Kautilya was an ancient India teacher, philosopher, economist, jurist and royal advisor. He is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. One of India's greatest mystics, Kabir (1398-1448) was also a satirist and philosopher, and a poet of timeless wit and wisdom. Rabindranath Tagore ( 1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, writer, composer, philosopher and painter. He became in 1913 the first non-European as well as the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Raja Rao (1909-2006), a path-breaker of Indian writing in English, was born in Hassan, Mysore. He moved to the United States in 1966, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin until 1983, when he retired as emeritus professor. A powerful and profound writer, and a superb stylist, Rao successfully and imaginatively appropriated English for the Indian narrative.

He was honoured with India s second-highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2007, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Ottupulackal Velukkuty Vijayan (2 July 1930 - 30 March 2005), commonly known as O. V. Vijayan , was an Indian author and cartoonist, who was an important figure in modern Malayalam language literature.