Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Rabindranath Tagore trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 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 dated his introduction September 1912 and wrote that he had carried the translations about 'reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses'. He later soured, grumbling that 'Tagore does not know English'.
Q 02Tagore's hymn 'Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata' has how many verses, of which only the first became India's anthem?
Five
Five verses make up the hymn, and only the first, 'Jana Gana Mana', was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 24 January 1950. It was written in Sadhu Bhasha, a heavily Sanskritised literary Bengali.
Q 03Which economist, born at Santiniketan in 1933 and a Nobel laureate in 1998, was given his first name by Tagore himself?
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen was named by the poet and later schooled at Patha Bhavana, Tagore's Santiniketan school, which shunned examinations and competitive testing. His 1998 prize was for work on welfare economics.
Q 04Which 1964 Satyajit Ray film, often called his finest, adapts Tagore's 1901 novella Nastanirh, The Broken Nest?
Charulata
Charulata is the lonely wife of newspaper editor Bhupati, drawn to his literary cousin in 1879 Calcutta. Ray said the novella had 'a western quality' that let him speak of Mozart in connection with the film.
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 2008 viral video of a man dancing around the world used Tagore's 'Stream of Life' as its lyric 'Praan'?
Where the Hell is Matt?
Where the Hell is Matt? 2008 set Garry Schyman's 'Praan', sung by Palbasha Siddique, over Matt Harding's dancing. The poem is number 69 of the Bengali Gitanjali, translated into English by Tagore himself.
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 08Who is ex officio acharya, or chancellor, of Visva-Bharati, the university Tagore inaugurated in 1921?
The Prime Minister of India
The Prime Minister of India is acharya, while the President is paridarshaka, the visitor, and West Bengal's governor is pradhana, the rector. Parliament made it a central university in 1951.
Q 09What did the Swedish Academy send Visva-Bharati after Tagore's Nobel medal vanished from its vault in 2004?
Gold and bronze replicas
Gold and bronze replicas were presented after a December 2004 decision; the theft inspired the 2012 film Nobel Chor, and in 2016 a baul singer was arrested for sheltering the thieves.
Q 10In which year did UNESCO inscribe Santiniketan, the ashram Tagore grew into a university town, as World Heritage?
2023
2023 brought the inscription after Santiniketan had sat on UNESCO's tentative list since 2010. Classes there are still held in the open under mango trees, as Tagore intended.
Q 11At which town's Besant Theosophical College did Tagore translate 'Jana Gana Mana' as 'The Morning Song of India'?
Madanapalle
Madanapalle's vice-principal Margaret Cousins set the tune down in Western notation from Tagore's own notes, and the song has been sung daily at the college ever since.
Q 12How many prose poems make up the 1912 English Gitanjali, only 53 of them taken from the Bengali collection of that name?
103
103 poems appear, the other 50 drawn from collections such as Naivedya and Kheya, and one of them fuses two separate Naivedya songs. The Bengali Gitanjali of 1910 had 157 poems.
Q 13To which English painter, a friend since his 1910 tour of India's art sites, did Tagore dedicate the English Gitanjali?
William Rothenstein
Q 21Which 1903 Tagore novel about the young widow Binodini was filmed in 1938, with the poet seeing and approving it?
Chokher Bali
Chokher Bali, 'sand in the eye', was first published in English as Eyesore in 1914, and Rituparno Ghosh filmed it again in 2003. It pillories the seclusion forced on widows who could not remarry.
Q 22Which 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 Hindu–Muslim violence with Nikhil likely mortally wounded; Satyajit Ray's 1984 film of it competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Q 23In which 1929 Tagore novel does the barrister Amit Ray rail against a revered poet who turns out to be 'Rabi Thakur'?
William Rothenstein found Tagore his 1912 rooms at 3 Villas on the Heath in Hampstead, now marked by a blue plaque, and lived nearby at Oak Hill Park. Their letters were published as Imperfect Encounter.
Q 14Which London body published the limited first edition of Tagore's English Gitanjali in November 1912?
The India Society
The India Society's edition carried an introduction dated September 1912, and the American magazine Poetry printed a selection. Tagore had shared the poems in London with admirers including Ezra Pound.
Q 15Which 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's nomination produced what the committee called 'a surprise of a peculiar kind'; member Per Hallström wrote that no poet in Europe since Goethe's death could rival Tagore.
Q 16Who 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 17Whose 1913 Nobel bid, backed by 97 Royal Society of Literature members, lost to Tagore as too 'pessimistic'?
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy's gloom was judged out of step with Alfred Nobel's will; Anatole France, also weighed that year, waited until 1921 for his prize. The Academy received 32 nominations for 28 writers.
Q 18From which Baul singer's song 'Ami Kothay Pabo Tare' did Tagore borrow the melody of 'Amar Shonar Bangla'?
Gagan Harkara
Gagan Harkara was the singer through whom Tagore discovered the Baul mystic Lalon Shah while managing the family estates at Shilaidaha, and the tune is set to dadra tala.
Q 19How many lines of Tagore's 'Amar Shonar Bangla' form Bangladesh's anthem, adopted in the 1971 Liberation War?
Ten
Ten lines of the poem, first printed in 1905, form the anthem, and in March 2014 some 254,537 people sang it together at Dhaka's National Parade Ground for a Guinness record.
Q 20Which 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, forcing his foster father to reveal the past and end his nativist zeal. Tagore wrote the novel between 1907 and 1910.
Shesher Kabita
Shesher Kabita, translated as The Last Poem and Farewell Song, let Tagore mock himself after younger writers had spent 1928 tilting at his reputation. Tagore had called the young writers to Jorasanko to hear them debate.
Q 24Which 1895 Tagore ghost story grew from his stay at Ahmedabad's Moti Shahi Mahal, where a brother was a judge?
The Hungry Stones
The Hungry Stones has a tax collector consumed night by night by a haunted marble palace; Tapan Sinha's 1960 film of it won a National Film Award and a prize at Cork.
Q 25Which 1961 Satyajit Ray anthology film brings together Tagore's stories The Postmaster, Monihara and Samapti?
Teen Kanya
Teen Kanya, 'Three Daughters', travelled abroad without its ghost story Monihara and was released on video as Two Daughters. Ray also made a documentary on Tagore that year.
Q 26Which 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, Dak Ghar in Bengali, treats the boy Amal's death as 'spiritual freedom'; its first English staging was at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1913, with Tagore in the audience at its London transfer.
Q 27In which symbolic Tagore play, written at Shillong, does Nandini defy a greedy king who makes his subjects mine gold?
Raktakarabi
Raktakarabi, 'Red Oleanders', was first titled Yaksapuri and appeared in the magazine Prabasi in 1924; a 2016 review called it Tagore's finest protest against totalitarianism.
Q 28Which Mahabharata hero does Manipur's warrior princess, granted beauty by the gods, woo in Tagore's play Chitra?
Arjuna
Arjuna, living as a hermit, is first won by a borrowed beauty; the princess had been raised as a boy because Manipur's king lacked a male heir. The play was published in English in 1913.
Q 29Which 1932 film, shot in four days at New Theatres in Calcutta, is the only one Tagore is credited with directing?
Natir Puja
Natir Puja recorded his 1926 dance-drama of a dancing girl's worship, with Tagore also acting in it; the prints were later destroyed in a fire at New Theatres.
Q 30Which relative of Tagore leased the Santiniketan land in 1863 for Rs 5 a year and named it the 'abode of peace'?
His father Debendranath
His father Debendranath, the Brahmo leader known as Maharshi, built a guest house there beside two chhatim trees; the 12-year-old poet first saw the place in February 1873.