Rabindranath Tagore Trivia
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49 free Rabindranath Tagore trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote the words of two national anthems, turned a family ashram into a university, took up painting at 60 and handed back a knighthood. The poet who won the 1913 Nobel for the English Gitanjali was also a novelist, playwright, composer of more than 2,000 songs and a restless traveller who argued with Gandhi and talked physics with a famous scientist. These 49 questions go past the headline facts: who introduced and published the English Gitanjali, how the Nobel was won and later stolen, what lies behind the anthems of India and Bangladesh, and how Santiniketan became Visva-Bharati. The novels, plays and dance-dramas get their due, as do the Tagores of Jorasanko and the journeys to Argentina, Italy and Iran. It suits Bengali-literature fans, anyone revising Indian history and quiz-night hosts who want questions with a story behind every answer.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Irish writer introduced Tagore's 1912 English Gitanjali, a manuscript he admitted reading on top of omnibuses?
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats wrote that he carried the translations about for days, reading them 'in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses'. By 1935 he had soured, dismissing Tagore's later English books as 'sentimental rubbish'.
Q 02In which city was Tagore's 'Jana Gana Mana' first sung in public, at a 1911 session of the Indian National Congress?
Calcutta
Calcutta heard it on 27 December 1911; the song is the first of five verses of his hymn 'Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata', and that verse alone became India's anthem in January 1950.
Q 03Which economist, born at Santiniketan in 1933, was given his first name by Tagore himself?
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen's grandfather taught Sanskrit at Santiniketan, and the boy went on to Tagore's school there, where, he recalled, any interest in exam grades was 'severely discouraged'.
Q 04Which 1964 Satyajit Ray film, often ranked among his finest, adapts Tagore's 1901 novella Nastanirh, The Broken Nest?
Charulata
Charulata is the lonely wife of a newspaper editor in 1879 Bengal, drawn to his visiting cousin; scholars think the novella drew on Tagore's own closeness to his sister-in-law Kadambari.
Q 05Which 1892 Tagore story about a dry-fruit seller's bond with little Mini became a 1961 Hindi film with Balraj Sahni?
Kabuliwala
Kabuliwala had already been filmed in Bengali in 1957 by Tapan Sinha, with Chhabi Biswas as the fruit-seller Rahmat, who is jailed and returns to find Mini grown up and about to marry.
Q 06Which viral dance video of 2008 took the words of its song 'Praan' from Tagore's poem 'Stream of Life'?
Where the Hell is Matt?
Where the Hell is Matt? 2008 set Garry Schyman's 'Praan', sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, over Matt Harding's dancing; the words are poem 69 of the English Gitanjali in their original language.
Q 07Which viceroy got Tagore's 1919 letter renouncing the knighthood that made 'our shame glaring'?
Lord Chelmsford
Lord Chelmsford was told that the punishments after Amritsar were 'without parallel in the history of civilised governments' and that Tagore wished to stand 'shorn of all special distinctions' beside his countrymen.
Q 08What did Sweden send India after Tagore's Nobel medal vanished from a Visva-Bharati vault in 2004?
Gold and bronze replicas
Gold and bronze replicas were re-minted in what was called an exceptional gesture, and twelve years after the theft a baul singer was arrested for sheltering the thieves.
Q 09Where does Patha Bhavana, Tagore's Santiniketan school, traditionally hold its classes?
Outdoors, under trees
Outdoors, under trees: Tagore wanted pupils taught in the shade with nature around them rather than behind walls, and UNESCO listed Santiniketan as World Heritage in 2023.
Q 10At which town's Besant Theosophical College did Tagore translate 'Jana Gana Mana' as 'The Morning Song of India'?
Madanapalle
Madanapalle's college was run by the Irish poet James Cousins, whose wife Margaret set the tune down in Western notation from Tagore's own notes during his five-day stay in 1919.
Q 11What does the title of Tagore's Gitanjali, the book that won him the 1913 Nobel Prize, mean in English?
Song Offerings
Song Offerings was the English edition's subtitle; its 103 prose poems were Tagore's own translations, yet only 53 of them came from the Bengali book of that name.
Q 12To which English painter, who found him rooms in Hampstead in 1912, did Tagore dedicate the English Gitanjali?
William Rothenstein
William Rothenstein was so struck by the manuscript that he passed it to a leading poet, who read the songs aloud at the painter's house on 7 July 1912; their letters were later published as Imperfect Encounter.
Q 13Which London body published the limited first edition of Tagore's English Gitanjali in 1912?
Q 21Which 1916 Tagore novel sets the zamindar Nikhil, his wife Bimala and the firebrand Sandip against the Swadeshi boycott?
