Santiniketan 1901 1932

In 1901 Tagore moved to Santiniketan to found an ashram with a marble floored prayer hallThe Mandiran experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a library. There his wife and two of his children died. His father died in 1905. He received monthly payments as part of his inheritance and income from the Maharaja of Tripura, sales of his familys jewelry, his seaside bungalow in Puri, and a derisory 2,000 rupees in book royalties. He gained Bengali and foreign readers alike, he published Naivedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) and translated poems into free verse. In November 1913, Tagore learned he had won that years Nobel Prize in Literature the Swedish Academy appreciated the idealisticand for Westernersaccessible nature of a small body of his translated material focussed on the 1912 Gitanjali Song Offerings. In 1915, the British Crown granted Tagore a knighthood. He renounced it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the Institute for Rural Reconstruction, later renamed Shriniketan or Abode of Welfare, in Surul, a village near the ashram. With it, Tagore sought to moderate Gandhis Swaraj protests, which he occasionally blamed for British Indias perceived mentaland thus ultimately colonialdecline.48 He sought aid from donors, officials, and scholars worldwide to free villages from the shackles of helplessness and ignorance by vitalising knowledge. In the early 1930s he targeted ambient abnormal caste consciousness and untouchability. He lectured against these, he penned Dalit heroes for his poems and his dramas, and he campaignedsuccessfullyto open Guruvayoor Temple to Dalits.