Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, composer, novelist and thinker, and in 1913 the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He founded a school and later the university Visva-Bharati at Santiniketan. In his lectures Personality (1917) he declines to define art and asks instead why it exists, treating it as the expression of personality and of what he calls the surplus in man, the energy left over beyond the needs of survival.

Key ideas

• Art arises from a surplus in human beings beyond what is needed to live.
• Art expresses personality, the self in its relation to the world, rather than imitating facts.
• The human and the divine meet in creative relation, a theme he called the religion of man.
• Education should be free and in contact with nature, not mechanical drilling.

Major works

• Gitanjali (Bengali 1910; English, Song Offerings, 1912)
• Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (1913)
• Personality (1917)
• The Religion of Man (1931)

In the conversation

• Discussion Tagore would not define art, and asked why we make it at all Farhana Akter · 5 replies