During the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore sought to spread his intellectual ideas in a fight against a scientific racist ideology which presented non-White or non-European individuals as downtrodden and in need of European colonialism to civilize them. Tagore was born in 1861 into a prominent Bengali Brahmin family as the youngest of thirteen children. His family was extremely wealthy, mainly due to the success of his grandfather Dwarkanath who had amassed a fortune through his firm, Carr, Tagore and Co. Dwarkanath had earned a great deal of respect from the British for his business accomplishments. From an early age, Tagore was an avid reader. Heavily influenced by the Upanishads, he was inspired to become a writer himself. In his works, Tagore set out to find unity and “a stability of belief and moral principal to give meaning and order to everything he did.”1 He looked for harmony in all things while paying attention to the deep religious beliefs of ancient India. Tagore believed the “unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality.”2 He expressed his creative passions by writing poetry that had strong spiritual messages. His writings referred heavily to the landscape of eastern India where he described the flowers, forests, birds, and the sacred Ganges River. Many of Tagore's poems created a sense of nostalgia. In one of his poems, titled Shah Jahan, named after the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Tagore lamented the end of the Mughal Empire, writing, “You are gone now emperor – Your empire has dissolved like a dream, Your throne is shattered, Your armies, whose marching shook the earth, Today have no more weight than the windblown dust on the Delhi road.”3 Tagore believed that the British Raj neglected the histories of the great Indian empires within their schools for Indian pupils. He wanted Indians to be proud of their ancestry, and sought to reassert their cultural brilliance both at home and abroad.