Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his poetry collection Gitanjali.
Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first Nobel laureate, was born in Kolkata on May 7, 1861. He was a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize in Literature and second non-European to receive a Nobel Prize after Theodore Roosevelt for Gitanjali, his best-known collection of poetry.
Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”
The Bengali poet was awarded a knighthood by King George V in 1915, however, he repudiated it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Renouncing the knighthood, Tagore, in a letter addressed to Lord Chelmsford, the then British Viceroy of India, wrote, “The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments…The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.”
Credit : Timenownews.com
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