Tagore

I was asked my opinion about Tagore.

Let me reply by first asking a counter question ? Why would our British rulers ( and looters ) help him get a Nobel Prize ? Why did they award him knighthood ( which,of course, he refused ) ?
 The correct answer is because the British wanted to divert literature from the direction Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyaya was taking it ( see his Pather Dabi and other works ) to the mystical mumbo jumbo of Tagore.

 Following Tagore, Hindi writers took to ' Chayavaad', which did great damage to Hindi literature. Instead of art for social purpose, like Kabir, Faiz, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Subramania Bharati,etc in India, Dickens, Shaw, Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Maxim Gorki in Europe, and Walt Whitman, Upton Sinclair and Steinbeck in America,  the Chayavaadi poets took to the school of art for art's sake, practised and preached by Tagore, which is really escapism in a poor country like India.