Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore translated the original Bengali poems of Gitanjali into English himself in 1912 while preparing for a trip to England. W. B. Yeats was deeply impressed by the manuscript and wrote an influential introduction to the English edition, which helped catapult Tagore to international fame and directly contributed to his 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tagore was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi but had a complex relationship with nationalism. He famously renounced the knighthood the British had given him in 1915, in protest of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, yet he also cautioned against the excesses of the Swadeshi movement.

Yes, Tagore is the only person to have written the national anthems of two sovereign nations: India's 'Jana Gana Mana' and Bangladesh's 'Amar Shonar Bangla.' He also composed over 2,000 songs, collectively known as Rabindra Sangeet, which remain central to Bengali musical culture.

Tagore founded Visva-Bharati in 1921 in Santiniketan, West Bengal, as an experimental school blending Eastern and Western educational philosophies. It later became a central university and counts Indira Gandhi and Satyajit Ray among its notable alumni.