Who among the following was a poet who won Nobel Prize for literature in 1913?

Correct — D. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first Nobel Prize of any kind to go to an Asian.

The award followed Gitanjali (Song Offerings), the English version of which Tagore prepared himself and which had appeared in London the previous year.

He remains the only Indian to have won the Literature prize, and he wrote the songs that became the national anthems of two countries - Jana Gana Mana and Amar Sonar Bangla.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Rudyard Kipling — Rudyard Kipling did win the Literature prize, but in 1907. He was a British writer born in Bombay, and that Indian birth is what makes him the tempting option here.
• (b)
  Bankin Chandra Chattopadhyay — Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay - the paper prints 'Bankin' - died in 1894, before the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901. He wrote Anandamath, which carries Vande Mataram.
• (c)
  Aurobindo Ghose — Aurobindo Ghose never received a Nobel Prize. He withdrew from politics in 1910 to Pondicherry, where he wrote The Life Divine and the epic poem Savitri.

The Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, which alone disqualifies anyone who died in the nineteenth century.

Tagore's 1913 Literature prize was the first won by an Indian and by any Asian. The next Nobel to an Indian citizen was C.V. Raman's in Physics in 1930.

For the exam, hold three things together for each laureate: the person, the year, and the field. SSC will ask for whichever of the three is missing from its stem.

Key facts

• Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 and is the only Indian to have won in that category.
• The prize followed Gitanjali, whose English rendering by Tagore appeared in London in 1912.
• Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.
• Tagore renounced his knighthood in 1919 in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Common traps

• Picking Kipling because he was born in India - his prize year is 1907 and his nationality was British.
• Assuming any celebrated nineteenth-century Indian writer was eligible when the Nobel began only in 1901.
• Swapping Tagore's Nobel year, 1913, for Gitanjali's English publication, 1912.

No directly related past PYQ was found.