Portal:Bangladesh/Selected biography/3

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj (syncretic Hindu monotheist) philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A cultural icon of Bengal and India, he became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

A Pirali Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta (Kolkata), India, Tagore first wrote poems at age eight. He published his first substantial poetry &mdash; under the pseudonym Bhanushingho ("Sun Lion") &mdash; in 1877 and wrote his first short stories and dramas at age sixteen. His home schooling, life in Shilaidaha, and travels made Tagore a nonconformist and pragmatist ; however, growing disillusionment with the British Raj caused Tagore to back the Indian Independence Movement and befriend Mahatma Gandhi. Despite losing virtually his entire family and his sorrow at witnessing Bengal's decline, his life's work &mdash; Visva-Bharati University &mdash; endured.

Tagore's works included Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World), while his verse, short stories, and novels &mdash; many defined by rhythmic lyricism, colloquial language, meditative naturalism, and philosophical contemplation &mdash; received worldwide acclaim. Tagore was also a cultural reformer and polymath who modernised Bangla art by rejecting strictures binding it to classical Indian forms. Two songs from his rabindrasangeet canon are now the national anthems of Bangladesh and India: the Amar Shonar Bangla and the Jana Gana Mana.

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