Rabindranath Tagore was a poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He wrote Amar Sonar Bangla, the national anthem for Bangladesh in 1905, and Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem for India in 1911. Jana Gana Mana was first publicly sung on 27 December 1911 at the Indian National Congress, and the lyrics of Amar Sonar Bangla first appeared to raise public consciousness against the political divide of Bengal in September 1905.
Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre.