Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Greatest writer in modern Indian literature, Bengali poet, novelist, educator, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore was awarded the knighthood in 1915, but he surrendered it in 1919 as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, where British troops killed some 400 Indian demonstrators protesting colonial laws. Tagore's reputation in the West as a mystic has perhaps mislead his Western readers to ignore his role as a reformer and critic of colonialism.