The Bengali poet, songwriter, novelist, painter, and educator who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, on the strength of his own spare English recasting of selected Bengali devotional poems — and who then spent the rest of his life resisting every box the world tried to put him in, lionized in the West as a mystic sage of a 'spiritual East' he distrusted, while at home he remade Bengali letters and music and wrote the words and music for the national anthems of two countries.
In 1919, British troops fired on an unarmed crowd in a walled garden at Amritsar and killed hundreds. A Bengali poet, knighted by the same Crown four years earlier, wrote to the viceroy and gave the knighthood back. He was already India's most internationally celebrated writer, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The West had crowned him a serene mystic from a spiritual East. Yet the same man warned, again and again, that the nation itself was a dangerous idol, and he said it to the faces of the people leading India toward freedom. Rabindranath Tagore would not be anyone's saint, and that refusal cost him admirers on every side.