A quotation from Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

1861 CE – 1941 CE

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.

Tagore was born into Bengal's leading intellectual family and created a body of work (poetry, novels, plays, songs, philosophy, painting) that no single genre contains. His Gitanjali, translated into English in 1912, stunned the Nobel committee into giving him the prize the following year. His philosophy was neither Western nor narrowly Hindu: he believed in the creative individual, in the connection between the human and the divine that runs through beauty, and in education that grows from nature rather than imposition. His university at Santiniketan sat under open skies and held classes beneath trees. When British troops massacred unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, he returned his knighthood to the Crown in protest, a gesture that cost him nothing materially and everything symbolically. He corresponded with Einstein about science and reality, debated Gandhi on the village versus the city, and wrote the national anthems of two countries: India and Bangladesh. He died in 1941, having watched the nationalism he had critiqued his whole life drag the world to war again.