Bengali poet, essayist, playwright, composer, painter, educator, and social reformer — the first non-European and the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913), and the central cultural figure of late-colonial Bengal. Tagore was born into a wealthy, intellectually distinguished Calcutta family at the height of the Bengali Renaissance, began publishing poetry in his teens, and over a sixty-year career produced two thousand songs (the Rabindra Sangeet that remains the living musical tradition of Bengal), two national anthems (India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla; Sri Lanka's draws on his work too), a dozen novels, short-story collections that largely invented the modern Bengali short story, and essay collections on education, nationalism, and religion.
The Nobel came for the English Gitanjali (Song Offerings, 1912), Tagore's own translations of a selection of his Bengali devotional poems, which W. B. Yeats introduced to English readers in an edition that created a brief but intense Western vogue for Tagore as sage. The vogue faded (partly because the English versions were pale shadows of the Bengali); the Bengali originals have remained the living corpus. Gitanjali, Gora (1910, the long novel), The Home and the World (Ghare-Baire, 1916), Four Chapters (Char Adhyay, 1934) together map Tagore's sustained argument with the political currents of his time.
The argument with nationalism is his most internationally influential legacy. Against both British imperial claims and the increasingly militant Indian nationalism of the 1905–20 period, Tagore defended a cosmopolitan universalism — his Nationalism (1917) lectures, delivered in Japan and the United States, argued that modern nationalism is a Western disease that Indian civilization should not import, and that genuine human community is built on spiritual and cultural exchange across borders rather than on territorial self-assertion. The position cost him the affection of Indian nationalists, with whom he remained in sustained, respectful disagreement — the long letters between Tagore and Gandhi are one of the major exchanges of 20th-century Indian political thought. In 1921 Tagore founded Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan, designed as a place where "the world meets in one nest" — a practical embodiment of the universalism the political writings defended.