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| Rabindranath Tagore |
A painter, a musician, a Sanskrit, English and Bengali scholar, an author and a freedom fighter, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) won Nobel prize in literature in the year for Gitanjali.
He did his schooling at home in Calcutta and in England. Belonging to a landlord family of Pir Ali fame, he managed the family estates, in Bengal. He was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but he resigned the honour as a protest against British atrocities in India.
He is the founder of gurukul style school Shantiniketan. India's national anthem "Jana Gana Man" is penned by him. After gaining independence in 1971, Bangladesh also adopted one of his songs as national anthem. Sri Lanka Matha, the national anthem of Sri Lanka is supposed to be based on his music composition. He was well-known outside Greater India and had many lecture tours across the world.
Major Publications:
Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are Manasi (1890) [The Ideal One], Sonar Tari (1894) [The Golden Boat], Gitanjali (1910) [Song Offerings], Gitimalya (1914) [Wreath of Songs], and Balaka (1916) [The Flight of Cranes]. The English renderings of his poetry, which include The Gardener (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and The Fugitive (1921), do not generally correspond to particular volumes in the original Bengali; and in spite of its title, Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), the most acclaimed of them, contains poems from other works besides its namesake. Tagore's major plays are Raja (1910) [The King of the Dark Chamber], Dakghar (1912) [The Post Office], Achalayatan (1912) [The Immovable], Muktadhara (1922) [The Waterfall], and Raktakaravi (1926) [Red Oleanders]. He is the author of several volumes of short stories and a number of novels, among them Gora (1910), Ghare-Baire (1916) [The Home and the World], and Yogayog (1929) [Crosscurrents].
