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Artistic License

Tagore poems on canvas

Jamil Mahmud
Whether it’s possible to effectively transform moving poetry into remarkable artworks, or not, remains debatable. Nevertheless, creativity can never be restrained by boundaries.
Over the last two years, Channel i has been encouraging this creative process of transforming poems into art and they have chosen to focus on Rabindranath Tagore’s verses. Their yearly calendars feature the outcome of this creative process.
While the 2011 calendar was a tribute to the poet on his 150th birth anniversary, this year's calendar features artworks inspired by the Nobel laureate's poems on the six seasons.
Each calendar features adaptations of 12 poems on different themes.
Tagore took up poetry at the very initial phase of his literary career, while he took interest in drawing and painting at the age of 60. If he had taken up brush and canvas earlier, we might have had a different window to look into his expressions. However, some noted Bangladeshi artists have demonstrated their courage to delve deep into Tagore's words and express them through art.
Eminent poet Syed Shamsul Haq selected the poems last year from the vast Tagore repertoire while noted artists Qayyum Chowdhury, Hashem Khan, Rafiqun Nabi, Monirul Islam, Sheikh Afzal, Nisar Hussain, Moniruzzaman and Kanak Chanpa Chakma have adapted them into art.
For last year's calendar, Sheikh Afzal transformed the ever-familiar words “Bohudin Dhore Bohu Krosh Durey”. His landscape features a euphoric Tagore, in white, raising his hands, set against the backdrop of green, under a blue sky.
What Tagore really meant by the words
would never be revealed, but Afzal found an enthusiastic poet in these words. He said, “When I read the poem, I imagine him in his disposition. Hence, I've painted him this way."
Presence of Tagore on the canvas is also apparent in Rafiqun Nabi’s and Shamsuddoha's works. Depicting the poem “Prothom Din-er Shurjo”, Nabi placed Tagore at a corner of his painting, as if the poet is looking at the first dawn of the year with overwhelmed eyes.
Hashem Khan's paintings feature in both years’ calendars. In the 2011 one, a depiction of the poem “Nirjhar-er Swapnobhango", and this year a poem on the season Hemanta. Narrating his own view of the earlier work, Khan said that in the poem he found an empathetic poet. “The poem urges the soul to be free, especially one who is restrained by middle-class sentiments,” said Khan.
In the prologue for this year's calendar, art enthusiast and Foreign Secretary Mijarul Quayes spoke about Tagore's fascination with the Bangla seasons that have been depicted in the artworks by 12 artists, including Nisar Hussain, Shahid Kabir, Biren Shome, Shamarjit Roy Chowdhury and Abdul Mannan.
The beautiful rural Bengal has been portrayed in each work. The colour red inevitably dominates Nisar Hussain's work on “Esho Hey Baishakh”. Portraying the rainy season, Shamsuddoha imagines a waterlogged landscape with the monsoon flower kadam at one corner.
As mentioned earlier, evaluating these artworks based on Tagore'e merit would be unfair. In his prologue for last year's calendar, media personality and art connoisseur Muhammad Jahangir mentioned that the artworks are only an attempt to understand the core messages of Tagore’s words with colours and lines.