Indira Debi Chowdhurani

Daughter of Satyendranath Tagore and Jnanadanandini Devi, born in Calcutta in 1873, Indira Debi took First Class Honours in French at Calcutta University in 1892 and held a diploma from Trinity College of Music in London. That double training — Bengali song in the ear, Western theory on paper — is exactly what the work needed.

She notated close to two hundred of Rabindranath's songs. She also translated Ruskin and French literature into Bengali and Rabindranath into English, wrote on music and on the position of women, and helped found Sangit Bhavana at Visva-Bharati, of which she was briefly chancellor.

The poet wrote to her for years from the river boats of East Bengal; those letters, kept and later published as Chhinnapatra, are among the most-read prose he ever produced — and they exist because she kept them. She was awarded Visva-Bharati's Desikottama in 1957 and died in 1960.