60 Facts About Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter.

Rabindranath Tagore reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Rabindranath Tagore was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

The youngest of 13 surviving children, Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, the son of Debendranath Rabindranath Tagore and Sarada Devi.

Rabindranath Tagore was raised mostly by servants; his mother had died in his early childhood and his father travelled widely.

The Rabindranath Tagore family was at the forefront of the Bengal renaissance.

Rabindranath Tagore's father invited several professional Dhrupad musicians to stay in the house and teach Indian classical music to the children.

Jyotirindranath's wife Kadambari Devi, slightly older than Rabindranath Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence.

Rabindranath Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati, which the family visited.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote 6 poems relating to Sikhism and a number of articles in Bengali children's magazine about Sikhism.

Rabindranath Tagore returned to Jorosanko and completed a set of major works by 1877, one of them a long poem in the Maithili style of Vidyapati.

Rabindranath Tagore debuted in the short-story genre in Bengali with "Bhikharini".

Rabindranath Tagore briefly read law at University College London, but again left school, opting instead for independent study of Shakespeare's plays Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra and the Religio Medici of Thomas Browne.

In 1890 Rabindranath Tagore began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha ; he was joined there by his wife and children in 1898.

Rabindranath Tagore released his Manasi poems, among his best-known work.

Rabindranath Tagore met Gagan Harkara, through whom he became familiar with Baul Lalon Shah, whose folk songs greatly influenced Tagore.

Rabindranath Tagore received monthly payments as part of his inheritance and income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of his family's jewellery, his seaside bungalow in Puri, and a derisory 2,000 rupees in book royalties.

Rabindranath Tagore gained Bengali and foreign readers alike; he published Naivedya and Kheya and translated poems into free verse.

In 1912, Rabindranath Tagore translated his 1910 work Gitanjali into English.

Rabindranath Tagore was awarded a knighthood by King George V in the 1915 Birthday Honours, but Tagore renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Rabindranath Tagore sought aid from donors, officials, and scholars worldwide to "free village[s] from the shackles of helplessness and ignorance" by "vitalis[ing] knowledge".

Rabindranath Tagore mourned the perennial poverty of Calcutta and the socioeconomic decline of Bengal and detailed this newly plebeian aesthetics in an unrhymed hundred-line poem whose technique of searing double-vision foreshadowed Satyajit Ray's film Apur Sansar.

Rabindranath Tagore's remit expanded to science in his last years, as hinted in Visva-Parichay, a 1937 collection of essays.

Rabindranath Tagore wove the process of science, the narratives of scientists, into stories in Se, Tin Sangi, and Galpasalpa.

Rabindranath Tagore was in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion in which he grew up.

Between 1878 and 1932, Rabindranath Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five continents.

In November 1912 Rabindranath Tagore began touring the United States and the United Kingdom, staying in Butterton, Staffordshire with Andrews's clergymen friends.

Shortly after returning home the 63-year-old Rabindranath Tagore accepted an invitation from the Peruvian government.

In May 1926 Rabindranath Tagore reached Naples; the next day he met Mussolini in Rome.

On 1 November 1926 Rabindranath Tagore arrived at Hungary and spent some time on the shore of Lake Balaton in the city of Balatonfured, recovering from heart problems at a sanitarium.

Rabindranath Tagore planted a tree, and a bust statue was placed there in 1956 and the lakeside promenade still bears his name since 1957.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote his Oxford Hibbert Lectures and spoke at the annual London Quaker meet.

Rabindranath Tagore visited Aga Khan III, stayed at Dartington Hall, toured Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany from June to mid-September 1930, then went on into the Soviet Union.

Vice-president of India M Hamid Ansari has said that Rabindranath Tagore heralded the cultural rapprochement between communities, societies and nations much before it became the liberal norm of conduct.

Rabindranath Tagore's works are frequently noted for their rhythmic, optimistic, and lyrical nature.

Rabindranath Tagore stated that his works sought to articulate "the play of feeling and not of action".

Rabindranath Tagore wrote eight novels and four novellas, among them Chaturanga, Shesher Kobita, Char Odhay, and Noukadubi.

Rabindranath Tagore falls for a Brahmo girl, compelling his worried foster father to reveal his lost past and cease his nativist zeal.

Rabindranath Tagore had risen in an observant and sheltered traditional home, as had all her female relations.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote of it: "I have always regretted the ending".

Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature and second non-European to receive a Nobel Prize after Theodore Roosevelt.

Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by the atavistic mysticism of Vyasa and other rishi-authors of the Upanishads, the Bhakti-Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen.

Rabindranath Tagore was a prolific composer with around 2,230 songs to his credit.

Rabindranath Tagore saw the partition as a cunning plan to stop the independence movement, and he aimed to rekindle Bengali unity and tar communalism.

Rabindranath Tagore influenced sitar maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad Ali Khan.

Rabindranath Tagore was likely red, green color blind, resulting in works that exhibited strange color schemes and off-beat aesthetics.

Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by numerous styles, including scrimshaw by the Malanggan people of northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Haida carvings from the Pacific Northwest region of North America, and woodcuts by the German Max Pechstein.

Some of Rabindranath Tagore's lyrics corresponded in a synesthetic sense with particular paintings.

Rabindranath Tagore opposed imperialism and supported Indian nationalists, and these views were first revealed in Manast, which was mostly composed in his twenties.

Rabindranath Tagore urged the masses to avoid victimology and instead seek self-help and education, and he saw the presence of British administration as a "political symptom of our social disease".

Rabindranath Tagore maintained that, even for those at the extremes of poverty, "there can be no question of blind revolution"; preferable to it was a "steady and purposeful education".

Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in response to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.

Rabindranath Tagore staffed the school, he contributed his Nobel Prize monies, and his duties as steward-mentor at Santiniketan kept him busy: mornings he taught classes; afternoons and evenings he wrote the students' textbooks.

Rabindranath Tagore fundraised widely for the school in Europe and the United States between 1919 and 1921.

Amartya Sen deemed Rabindranath Tagore a "towering figure", a "deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker".

Rabindranath Tagore was renowned throughout much of Europe, North America, and East Asia.

Rabindranath Tagore co-founded Dartington Hall School, a progressive coeducational institution; in Japan, he influenced such figures as Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata.

In colonial Vietnam Rabindranath Tagore was a guide for the restless spirit of the radical writer and publicist Nguyen An Ninh Rabindranath Tagore's works were widely translated into English, Dutch, German, Spanish, and other European languages by Czech Indologist Vincenc Lesny, French Nobel laureate Andre Gide, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, former Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, and others.

Yet a latent reverence of Rabindranath Tagore was discovered by an astonished Salman Rushdie during a trip to Nicaragua.

Young Rabindranath Tagore used to visit Dakkhindihi village with his mother to visit his maternal uncles in her mother's ancestral home; Rabindranath Tagore visited this place several times in his life.