Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath — poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Author of the Gitanjali (Song Offerings), he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal".