Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (/rəˈbɪndrənɑːt tæˈɡɔːr/ ( listen); born Robindronath Thakur,[1] 7 May 1861 – 7 August

1941),[a] also known by his pen name Bhanu Singha Thakur (Bhonita), and also known by
his sobriquets Gurudev,[b] Kabiguru, and Biswakabi, was a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian
subcontinent.[4][5] He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali,[6] he
became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.[7] Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as
spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. [8] He
is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal".[9]
A Brahmo from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.[10] At the
age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were
seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.[11][12] By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and
dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist,[13] he
denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he
advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand
songs; his legacy also endures in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.[14][15][16][17][18]
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories,
songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-
Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and
novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His
compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar
Shonar Bangla. The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work.[19][20][21]
Mukherjee was born with a severe eye problem. Despite being myopic in one eye and blind in the other, he
continued to paint and do murals even after he lost his eyesight completely following an unsuccessful
eye cataract operation in 1956. In 1919, he took admission in Kala Bhavana, the art faculty of Visva-Bharati
University. He was a student of another celebrated Indian artist Nandalal Bose, and a friend and close
associate of Ramkinkar Baij, the celebrated sculptor. In 1925, he joined Kala Bhava Bijn as a member of the
teaching faculty. He inspired many brilliant students over the years, notable among them are painter Jahar
Dasgupta, Ramananda Bandopadhyay, K.G. Subramanyan [1], Beohar Rammanohar Sinha [2], sculptor &
printmaker Somnath Hore, designer Riten Majumdar and filmmaker Satyajit Ray. In 1949, he left Kala
Bhavan and joined as a curator at the Nepal Government Museum in Kathmandu. From 1951-52, he taught at
the Banasthali Vidyapith in Rajasthan. In 1952, he along with his wife Leela, started an art training school
in Mussoorie. In 1958, he returned to Kala Bhavan, and later became its principal. In 1979, a collection of his
Bengali writings, Chitrakar was published.
In Oxford Art Online, R. Si'va Kumar claims, "His major work is the monumental 1947 mural at the Hindi
Bhavan, Sha'ntiniketan, based on the lives of medieval Indian saints and painted without cartoons. With its
conceptual breadth and synthesis of elements from Giotto and Tawaraya Sotatsu, as well as from the art of
such ancient Indian sites as Ajanta and Mamallapuram, it is among the greatest achievements in contemporary
Indian painting."[1]

Benode Behari Mukherjee