5 Rupees Rabindranath Tagore

Issued to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Reserve Bank of India produced commemorative circulation strikes in this series throughout the 2000s and 2010s, tying the five-rupee denomination to figures of national cultural significance rather than retiring the format for purely transactional coinage.

Tagore's relationship with the British Crown was complicated — he returned his knighthood in 1919 following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.