Rabindranath Tagore Won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Poems He Translated Himself, Then Wrote to the Viceroy in 1919 to Ask to Be Relieved of His Knighthood

On 30 May 1919, five and a half years after the Swedish Academy made him the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Rabindranath Tagore wrote from Calcutta to the Viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford. He asked to be relieved of the knighthood he had accepted in 1915. The letter went to the press as well, and The Statesman printed it on 3 June.

One honour came from a committee in Stockholm, the other from the Crown that ruled India. This piece follows both, and the school at Santiniketan that Tagore kept building through them.

A book of 103 prose poems, translated by the poet himself

Tagore’s Gitanjali first appeared in Bengali in 1910. The book that won the prize is a different object. The Nobel Foundation’s biography, written at the time of the award, notes that the English Gitanjali: Song Offerings of 1912 “contains poems from other works besides its namesake.” The Caravan counts 53 poems from the Bengali collection and 50 published elsewhere, all rendered into English prose by Tagore. The English title page says the same: “a collection of prose translations made by the author from the original Bengali.”

The London-based India Society published it in November 1912, limited to 750 copies, with an introduction by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who had met Tagore for the first time that June (The Caravan). Yeats wrote that he had “carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses.” Macmillan reissued it in March 1913. Amartya Sen, writing on the Nobel Prize website, says it had been reprinted ten times by November, when the award was announced.

Poem 35 of the English book begins “Where the mind is without fear” and ends “Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.” Sen says that nothing expresses Tagore’s values as clearly as this poem.

What the Academy said it was rewarding

The Swedish Academy informed Tagore through his publisher on 13 November 1913, according to The Caravan. The citation credits his “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse,” and its final clause names the language: poetic thought “expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” The English poet Thomas Sturge Moore had nominated him, according to the Nobel nomination archive.

Harald Hjärne, chairman of the Nobel Committee, addressed the choice in his presentation speech on 10 December 1913. He said the Academy had seen no reason to hesitate because the poet’s name was “comparatively unknown in Europe,” and he quoted Alfred Nobel’s will, which asked that “no consideration should be paid to the nationality to which any proposed candidate might belong.” Hjärne also said the English Gitanjali, in a real and full sense, belonged to English literature.

Tagore did not travel to Stockholm. The British chargé d’affaires, Mr. Clive, read out his telegram at the banquet, thanking the Academy for “the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother.”

The Western welcome did not last. Sen notes that Yeats praised the poems in 1912 and wrote “Damn Tagore” in 1935. In Sen’s reading, Tagore’s later writing did not fit the image of a remote spiritual teacher that Yeats and others had sold to the West, while in Bengal and the rest of India he is read as a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist and composer of songs.

A knighthood in 1915, from a government he had already criticised

The Nobel biography says the British Government knighted Tagore in 1915 and that “within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India.” Navtej Sarna points out in The Week that it was a Knight Bachelor, a rank that carried no insignia, so there was no medal to send back and the protest had to be a letter.

Tagore was not new to opposing the government. The historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, in his introduction to the National Book Trust volume of Gandhi-Tagore letters, calls him an active participant in the swadeshi movement that followed the 1905 partition of Bengal. The Curzon piece covers his rakhi protest and the song that became Bangladesh’s anthem.

His link with Gandhi began at Santiniketan. Boys from Gandhi’s Phoenix School in South Africa stayed there from 4 November 1914 to 3 April 1915, and Gandhi met Tagore there on 6 March 1915 (Bhattacharya’s notes). On 12 April 1919, the day before Jallianwala Bagh, Tagore replied to Gandhi’s request for a message on the “national struggle” with the words “Our authorities have shown us their claws.”

Weeks of looking for someone to protest alongside

Accounts from Punjab reached the rest of India slowly, and martial law there was not withdrawn until 9 June. Amiitabha Bhattacharya, a former civil servant, retells what followed in The Tribune from the Bengali biography by Prasanta Kumar Pal and the recollections of the statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. The account rests on those two sources, and this article has not checked either.

