Nobel Prize for Literature (1913)

Tagore was born and lived in Calcutta for most of his life. He was one of modern India’s greatest poets and the composer of independent India’s national anthem. In 1901 he founded his school, the Santiniketan, at Bolpur as a protest against the existing bad system of education. The school was a great success and gave birth to Viswabharati.

He was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature for his work “Gitanjali”; for the English version, published in 1912. The noble citation stated that it was “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic though, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”

In 1915, he was knighted by the British King George V. Tagore renounced his knighthood in 1919 following the Amritsar massacre or nearly 400 Indian demonstrators.