Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti 2026 Date

About Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti

Marked in Kolkata as Poncheeshe Boishakh — the 25th of Boishakh — this is the only Indian birth anniversary that splits the calendar: West Bengal keeps the Bengali date (8 or 9 May), while the rest of India fixes it to 7 May. The day belongs to Rabindra Sangeet recitals.

Tagore was born on 25 Boishakh, 1268 of the Bengali Era, at the Jorasanko Thakurbari in Calcutta. Because West Bengal follows the Bengali calendar and other states follow the Gregorian, the same anniversary is often observed on two separate days — 7 May outside Bengal, 8 or 9 May inside it. The recitals draw on a remarkably specific corpus: the roughly 2,000 songs he composed, now called Rabindra Sangeet, plus dance-dramas like Chitrangada and verses from Gitanjali, the 1910 collection that won him the 1913 Nobel — the first for any non-European. The day also carries a political memory. Britain knighted Tagore in 1915; he gave the title back in 1919 to protest the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and that act of refusal is read aloud at many gatherings.