Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861 into a wealthy and enlightened Brahmin family, the fourteenth child of his father. He hated school and received almost no formal education, being taught chiefly at home by tutors and his elder brothers. He began writing poetry at eight, and at seventeen went to England to study law but came home without a degree. Later, at his father's bidding, he managed the family estates in East Bengal, travelling by boat along the tributaries of the Ganges and coming to know village life and the peasants intimately. At forty he founded a school at Santiniketan, which grew into Visva-Bharati University. In 1913 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali, which he had translated into English himself, the first Asian to win it. He wrote more than two thousand songs, two of which became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. He visited China and had close ties with Chinese men of letters.