As explained by my brother in this article on The Conversation.
Here is a taste:
There’s been a great deal of excitement over Bob Dylan winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s rare for artists who have achieved widespread, mainstream popularity to win. And although Nobels often go to Americans, the last literature prize to go to one was Toni Morrison in 1993. Furthermore, according to The New York Times, “It is the first time the honor has gone to a musician.”
But as Bob Dylan might croon, “the Times they are mistaken.”
A Bengali literary giant who probably wrote even more songs preceded Dylan’s win by over a century. Rabindranath Tagore, a wildly talented Indian poet, painter and musician, took the prize in 1913.
The first musician (and first non-European) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore possessed an artistry – and lasting influence – that mirrored Dylan’s.
The whole story of Rabindranath Tagore is well worth reading.
For an introduction to the life and work of Tagore, I recommend the following:
• Alam, Fakrul and Radha Chakravarty, eds. The Essential Tagore (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
• Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
• Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, eds. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Sen, Amartya, “Tagore and His India,” in Sen’s book, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005): 89-120 (first published on 26 June 1997 in the New York Review of Books).
And yet while Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature _as_ a musician (his lyrics), it seems Tagore, although indeed a musician (among other artistic talents) was awarded the Prize in 1913 for his poetry (to be sure, his poems and other literary productions have been 'lyricized,' both by Tagore and others): "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."
Tagore won because Yeats ran a PR campaign after reading a book of his poetry, though I have little doubt he deserved it based on his position in Bengali literature. As a social philosopher he was also a pretty fascinating thinker; an extreme cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist, though interestingly two of his works became the national anthems of India and Pakistan.
Indeed, it is the polymathic cosmopolitan that Sen ably treats and well appreciates, helping us understand the "many disagreements [he had] with [Gandhi] on a variety of subjects, including nationalism, patriotism, the importance of cultural exchange, the role of rationality and of science, and the nature of economic and social development."
I might have to check out the Sen article; I actually wrote a term paper on Tagore for a graduate English class but it was so long ago that I can't remember what sources I used. Read Gandhi's autobiography for the class, which does paint him as a slightly less sympathetic figure than history remembers.
Croon: to sing sentimentally in a sweet, low voice
you might want to check with your brother on use of that word to describe Dylan's vocals.