Stray Birds

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was born in Calcutta into a prominent Bengali family and became, in 1913, the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for the verse of Gitanjali (1910), which he had translated into English himself. His earlier collections include Manasi (1890) and Sonar Tari (1894). He wrote the novels Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire (1916), the play Chitrangada (1892), and some two thousand songs. Knighted in 1915, he repudiated the honor in 1919 in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. In 1921 he founded Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan.