Thursday, May 09, 2013
Kolkata: Amid mellifluous songs, appealing poems and colourful processions, West Bengal along with the rest of India, remembered Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, on his 152 birth anniversary on Thursday.
Students as well as popular artists were seen celebrating the day in his ancestral home in the city Jorasanko Thakur Bari by dancing to the tunes of Tagore’s composition, singing his songs and reciting his poems. In every vicinity of the city, cultural events are organised to honour the poet by performing his songs, poems, plays and dances. In schools and colleges, students dressed themselves up in traditional attaire and participated in ‘Rabindra Jayanti’ celebration.
Tagore was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region’s literature and music. He authored the Gitanjali and its “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verses” and became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics ranging from political and personal. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India’s ‘Jana Gana Mana’ and Bangladesh’s ‘Amar Shonar Bangla’.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee joined in the celebrations along with her cabinet minister. Banerjee’s admiration for Tagore is well known, and is seen reciting many of his poems even in political rallies. It is Banerjee who ensured that Tagore songs were played at every crossing in the city.
President Pranab Mukherjee’s wife Suvra Mukherjee, an accomplished Rabindra Sangeet singer, paid here tribute to Tagore in New Delhi. Opening a soiree of songs based on Tagore’s works as part of “Rabindra Janmo Jayanti” organised by Sparsh Natya Rang theatre group, Geetanjali troupe here last evening. Prominent among those who attended the event were Chief Minister Shiela Dixit, Gursharan Kaur, wife of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, MP and actor Hema Malini, Mithun Chakroborty and singer Shaan Mukherjee.
Visva-Bharati University, established by him in Bolpur town (Santiniketan) of West Bengal, decided to celebrate the birth anniversary of Tagore on the actual date of his birth, Boishakh 25, scrapping a rule ushered in by his predecessor - that of celebrating the bard’s birth anniversary on Poila Boishakh (the first day of the Bengali calender).
By Archisman Dinda Correspondent
Gulf News 2013. All rights reserved.
