Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore was born into a wealthy, cultured Calcutta family and largely educated at home, restless enough at school that formal instruction never held him. He began publishing poetry as a teenager and eventually managed his family's rural estates in East Bengal, an experience that steeped him in village life and folk song and reshaped both his poetry and his fiction.

He translated his own poetry collection Gitanjali into English, and its 1913 Nobel Prize made him literature's first non-European laureate, a fame he used to found Visva-Bharati, an experimental university built around open-air teaching and internationalism. The Home and the World, written as the 1905 partition of Bengal inflamed nationalist passion, staged his own ambivalence about the movement through a wife caught between her sheltered husband and a firebrand revolutionary.

He renounced his British knighthood after the 1919 Amritsar massacre and kept writing, composing, and painting into his final years, dying in Calcutta in 1941 having also written the national anthems later adopted by both India and Bangladesh.