The Indian Cultural Center is making arrangements for a year-long program in connection with the 150th birth anniversary of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
Two Universities, those of Colombo and Kelaniya, the Ministry of Culture and Arts and the Bangladesh High Commission are associated with the arrangements.
An introductory lecture would be delivered by Dr. Reba Som at the Colombo University on January 31 on ‘Musical Journey of Rabindranath Tagore' to be followed by the screening of the film ‘The story of Tagore's Gitanjali'.
Dr, Som, Director of Rabindranath Center, Kolkata, is a scholar on Tagore and famed singer and author of several books on the Bengali personage and eastern culture.
The Bengali celebrity, Tagore was born on May 7, 1861, in Calcutta in what was then known as British India and died on August 7, 1941, at the ripe old age of 80.
Multi-faceted Tagore was a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, educationist, spiritualist, philosopher, internationalist, painter, orator, song writer, composer and singer, all in one.
Married to Mrinalini Devi, he was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first non-European and first Asian to be so honored.
‘His poetry in translation was viewed as spiritual, and this together with his mesmerizing persona gave him a prophet-like aura in the West', says Wiki.
Tagore was the founder of the Visva Bharati University. He was perhaps the only litterateur to have composed national anthems for two countries, India and Bangladesh. He was also the founder of world renowned Shanthiniketan.
He enrolled as a student of a public school, East Sussex in England in 1878 and later read law at the University College in London but stopped short of becoming a Barrister.
He traveled in more than 30 countries in 5 continents. English poets Charles Andrews, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Earnest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moor and many others were his fans. In fact, Yeats wrote the preface to the English translation of Gitanjali while Andrews joined Shanthiniketan to study under Tagore.
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