Tagore Center Foundation – Tagore Center Foundation

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is iconized by Indians as a poet and writer and recognized around the world as the first non-European to be awarded a Nobel Prize for literature. The variety, quality and quantity of his volume of works rightly identified him as a Renaissance man.

Tagore wrote over two thousand poems; eight volumes of short stories; over two dozen plays; eight novels; and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics. He composed more than two thousand songs, both the music and lyrics. Two of them became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

Tagore’s writing is deeply rooted in both Indian and Western learning traditions. Apart from fiction, it included portrayals of common people’s lives, literary criticism, philosophy, and social issues. Tagore originally wrote in Bengali, but later reached a broad audience in the West after translating his writings in English. To the West, his poetry conveyed the peace of the soul in harmony with nature, and he became well known in different Western continents. His popularity took him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship.

Tagore began drawing and painting at the age of sixty-three with no formal training. He has left behind nearly 2500 paintings and drawings, all done in the last fifteen years of his life and created a body of work that made him one of South Asia’s great modern painters