CELEBRATING THE 150th BIRTH ANNIVERSARY OF NOBEL LAUREATE RABINDRANATH TAGORE

An Exhibition on Rabindranath Tagore in Kuala Lumpur

On the 31^st of July 1927, Rabindranath Tagore addressed the people of Kuala Lumpur in a public reception at the Town Hall; he said, “I claim my place among you as a poet and you must know that a poet does not merely belong to his own time, and his own country. I only wish I had the time to be able to share your life and your aspirations, to cheer you with my singing and to help you with such gift of imagination as I have. But that is not possible and I ask you to accept me as your friend and trust me.” Eighty four years after he said those words, the people of Kuala Lumpur have kept his trust. His songs still cheer them; his gift of imagination still inspires them. A lot of this credit should of course go to the Malaysian Bengali Association for keeping alive in Malaysia the creations of Rabindranath Tagore.

To celebrate the 150^th birth anniversary of the Poet, the Association wanted to hold an exhibition on the Life, Works and Travels of Rabindranath Tagore. The University of Malaya not only offered a venue for the exhibition, the Museum department contributed immensely by preparing new panels for the photographs and did the final designing of the exhibition. Mr Abd Aziz Rashid, Head of the Department of Asian Art took a keen interest in making this exhibition a success. The University Librarian and her staff helped by finding, from their archive, newspaper clippings of the Poet in Malaya in 1927. They also put together an interesting book exhibition from their collection showcasing translations of Rabindranath’s works in different languages as also books about him. I was helped all along by Pulak Roy who coordinated with me and the museum authorities and also arranged all the prints and mounting of these photographs. The exhibition was inaugurated on the 28^th of May, 2011 by His Excellency, Sri Vijay Kumar Gokhale, High Commissioner from India to Malaysia and DatukDr.GhausJasmon, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya.

Organizing an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur has been an exciting experience. The idea of giving the people of Malaya an exposure into the life of someone so dear to India was overwhelming. The general visitor was kept in mind; no previous knowledge of this multi-faceted personality had been assumed. So the story-line had been kept basic with the different facets of the Poet being shown through photographs and text. To bring a little bit of Santiniketan into Kuala Lumpur, alpona motifs were used on panels as tailpieces and a few on the floor with potted plants.

Rabindranath belonged to a very special family in Bengal and, very briefly, this has been explained. Both his father, Debendranath and his grandfather, Dwarkanath were outstanding personalities of their times and they had a deep impact on the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century.

Many would be aware of his miserable experience in school which triggered off his quest for the perfect educational system. He believed very strongly that education should be joyful and in harmony with nature. With this in mind, he founded in Santiniketan a school in 1901. This exhibition depicted some photographs of this school. Later when a university evolved out of this experiment, where music and fine arts were given equal importance with subjects like philosophy and literature, the exhibition gave the visitor some impressions of this great educational experiment. It was to explain his ideals of education and to collect funds for his university that he travelled to Malaya in 1927. The Malaysians of today would be proud to know that the response Rabindranath received in their country was overwhelming.

Literature was of course one facet of his personality; it was this facet which brought him world-wide fame when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Some specimens of his manuscripts with his elegant handwriting were also on display.

Rabindranath was a dramatist of repute; dramatics was a creative pastime in Jorasanko, the Poet’s ancestral home. The Tagore brothers wrote their own plays, staged them at Jorasanko and acted in these themselves. Rabindranath was an accomplished actor. The tradition of play-acting, especially of dance-dramas written and composed by the Poet continues in Santiniketan. Glimpses of this aspect of his life were presented.

Rabindranath was concerned with communal problems and did his bit to bring about harmony among the different communities that resided in Santiniketan. He introduced in Santiniketan seasonal festivals where everyone could participate joyfully. These seasonal festivals came to be associated with the special culture of this institution and the introduction of traditional Indian forms and rituals in organizing these festivals, including decoration of the site, use of flowers, alpona (a kind of floor decoration), chanting of Vedic hymns and blowing of conch-shells gave them a new dimension, aesthetically attractive, intrinsically Indian yet totally secular.

Another panel celebrated the wayfarer in the poet. “I am a wayfarer of an endless road; my greetings of a wanderer to thee!” Even as a child, Rabindranath had yearned to see the great Outside. In his reminiscences, he recalled being restricted in his movements; even going out of the house was forbidden to the children. In the Post Office, Amal symbolizes his longing for ‘far-away things.’ We have given glimpses of his travels around the world with a special focus on his tour of Southeast Asia.

A person of his intellectual stature and sensitivity, Rabindranath felt the need to meet kindred spirits. He invited some of the greatest minds of the time to spend time in Santiniketan. When he went travelling he was sought out by eminent and distinguished people. This panel depicts this confluence of minds.

