Explore
Compare
Life
He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and returned his knighthood to the British Crown when colonial troops massacred his people.
He coined 'double consciousness', the sense of always seeing yourself through the eyes of others, and spent sixty years fighting the world that made it necessary.
Connection
Rabindranath Tagore non-Western modernity W.E.B. Du Bois — Du Bois and Tagore exchanged admiration across the Atlantic; both critiqued Western nationalism while engaging with its forms. Tagore's insistence that Asian civilization had something to teach the West, not merely to receive from it, paralleled Du Bois's argument that the 'gift of Black folk' was a specific cultural contribution, not just a claim on rights.
Ideas
Words
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
“You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
“One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
Key Moments
1913
Nobel Prize in Literature
1919
Returns knighthood after Jallianwala Bagh massacre
1921
Founded Visva-Bharati university at Santiniketan
1895
First Black American PhD from Harvard
1903
The Souls of Black Folk published
1909
Co-founded the NAACP
Works
Gitanjali
Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
The Souls of Black Folk
Black Reconstruction in America