustained project was educational. In 1901 he founded a school at Santiniketan with five pupils, one of them his son, built on everything his own schooling had lacked: classes held outdoors under trees, no punishment, music and drama as central rather than decorative subjects, and an emphasis on the student's relationship with nature and with the teacher.

In 1921 it became Visva-Bharati, a university whose motto declares that the world makes a home in a single nest. Its founding idea was that Indian civilisation should be studied seriously alongside Chinese, Japanese, Persian and European traditions, in one institution, in an era when colonial education taught Indians that European knowledge was the only knowledge. He also founded Sriniketan nearby for rural reconstruction — agriculture, crafts, cooperative credit and health.

He raised the money by lecturing across the world, travelling to more than thirty countries; his 1930 conversation with Einstein about whether truth exists independently of humanity was recorded and is still discussed.

His output is difficult to summarise: thousands of poems; novels including *Gora* and *The Home and the World*, which examines political violence in a nationalist movement through a marriage; plays; essays; and around two thousand three hundred songs. Rabindra Sangeet is a living tradition in Bengal, sung at weddings, funerals and protests. He wrote what became the national anthem of India, and separately what became the national anthem of Bangladesh — the only person to have written two — and Sri Lanka's anthem was written by a student of his.

He began painting seriously at about sixty and produced over two thousand works, dark and startlingly modern.

He died at Jorasanko on 7 August 1941, aged eighty.

Why this matters

Tagore is the only person to have written the national anthems of two countries, and his songs remain an active part of daily life in Bengal — a scale of cultural presence few writers anywhere have achieved.

You have the school and the songs. What would you ask him at the end?

Ask Tagore

• “Why hold classes outdoors under trees?”
• “What was Visva-Bharati meant to prove?”
• “What did you and Einstein disagree about?”
• “Why do your songs matter more in Bengal than your poems?”
• “Why start painting at sixty?”

What Tagore changed

Tagore reshaped Bengali literature and music, wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, and founded a university built on the equal study of world civilisations. He was the first non-European Nobel laureate in literature, and his critique of nationalism has been rediscovered by each generation that finds the nation-state producing what he predicted.

A debate that continues

Bengali readers have long argued that his Western reputation rests on simplified English versions that misrepresent his formal range, and his critique of nationalism was attacked in his lifetime as unpatriotic — a charge still made in India today.

Keep exploring — ask Tagore

• “What did you want a school to feel like?”
• “How should a colonised people relate to the coloniser's culture?”
• “Which of your songs would you want a stranger to hear first?”

Related lives

• Mahatma Gandhi — Mahatma · Father of the Indian Nation
• Chinua Achebe — Father of African Literature
• Albert Einstein — Nobel Laureate · Author of Relativity

Related themes

Indian independence · World literature and translation · Education and cultural exchange