arts and culture was prevalent, and he wrote prolifically his entire life, producing more than 3,000 songs as well as volumes of novels, short stories, plays, and poems. In later life he delivered lectures and made many paintings. He also wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.Rabindranath Tagore became famous in the West when he travelled to England and met W. B. Yeats and others, and translated his works into English. He was given knighthood in 1915 but after the Jalianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, he gave up his knighthood. Although he did not agree with all the political activities and nationalistic principles of the movements for independence, he did participate in them along with Gandhi.
After a short spell of fame in the West, and after he gave up his knighthood, Tagore's English writings lapsed into a sort of obscurity. Very recently some editors and translators have realized that Tagore is very much a modernist writer in spite of the previous criticism that placed him in the sentimentalist or mystical Edwardian camp. It seems quite possible to improve on the earlier translations and make Tagore's works sing again to modern readers in English.
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