Tsinghua University,
1924.
In 1901 Tagore moved to Santiniketan to
found an ashram with a
marble-floored prayer hall—The Mandir—an
experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, a library.[51] 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 family's
jewellery, his seaside bungalow in Puri, and a derisory 2,000
rupees in book royalties.[52] 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 year's Nobel Prize in Literature: the Swedish Academy appreciated the idealistic—and for
Westerners—accessible nature of a small body of his translated material
focussed on the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings.[53] He was awarded a knighthood by King
George V in the 1915 Birthday Honours, but renounced it after
the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.[54]
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 Gandhi's Swaraj protests, which he occasionally
blamed for British India's perceived mental — and thus ultimately colonial —
decline.[55] He sought aid from donors, officials,
and scholars worldwide to "free village[s] from the shackles of
helplessness and ignorance" by "vitalis[ing] knowledge".[56][57] 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
campaigned—successfully—to open Guruvayoor
Temple to Dalits.[58][59]
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