Tagore, Rabindranath (1886–1941)

In the flurry of intellectual activity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore became one of the best-known playwrights, poets, novelists, educators and philosophers, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. His thought drew on the English Romantics as well as Sanskrit and Bengali writers and movements.

Tagore was not a systematic philosopher. He termed his position ‘a poet’s religion’ which valued imagination above reason. He moved between the personal warmth of human relationships to a theistic Divine and belief in an Absolute as a unifying principle. He advocated a thoughtful but active life, criticizing asceticism and ritualism.