31 Facts about Rabindranath Tagore- Noble Prize for Literature Winner

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta to Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) and Sarada Devi (1830–1875). His nickname was Rabi.
Rabindranath Tagore was 14 years old when his mother died.

Soon Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby area. He loves to swim across the Ganges and trek through hills, do gymnastics, judo and wrestling.
Rabindranath Tagore taught himself subject like drawing, anatomy, geography and history. He hates literature, mathematics, Sanskrit, and English.
At age eleven, Rabindranath Tagore and his father left Calcutta in February 1873 to tour India for several months including Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie. There Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kālidāsa.
Tagore despised rote classroom schooling: in “The Parrot’s Training”, a bird is caged and force-fed textbook pages—to death.
Later Rabindranath Tagore returned home and completed a set of major works by 1877, one of them a long poem in the Maithili style of Vidyapati. As a joke, he claimed that these were the lost works of (what he claimed was) a newly discovered 17th-century Vaiṣṇava poet Bhānusiṃha. Regional experts accepted them as the lost works of Bhānusiṃha.

Soon he debuted in the short-story genre in Bengali with “Bhikharini” (“The Beggar Woman”).
Because Debendranath wanted his son to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, East Sussex, England in 1878.He briefly read law at University College London, but again left school, opting instead for independent study of Shakespeare’s plays.

In 1880 he returned to Bengal degree-less, resolving to reconcile European novelty with Brahmo traditions, taking the best from each.
After returning to Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore regularly published poems, stories, and novels. These had a profound impact within Bengal itself but received little national attention.
Known mostly for his poetry, Tagore wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas, and thousands of songs.
His works are frequently noted for their rhythmic, optimistic, and lyrical nature.

In 1883 he married 10-year-old Mrinalini Devi. They had five children, two of whom died in childhood.
In 1890 Tagore began managing his vast ancestral estates in Shelaidaha (Bangladesh); he was joined there by his wife and children in 1898.
Rabindranath Tagore released his Manasi poems (1890), among his best-known work.
He period 1891–1895, Tagore’s Sadhana period, named after one of his magazines, was his most productive;in these years he wrote more than half the stories of the three-volume, 84-story Galpaguchchha.
In 1901 Rabindranath Tagore moved to Santiniketan to found an ashram with a marble-floored prayer hall—The Mandir—an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a library.
There his wife and two of his children died. His father died in 1905.

In November 1913, Rabindranath Tagore learned he had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature: the Swedish Academy appreciated the idealistic—and for Westerners—accessible nature of a small body of his translated material focused on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings.
The British Government awarded him a knighthood by King George V in the 1915 Birthday Honours, but renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
On 25 March 2004, thieves stole Tagore’s Nobel Prize from the safety vault of the Visva-Bharati University, along with several other of his belongings.
Later on 7 December 2004, the Swedish Academy decided to present two replicas of Tagore’s Nobel Prize, one made of gold and the other made of bronze, to the Visva-Bharati University.

He lampooned the Swadeshi movement; he rebuked it in The Cult of the Charkha, an acrid 1925 essay. 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”.
He 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”.
Such views enraged many. Rabindranath Tagore escaped assassination—and only narrowly—by Indian expatriates during his stay in a San Francisco hotel in late 1916; the plot failed when his would-be assassins fell into argument.
He penned Dalit heroes for his poems and his dramas, and he campaigned successfully to open Guruvayoor Temple to Dalits.
In 1934, an earthquake hit Bihar and killed thousands. Gandhi hailed it as seismic karma, as divine retribution avenging the oppression of Dalits. Tagore rebuked him for his seemingly ignominious implications.
His respect for scientific laws and his exploration of biology, physics, and astronomy informed his poetry, which exhibited extensive naturalism and verisimilitude.

Between 1878 and 1932, Tagore set foot in more than thirty countries on five continents.
His last five years were marked by chronic pain and two long periods of illness. These began when Tagore lost consciousness in late 1937; he remained comatose and near death for a time. This was followed in late 1940 by a similar spell, from which he never recovered.
Poetry from these valetudinarian years is among his finest. A period of prolonged agony ended with Tagore’s death on 7 August 1941, aged eighty.

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