Ghare Baire
Ghare Baire, The Home and the World, ends in sectarian violence, with Nikhil riding out to help the victims at the risk of his life; Satyajit Ray's 1984 film of it competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Q 22In which 1929 Tagore novel does the barrister Amit Ray rail against a revered poet who turns out to be 'Rabi Thakur'?
Shesher Kabita
Shesher Kabita, translated as The Last Poem and as Farewell Song, let Tagore send himself up at a time when younger Bengali writers were attacking his dominance.
Q 23Which 1895 Tagore ghost story grew from his stay with an elder brother at Ahmedabad's Moti Shahi Mahal?
The India Society
The India Society, founded in London in 1910 to champion Indian art, issued the limited first edition; Macmillan's trade edition followed in 1913, the year the book won the Nobel Prize.
Q 14Which British poet made the lone nomination that won Tagore the 1913 Nobel, in the first year he was ever nominated?
Thomas Sturge Moore
Thomas Sturge Moore nominated him as a member of the Royal Society of Literature, and that single letter beat a rival candidacy signed by 97 of the society's other members.
Q 15Who read Tagore's one-sentence telegram of thanks at the December 1913 Nobel banquet in Stockholm, which he skipped?
The British chargé d'affaires
The British chargé d'affaires, Mr Clive, read the line thanking the Academy for an understanding that 'has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother'. Tagore never delivered a Nobel lecture.
Q 16Whose 1913 Nobel bid, backed by 97 members of the Royal Society of Literature, lost to Tagore's single nominator?
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy was put forward again and again, 25 nominations in all by 1927, yet he died the following year without ever receiving the prize.
Q 17From which Baul singer's song 'Ami Kothay Pabo Tare' did Tagore borrow the melody of 'Amar Shonar Bangla'?
Gagan Harkara
Gagan Harkara was a village postman, which is what 'harkara' means, on the Tagore estates at Shilaidaha; through him the poet came to know the songs of the Baul mystic Lalon Shah.
Q 18Tagore's 'Amar Shonar Bangla' became a protest song against which 1905 British measure?
Partition of Bengal
The Partition of Bengal split the province in 1905 and the song was sung against it; Bangladesh took its first ten lines as the national anthem during the 1971 Liberation War.
Q 19Which Tagore novel, his longest, follows an Irish orphan of 1857 raised as a zealous Hindu, unaware of his birth?
Gora
Gora means 'whitey'; the hero falls for a Brahmo girl, and his Hindu zeal collapses once his foster father reveals the truth about his parents.
Q 20Which 1903 Tagore novel about the young widow Binodini was filmed in 1938 and again by Rituparno Ghosh in 2003?
Chokher Bali
Chokher Bali means a grain of sand in the eye, a constant irritant, which is why its first English translation, in 1914, was called Eyesore.
The Hungry Stones
The Hungry Stones has a young collector of cotton duties lodge in a deserted marble palace, where each night the revels of a long-dead court draw him further in.
Q 24Which 1961 Satyajit Ray anthology film brings together Tagore's stories The Postmaster, Monihara and Samapti?
Teen Kanya
Teen Kanya, 'Three Daughters', was made for the centenary of Tagore's birth, yet went abroad as Two Daughters because the ghost story Monihara was left out.
Q 25Which Tagore play about the dying boy Amal did Janusz Korczak's orphans stage in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942?
The Post Office
The Post Office was the last play Korczak's orphanage staged, on 18 July 1942; about three weeks later he and the children were deported to Treblinka.
Q 26In which symbolic Tagore play, written at Shillong, does Nandini defy a greedy king who makes his subjects mine gold?
Raktakarabi
Raktakarabi, 'Red Oleanders', is named for the flowers Nandini wears for the man she loves; Tagore first called the play Yaksapuri, after the king's joyless town.
Q 27Which Mahabharata hero does Manipur's warrior princess, granted beauty by the gods, woo in Tagore's play Chitra?
Arjuna
Arjuna, living as a hermit under a vow, is first won by her borrowed beauty; the princess had been raised as a son because Manipur's king had no male heir.
Q 28Which 1932 film, shot in four days at the New Theatres studio, is the only one Tagore is credited with directing?
Natir Puja
Natir Puja was filmed like a stage play from his 1926 dance-drama, with a cast he brought from Santiniketan; the prints were reportedly lost in a fire at the studio.
Q 29Which relative of Tagore founded a retreat at Santiniketan in 1863 and gave it that name, meaning 'abode of peace'?
His father Debendranath
His father Debendranath, the Brahmo leader known as Maharshi, built a small retreat for meditation there; the poet opened a school on the land in 1901, and the school grew into a university.
Q 30Which all-European cadre did Tagore's brother Satyendranath become the first of his countrymen to join?
Indian Civil Service
The Indian Civil Service sent Satyendranath to western India for most of his career; his daughter Indira Devi later set nearly 200 of her uncle's songs down in musical notation.