Tagore Dies: Nobel Laureate Who Wrote Two National Anthems
Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, for Gitanjali — a collection of poems translated into English by Tagore himself, in prose so luminous that W.B. Yeats wrote the introduction. He'd already built a school in Bengal that rejected the colonial educational model. He wrote over two thousand songs, still sung daily across Bengal. He designed the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. He died in 1941 having seen the Bengal he loved carved up by partition. The carving continued after his death.
August 7, 1941
85 years ago
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