Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1913 largely for Gitanjali. He wrote poetry, songs, essays and fiction in Bengali, and translated a good deal of it himself. The Home and the World (1916) is his most argued-over novel: a story of the Swadeshi movement in which the most stirring speeches belong to the character whose politics Tagore distrusted. He renounced his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. Quotes here are from public-domain English translations, with the speaker identified where the novel’s structure makes it clear.