Tagore is best known as a poet and in 1913 was the first non-european writer to be awarded

the nobel prize for literature for his collection of poems titled Gitanjali. Highly prolific,
Tagore was also a composer and wrote the national anthems for both India and Bangladesh,
as well as an educator, social reformer, philosopher and painter. In India, he is regarded as a
national figure whose achievements are as important as those of Gandhi. Yet, his legacy
exceeded far beyond that of South Asia yet also into Britain. His work became knonw among
the London intelligentsia due to his reading at hamstead house and after this jis
collection Gitanjali was first published as a limited edition by the India Society of London,
and one year later in a much-expanded print-run by Macmillan, with an introduction added
by W. B. Yeats. Furthermore, Over a dozen of his plays were produced in London between
the wars, perhaps the finest being Chitra, which he directed and designed for the Prince of
Wales Theatre in 1920. Despite this there remains a vast gap between Tagore’s role in the
cultural memory in South Asian countries and, after the hype in the 1920s and 30s,
disenchantment and marginalisation in the West.  In Western countries, South Asian
intellectuals could not fail to notice the diminishing recognition of Tagore in their cultures
and the different attractions of modernity they provided. Amartya Sen, one of Tagore’s
successors as Nobel Laureate, himself a towering figure among Indian cosmopolitans today,
has attributed this drifting apart between Tagore’s image in East and West to the
narrowness of Tagore’s reception in the West.