Why Rabindranath Tagore is a poet of Bengal, India, the world | The Indian Express

Why Rabindranath Tagore is a poet of Bengal, India, the world | The Indian Express

Written by Daud Haider |Updated: May 9, 2019 9:52:14 am

Haider is a Bangladeshi poet who lived in political exile in Kolkata before moving to Berlin.

Why Rabindranath Tagore is a poet of Bengal, India, the world

Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti: Abroad, too, cities with large Bengali populations celebrate the phenomenon called Rabindranath. New York, London, Chicago, Toronto, Paris boast Rabindra Sangeet academies, the number of students increasing by the day. The real reason is the desire to keep close to one's language, the land of one's birth.

Rabindra Jayanti 2019: Rightly or wrongly, Tagore associated the practice of early marriage or betrothals with the institution of extended families; he found early marriages were useful only when kinship ties had the strength to resist fragmentation and the birth of nuclear families.

Rabindra Jayanti 2019: Two months after Bangladesh declared Independence, I was in Calcutta, where I met a lady who taught at Presidency College. At the very outset, we were in a state of near argument. “You lot, really, there’s nothing you can’t do. Making sure we can no longer sing the song of our souls, at least in public, not play it on the radio, no singer can even cut a record.” Stunned, completely befuddled, I asked, what song? Whose song?

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