By that account, the missionary C. F. Andrews, a friend of both men, saw the Viceroy and wrote to Tagore on 14 May that “every hope I had was dashed to the ground.” Tagore then sent Andrews to Gandhi with a proposal: Gandhi would come to Delhi, the two would try to enter Punjab together, and they would be arrested as their protest. Andrews came back with Gandhi’s answer, “I do not want to embarrass the Government now.” Tagore next asked the Calcutta leader Chittaranjan Das to call a protest meeting that Tagore would chair. It did not happen. According to the account, Andrews read Tagore’s draft letter and asked him to soften it.

What the letter says, and the two dates it carries

The letter opens by saying the government’s measures in Punjab had revealed “the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India.” It calls the punishments disproportionate, says Indian suffering had trickled through a “gagged silence,” and complains that most Anglo-Indian newspapers had praised what it calls callousness. Then comes its central sentence: “The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring.” Tagore writes that he wishes to stand “shorn of all special distinctions” beside countrymen who face degradation “not fit for human beings,” and he asks the Viceroy “to relieve me of my title of knighthood.” He adds that he accepted it from the King “at the hands of your predecessor,” whose nobleness of heart he still admired.

The letter carries two dates in print. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s volume gives 30 May 1919 and says the original draft in Tagore’s hand is in the Visva-Bharati Archives. The text in Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson’s Selected Letters, as reproduced by Columbia University’s DART project, is headed 31 May. The Overman Foundation’s transcription of The Statesman text ends with 30 May. The printings also differ in small words, so the quotations here use only phrases that appear in all of them. The letter ran in The Statesman on 3 June and in the Modern Review that July.

How Gandhi, the press and the Raj took it

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya reports that Gandhi was appreciative of a “burning letter from the poet,” yet he told Srinivasa Shastri on 6 June 1919, “I personally think it is premature.” The Englishman mocked the gesture, and, according to Amiitabha Bhattacharya, some Indian commentators called it hasty. Tobias Harper, a historian at Arizona State University, adds in Aeon that Indian nationalists later used the knighthood against Tagore, since they too held that British honour could not be separated from Indian shame.

The official reaction is told in two accounts. Harper writes that Chelmsford and officials in London refused to accept the resignation, on the argument that a knighthood given for services to literature had nothing to do with politics. Sarna adds that Chelmsford proposed, and the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, agreed, that the Viceroy tell Tagore he could not remove the title and would make no recommendation to the King. Sarna says King George V accepted this and that Whitehall avoided a formal stripping because it would have drawn publicity. Harper says British officials went on calling him Sir Rabindranath until he died in 1941.

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya cites a note of 15 May 1925 from D. Petrie, Director of the Intelligence Bureau, held in the National Archives of India. Petrie wrote that Tagore had resigned his knighthood, misdating it to 1920 or 1921, “becoming to all intents and purposes a non-cooperator.” Bhattacharya also writes that during the Khilafat and non-cooperation movements of 1919 to 1922 (the Chauri Chaura piece covers how the latter ended) Tagore “began to feel uncomfortably at variance with some of the actions” they led to. Sen documents their disagreements over nationalism, the spinning wheel and science, while Tagore wrote of Gandhi in 1938 that he was greater as a man than as a politician or organiser. Gandhi’s own life is told in this profile.

Santiniketan, and the university that grew out of it

Visva-Bharati’s own history says Tagore’s father, Debendranath, built a small meditation retreat on a twenty bigha plot at the site in 1863. Tagore’s school, Brahmacharyasrama, started formally on 22 December 1901 with no more than five students. Classes met in the open air under trees, and the school chose a Vedic motto that the university translates as “where the world makes a home in a single nest.” Hjärne’s 1913 speech described it as an open-air school in western Bengal under the branches of a mango tree.

On 23 December 1921 Visva-Bharati became a registered public body with its own constitution. The Sriniketan rural reconstruction project began in 1922, and the school was renamed Patha Bhavana in 1925. The Raj watched it closely. A Home Department note of 22 October 1925, quoted by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, says private attempts to run schools on national lines were “very susceptible to political influences,” and he adds that loyal subjects were encouraged to withdraw their wards from Visva-Bharati.

In May 1951 an Act of Parliament made Visva-Bharati a central university and an institution of national importance. The Prime Minister of India is now its Acharya, or Chancellor, according to the university. On 17 September 2023, at the World Heritage Committee’s meeting in Riyadh, Santiniketan was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, according to the Press Information Bureau.