Rabindranath Tagore wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

Date

1913

Category

Culture, arts & philosophy

Region

Bengal, British India (South Asia)

Era

Modern

Significance

In November 1913 the Bengali poet, composer, and polymath Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first non-European and first Asian laureate.

The Swedish Academy honoured him chiefly for 'Gitanjali: Song Offerings', his own English translations of devotional poems originally published in Bengali in 1910. After Tagore shared the poems in London in 1912, admirers including W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound championed the collection, and Yeats wrote an introduction to its English edition. The award marked a milestone in the global recognition of non-Western literature and a moment of pride across colonial India and the wider colonised world, challenging Eurocentric assumptions about literary achievement. Tagore went on to reshape Bengali letters and music, found the university at Santiniketan, and write the texts that became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. His Nobel symbolised the growing place of Asian voices in world culture on the eve of the First World War.

Empires active in 1913

• Empire of Japan
  1868 CE – 1947 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• German Empire
  1871 CE – 1918 CE
• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE

Related culture, arts & philosophy events

• Walter Gropius Founds the Bauhaus in Weimar
  April 1919
• Freud publishes 'The Interpretation of Dreams'
  1900 (completed 1899)
• The Jazz Singer Inaugurates the Sound Film Era
  6 October 1927
• First FIFA World Cup Held in Uruguay
  13–30 July 1930
• Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
  1883–1885
• First Impressionist Exhibition opens in Paris
  15 April 1874

Further reading

The Story of Art

The wider story

The Story of Art

E. H. Gombrich

The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.

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