Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was a poet, philosopher, artist, writer, player, composer and novelist. He was born in Kolkata and became famous in the west, when he travelled to England and met William Butler Yeats and others, and translated his works into English.

         He was knighted by the English government in 1915, but after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India in 1919, he gave up his knighthood.

         Tagore’s poetry drew from traditional vaisnava folk lyrics and was often deeply mystical. He wrote more than 3,000 songs as well as volumes of novel, short stories, plays and poems. In later life, he delivered lectures and made many paintings. He believed that India could progress only through education. Therefore, in 1921, he founded a school at Shanti Niketan in west Bengal. It is now popularly called the Vishva Bharati University.