Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who was a poet, novelist, painter, independence activist, musical composer, and playwright. He pioneered new forms of art and literature in Bengal by introducing aspects of colloquial language. Tagore's translations of his Bengali works into English brought him great recognition, including becoming the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He founded an experimental school in rural Bengal to combine the best of Indian and Western traditions in education.