Although he felt this need for intellectual companionship he was not isolated in an ivory tower; he had a family and personal life. One panel is devoted to this aspect.

Another important panel depicts the Poet as an Artist.  Although he doodled and made artistic emendations on his manuscripts for a fairly long time, he took to painting seriously only in his late sixties. In 1930, his first exhibition opened in Paris, followed by exhibitions in nearly all the major cities of Europe and America. Some reproductions of his paintings were displayed. It is possible to see how his paintings evolved out of stray erasures and doodling.

Rabindrasangit, or lyrics written and set to music by Rabindranath, is the genre in which his creative genius was at its best. Whatever may happen with the rest of his corpus, his songs, he knew would survive. He once said that his music reaches where words fail.

Few people are fully aware of the value of Rabindranath’s contribution in the field of rural development. It could be that his achievements in literature, music and art eclipsed his activities in this sphere. Yet it has to be acknowledged that Rabindranath was a pioneer in the movement for rural resuscitation in his country. His institute, Sriniketan, a centre for Rural Reconstruction has done much in bringing to the villages surrounding Santiniketan health, employment and joy.  

In 1940, when Oxford University conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters on Rabindranath, they called him ‘a myriad-minded man’. His personality was truly multi-faceted. Poet, dramatist, music composer, artist, innovator in education, social reformer—these are just some of his personas. But he was much more besides -- a living presence, in many ways still alive.

He lived from the second half of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th. What really makes him stand out during this period was his humanism and belief in the underlying unity of Man. He believed it was possible to create a world of peace and harmony and brotherhood and he did and said all that he could towards that goal. He was not interested in wielding power over the lives of others but had a clear idea of man’s destiny and an intuitive understanding of the basic principles which man must follow to evolve and not perish at the root. Today such ideas are familiar but nearly a hundred years ago Rabindranath was a lone visionary who went from country to country with the message of universal brotherhood.

Rabindranath was one of the most romantic men of his times—he was a path-breaker in whatever he did, be it literature, art or music. He revolutionized mind-sets and ushered in new trends in India. During his age, performing dance on stage was taboo for girls belonging to respectable families. He dared to defy that by staging dance-recitals by his students of Visva-Bharati all over India facilitating the revival of the Classical dance forms of India through dancers like RukminideviArundale, Balasaraswati and many others.

The choice of the venue for the exhibition on our Poet was most appropriate as students of the University would have easy access to it. The celebration of the 150th birth anniversary will be more meaningful if our youth can be interested in his life and works. I find that the youth of today are often turned off by the image of Rabindranath they are most familiar with. In fact, Rabindranath was aware of this and had once told them, “I know I look rather formidable, with my grey beard and white hair and flowing Indian robe, and people, who know me by my exterior, make the absurd mistake that I am an old man…if I could show you my heart, you would find it green and young,--perhaps younger than some of you…”

It is to dispel feelings that Rabindranath was always old, we have, in our exhibition, depicted him, also in his youth and prime—possibly as handsome and attractive as any rock-star today!

One of the symptoms of old age is a stagnation of thoughts and ideas, old people stop growing, stop being creative. His life, full of tensions and surprises, creative to the end, is a challenge. As his later poems and paintings show, the poet of Gitanjali was more than the poet of Gitanjali.

I end with an excerpt from a letter written by Rabindranath to a young friend, in 1938, just three years before he died:

“I have changed my opinion…In this vast world, where the stream of thought and the wheel of work move on, its acquaintance becomes more and more wide. I have seen that when the mind is lively, it has proved through initiating fresh ideas in the worlds of knowledge, thought and action that man is a creator, unlike insects he does not continue repetition of the same art pattern. I have no doubt today that in music, literature or the fine arts it is not our ultimate goal to go round and round within the same circle like a pair of oxen with blinkers on, grinding oil-seeds….

I have changed my mind. There is no counting how many times I have changed my mind. Had our Creator not changed his mind again and again, we would be listening to the classical roars of dinosaurs in our music soirees and the four-footed mammoths with their four-tusked heads would be dancing so frighteningly that even our martial art dancers would flee. Till the very last day if my power to change my mind remains intact, I know that there is hope that I shall live.”

Info dari Wiki adalah seperti di bawah ini. 

Rabindranath Tagore^[a] (ⁱ/rəˈbindrəˈnɑːt ˈtɑːɡɔr/; Bengali pronunciation: [robind̪ro nat̪ʰ ʈʰakur]), also written Ravīndranātha Thākura^[1] (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941),^[b] sobriquetGurudev,^[c] was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well asIndian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author ofGitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse",^[3] he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.^[4] In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.^[5] Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of the modern Indian subcontinent.

