In 1937 the novelist Graham Greene wrote that he could not believe anyone but Yeats still took Tagore's poems seriously, and by then Yeats himself had turned against them. Twenty-five years earlier W. B. Yeats had introduced Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Rabindranath Tagore's own English prose versions of religious poems from several of his Bengali collections. In 1913 the book helped make him the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. At home in Bengal he was also the poet, novelist, playwright and songwriter who had brought everyday speech into Bengali literature, and the economist Amartya Sen, who went to Tagore's school, has said that readers of the Bengali originals cannot be satisfied with any of the translations. Behind both reputations stood a thinker who argued for decades about God, nature, schooling and the nation.
His starting point was a household religion. His father, Debendranath Tagore, had joined the Brahmo Samaj, the Calcutta society of Hindu reformers who worshipped one God without images, and went on to lead it. The family used passages of the Upanishads, the ancient scriptures of Vedanta, in its daily worship. Rabindranath avoided the classroom. He was tutored at home, lasted a single day at Presidency College, and was sent to England in 1878 to become a barrister, coming home two years later without a degree. From 1890 he managed the family estates along the Padma river, travelling them by barge, and there he came to know the songs of Lalon Shah, a singer of the Bauls, the wandering religious minstrels of Bengal.
From those sources he drew the claim he is remembered for: the infinite is met inside the finite world, not by escaping it. In Sadhana: The Realisation of Life, lectures he read at Harvard, he rejected the view, held by some European admirers of the Upanishads, that India's God was an abstraction reached by renouncing the world, and argued that the soul reaches the infinite through nature, love, work and beauty. In 1918 the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan interpreted him through Advaita, the non-dual school of Vedanta. Tagore's own later statement, the Hibbert Lectures he gave at Oxford in 1930 and published as The Religion of Man, is more humanist than that reading allows.
He built the claim into an institution. In 1901 he opened a school at Santiniketan, the retreat his father had founded in rural Bengal, where classes often met out of doors, lessons were in Bengali, and curiosity counted for more than competition. In 1921 it grew into Visva-Bharati, a university meant to bring together the cultures of India and of the world. Nearby, with Leonard Elmhirst, an English agronomist, he founded an institute for rural reconstruction.
The nation was his other subject. In 1905 he wrote songs against the British partition of Bengal; one of them, "Amar Shonar Bangla", became the national anthem of Bangladesh in 1971, and another, "Jana Gana Mana", became India's in 1950. Yet his novel The Home and the World, published in 1916, turned on the violence and religious zeal of the Swadeshi movement, the boycott campaign that followed the partition. His lectures on nationalism, given in Japan and the United States in 1916–17, called the nation-state a machine built for power. On 30 May 1919, after British troops fired on an unarmed crowd at Amritsar, he wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, giving up the knighthood he had accepted four years earlier.
With Gandhi, whom he first met at Santiniketan in 1915, he shared the aim of independence and disputed the means. In 1921 he objected to burning foreign cloth that the poor could have worn; in 1925 he wrote that the spinning wheel had become a cult; in 1934 he protested when Gandhi called an earthquake in Bihar a punishment for untouchability. Sen has argued that he remains a thinker for the present. Since 2023 Santiniketan has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.