Biography
Born May 6 (some sources say May 7), 1861, in Calcutta, Rabindranath Tagore became one of the prolific writers in the world, poet, artist, dramatist, musician, novelist, and essayist. He was completely at home both in Bengali and in English, in part because he was educated at University College, London, in 1879-80. He had become the national poet of Bengal by the time of his Golden Jubilee in Calcutta on January 28, 1912, but his international fame only came in November 1913 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature for Gitanjali, a collection of poetry initially brought out in Bengali in 1910 and then translated by the poet and published in English in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. He translated so many volumes of his own Benjali poems personally that he can be regarded as an Anglo-Indian poet. Tagore resided at Shantiniketan and Ashram and founded a school at the former place that turned into Visva-Bharati University in 1918, the present-day holder of the Tagore copyright (which ran out on January 1, 2002). Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri and he wed, in an arranged marriage, Dec. 9, 1883, and they had five children: three daughters, Madhurilata, Renuka, and Mira, and two sons, Rathindranath and Samindranath. Tagore obtained honorary degrees from the universities of Calcutta (1913), Dacca (1936), Osmania (1938), and Oxford (1940). He died August 7, 1941, in Calcutta, and was cremated.
