Rabindranath Tagore

Born into a Bengali Brahmin family in Calcutta on 7 May 1861, Tagore wrote poetry at eight and by sixteen had released poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha that literary authorities mistook for long-lost classics. By 1877 he was publishing short stories and dramas under his own name. His 1913 Nobel Prize recognised the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, making him the first lyricist to win the award. He modernised Bengali art by rejecting rigid classical forms, producing a vast canon: paintings, sketches, hundreds of texts, some two thousand songs, novels like Gora and Ghare-Baire. A humanist and critic of nationalism, he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence. He founded Visva-Bharati University and composed "Jana Gana Mana" and "Amar Sonar Bangla" - chosen as the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. He died on 7 August 1941.