Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, dramatist and composer, born in Calcutta into a wealthy and cultivated family. He wrote in Bengali from boyhood, and his own English versions of his songs, published as Gitanjali in 1912 with an introduction by Yeats, won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first awarded outside Europe and America. His novels include The Home and the World and Gora, his plays The Post Office and Chitra. He founded the school at Santiniketan that grew into Visva-Bharati University, renounced his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and composed the songs that became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.