A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.^[6] At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.^[7][8] By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident nationalist he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of theBengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.

Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India'sJana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The lyrics and music for the original song of Sri Lanka's National Anthem were also the work of Tagore.

Write up tentang Pameran Rabindranath:-

Rabindranath Tagore Exhibition- 28^th May 2011

The exhibition entitled Glimpses from the Life, Works and Travels of Rabindranath Tagore will depict some milestones from the Poet’s life through images and text. A myriad-minded man, Rabindranath belonged to one of the leading aristocratic families of Calcutta. The story of his life begins at Jorasanko, his ancestral home with a brief history of his illustrious family and of the period he was born in. We shall have glimpses of his childhood and adolescence, his early trips to England and his entrance into the literary and cultural world of Bengal.

The exhibition will showcase the different facets of Rabindranath, beginning with his literary career that lead him to be awarded the Nobel Prize, the first Asian ever to be thus honoured. The poet, the dramatist and the novelist will be highlighted.

A person of his intellectual stature and sensitivity, Rabindranath felt the need to meet kindred spirits. When he was travelling he was sought out by eminent and distinguished people. One panel will depict this confluence of minds.

Another important panel will depict the Poet as Artist. Some reproductions of his paintings are being displayed. It is possible to trace how his paintings evolved out of stray erasures and doodling.

Rabindrasangit, or lyrics set to music by Rabindranath, is the genre in which his creative genius was at its best. Whatever may happen with the rest of the corpus, his songs, he knew, would survive. He had once said music reaches where words fail.

Many would be aware of his miserable experience in school which triggered off his quest for the perfect education system. He believed that education should be joyful and in harmony with nature. With this in mind, he founded in Santiniketan a school in 1901. Later a university evolved out of this experiment, he created a centre ‘where the world could meet in a single nest’. Visitors to the exhibition will be given some impressions of this great educational experiment.

Another section of the exhibition celebrates the wayfarer in the Poet. Even as a child, he yearned to see the great Outside. This section will give glimpses of his romance with travel and focus on his tour of Southeast Asia.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) belonged to the renowned Tagore family of Jorasanko in Kolkata. It is difficult to trace a family that could match the Tagores in sheer diversity of creative brilliance in so many members of a single family. There had been hardly a member in this family who had not shown signs of brilliance in fields of art, literature, the performing arts, philosophy or religion. The Tagores contributed in pioneering a cultural and social movement in Bengal which is the basis of Bengali culture today.

His grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, built a business empire by collaborating with the British on equal terms. He stood up for every social reform and progressive movement of the day, religious, social and political. His father, Devendranath, was not interested in the Tagore business empire; he revived the BrahmoSamaj, a modern development that rejected idolatry and superstition. It was through his father that Rabindranath received his grounding in the Upanishads.

Rabindranath started writing early in life and his works were greeted with acclaim from the beginning. In the development of Bengali poetry, Rabindranath compressed in one lifetime the development of several centuries. His prose is equally rich; he found a rigid, formal Bengali when he began writing and he left it a supple and rich language. All moods and shades are there in his prose. He wrote plays, dance-dramas, short stories and novels. The range of subjects he wrote on was vast; from subjects as varied as the opium trade in China to a scientific treatise on the universe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first Asian to be so honoured.

His genius was multi-faceted. One of these facets was music. He wrote over two thousand lyrics and set them to his own music; it was in this genre that his creative genius was at its best. Each change of the season, each aspect of his country’s rich landscape, every undulation of the human heart, in sorrow or in joy, has found its voice in some song of his.

As an artist, Rabindranath started late. It was only in his late sixties that he started painting. He took the West quite by storm. After his first successful exhibition in Paris in 1930, he went on to exhibit in Birmingham, London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Moscow, Philadelphia and Boston.

In spite of all this success in the world of literature, music and art, Rabindranath would say that he was happiest in his role as a school teacher. He was to write about education for the individual, for the masses and for its necessity in the building up of a nation. His bold experiments in education resulted in the creation of a Poet’s school in 1901 in Santiniketan and an international university, Visva-Bharati in 1921.

Few people are aware of his contribution in the field of rural development. It could be that his achievements in literature, music and arts eclipsed his activities in this sphere. Yet it has to be acknowledged that Rabindranath was a pioneer in the movement for rural resuscitation in his country.

Rabindranath believed it was possible to create a world of peace and harmony and brotherhood and he did and said all that he could to work towards that goal. Today when we hear a group of Americans singing, ‘We are the world…’ for their starving African brothers, we are not surprised but less than a hundred years ago, Rabindranath was a lone visionary who went from country to country with the same message of universal brotherhood and of the underlying unity in Man.