A Pirali Brahmin[4][5][6][7] from Kolkata, Tagore was already writing poems at age eight.[8] At age 16, he published his first substantial poetry under the pseudonym Bhanushingho ( Sun Lion )[9][10] and wrote his first short stories and dramas in 1877. Tagore achieved further note when he denounced the British Raj and supported Indian independence. His efforts endure in his vast canon and in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to political and personal topics. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and contemplation. Tagore was perhaps the only litterateur who penned anthems of two countries - Jana Gana Mana, the Indian national anthem and Amar Shonar Bangla, the Bangladeshi national anthem.
The youngest of 13 surviving children, Tagore was born in the Jorasanko mansion in Kolkata of parents Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) and Sarada Devi (1830–1875).ε[›][11] Tagore family patriarchs were the Brahmo founding fathers of the Adi Dharm faith. He was mostly raised by servants, as his mother had died in his early childhood; his father travelled extensively.[12] Tagore largely declined classroom schooling, preferring to roam the mansion or nearby idylls: Bolpur, Panihati, and others.[13][14] Upon his upanayan initiation at age eleven, Tagore left Calcutta on 14 February 1873 to tour India with his father for several months. They visited his father's [[Santiniketan]] estate and stopped in Amritsar before reaching the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie.
A prospective barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, East Sussex, England in 1878. He first stayed for some months at a house that the Tagore family owned near Brighton and Hove, in Medina Villas; in 1877, his nephew and niece – Suren and Indira, the children of Tagore's brother Satyendranath – were sent together with their mother (Tagore's sister-in-law) to live with him.[20] He read law at University College London, but left school to explore Shakespeare and more: Religio Medici, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra;[21] he returned degreeless to Bengal in 1880. Nevertheless, this exposure to English culture and language would later percolate into his earlier acquaintance with Bengali musical tradition, allowing him to create new modes of music, poetry, and drama.
