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The voice of Bengal

Mohammad Shahidul Islam
Alongside Pahela Baishakh, 25th of this (Bangla) month occupies a special place among the Bengalis. This day has been bejeweled by the arrival of a great scholar who revolutionised Bengali literature and introduces its treasures to the world. Today i$ Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore's 147th birth anniversary. Every year the day is observed by Bengalis with much zeal.
Tagore was born into a distinguished family in Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal. His father Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, was a well known Hindu reformer and mystic and his mother was Srimati Sharada Devi. Tagore was home-schooled. He was taught in Bengali, with English lessons in the afternoon. He read the Bengali poets at an early age and began writing poetry himself by the age of eight. Tagore did have a brief spell at the St Xavier's Jesuit school, but found the conventional system of education uncongenial. His father wanted him to become a barrister and he was sent to England for higher studies.
In England, Tagore was impressed and inspired by John Bright W.E. Gladstone's "large-hearted, radical liberalism." In 1879, he enrolled at University College, at London, but was called back by his father to return to India in 1880. Three years later he was married. Tagore's family chose his bride, an almost illiterate girl of ten, named Bhabatarini (renamed Mrinalini). They went on to have four children; the eldest was born when Mrinalini was 13. Mrinalini died at the age of 30.
What Rabindranath did for literature, he tried to do the same for music as well. He respected the invjplable sanctity of both classical and folk music, and took from each that suited his purpose. Each season, each aspect of the Bengali
landscape and every undulation of the human heart have found their voices in his songs. They are sung at religious gatherings and at concert halls. Patriots have walked to the gallows with his song on their lips; young lovers unable to express the depth of their feelings render his songs and feel the weight of their inadequate articulacy relieved.
Tagore once said, "Whatever fate may be in store for my poems, stories and plays, I know for certain that the Bengali race will need my songs, they will sing my songs at every Bengali home, in the fields and by the rivers... I feel as if music wells up from within some unconscious depth of my mind, that is why it has certain completeness."
From 1890, Tagore had undertaken the management of his family estates. In 1901 he founded the famous Shantiniketan at Bolepur. This was designed to provide education that combined the traditional ashram Western system. He began with 5 pupils and 5 teachers (three of whom were Christians). His ideals were simplicity of living and the cultivation of beauty.
In 1912, Tagore visited Britain again and his own English translation of Gitanjali was published under William Butler Yates' auspices. Lecture tours in Britain and USA followed. In 1913 he was awarded the famous Nobel Prize for Literature. The Committee stated. "Because of his profoundly sensitive fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, apart of the literature of the West." The prize money went to his school, Shantiniketan.
Tagore's role in the innovation of educational ideas has been eclipsed by his fame as a poet. He was a pioneer in the field of education. For the last forty years of his life he was content to run a school in a humble rural surrounding, even when he had achieved fame such as no Bengali had known before.
If Tagore had done nothing else, what he did at Shantiniketan and Sriniketan would be sufficient to rank him as one of the subcontinent's greatest riation-builders. The little school for children at Shantiniketan became a world-renowned institution. Visva-Bharati, is a centre for Bengali Culture, a seminary for Eastern Studies and a meeting-place of the East and West. The poet selected as its motto an ancient Sanskrit verse, "Yatra visvam bhavatieka nidam," which means, "Where the whole world meets in a single nest." In 1940 a year before he died, he put a letter in Gandhi's hand, "Visva-Bharati is like a vessel which is carrying the cargo of my life's best treasure, and I hope it may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation."
Amar shonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh. The song touches all and inspires us to unconditionally love and appreciate the motherland. "When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Grant me my prayer that I may never lose touch with the one in the play of the many," -- Gitanjali. The writer is a faculty at the National Hotel and Tourism Training Institute. Bangladesh Parjatan Corporation-NT 0