Tagore House Initiative

Rabindranath Tagore traveled to the west many times before and after receiving Nobel Prize in Literature. He had also sent his son Rathindranath, his son-in-law Nagendra Nath Gangopadhyay  and his student Santosh Majumdar to study Agricultural Economics at UIUC.

Later he visited and stayed in Urbana at 508 West High Street (Nov 1912 – Apr 1913) and called it to be his home and cited as his permanent address in several of his letters to friends and family.

While in the US he conducted his research and collaborated with many scholars and traveled to various part of the country. It is prominent in his writings that through his interactions he was learning the western way of building, developing, and managing the institutional structure of education. He was gathering and building the knowledge to fulfill his dream of setting up the University, Viswa-Bharati in Santiniketan, India, with mission of social reforms and educate the common people in science, agriculture, art  and invest in the future of the nation.

We acquired the house from a private resident in August 2021. It is small single-family two-story house, built around 1900, on the campus of UIUC, with a plan to build a foundation aligning with our vision and mission.