Rabindranath Tagore 1

2016 Gitanjali & Beyond Hau: Issue 1, Vol. 1 (2016): Tagore & Spirituality Journal http://dx.doi.org/10.14297/gnb.1.1 http://gitanjaliandbeyond.napier.ac.uk of Tagore and Beyond 1 (1): 10 - 69 Editor-in Chief: Bashabi Fraser Deputy Editor: Christine Kupfer Published by The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) Edinburgh Napier University © The contributors 2016 Editorial Board Dr Liz Adamson Dr Sangeeta Datta Artist & Curator, Edinburgh Filmmaker SD Films; College of Art. independent Tagore Scholar. Prof Fakrul Alam Prof Sanjukta Dasgupta Professor of English, Professor of English, University University of Dhaka of Calcutta. Dr Imre Bangha Prof Uma Das Gupta Associate Professor of Hindi, Historian and Tagore biographer. University of Oxford. Dr Stefan Ecks Ursula Bickelmann School of Social and Political Independent Art Historian Science, University of Edinburgh Prof Elleke Boehmer Prof Mary Ellis Gibson Writer and critic; Professor of English, Colby Professor of World Literature in College, Waterville, ME, USA. English, Director of Oxford Humanities Centre Prof Tapati Gupta English Faculty, University of Professor emer., Department of Oxford. English, Calcutta University, Tagore scholar and independent Prof Ian Brown researcher of intercultural Playwright, Poet, Emeritus theatre. Professor, Kingston University, London. Prof Kaiser Md. Hamidul Haq Poet, Professor of English Colin Cavers University of Liberal Arts, Photography, Edinburgh College Bangladesh. of Art. Dr Michael Heneise Dr Amal Chatterjee Director, The Kohima Institute Writer. Nagaland, India Dr Debjani Chatterjee Dr Dr Martin Kaempchen MBE, Poet, Writer, Creative Arts Writer and Translator of Tagore. Therapist, Associate, Royal Literary Fellow. Mary-Ann Kennedy Photography, Edinburgh Napier Dr Rosinka Chaudhuri University. Professor of Cultural Studies, Centre for Studies in Social Usha Kishore Sciences, Kolkata. Poet and Translator. Dr Debasish Lahiri Prof Stephen Regan Poet, Poet, Assistant Professor & Professor of English, Centre for Head of the Department of Poetry & Poetics, Durham English, Lal Baba College, University, University of Calcutta. Prof Alan Riach Prof Ananda Lal Poet and Professor of Scottish Professor of English and Head, Literature, Glasgow University, Tagore Cultural Centre, Glasgow University. Jadavpur University. Director, Writers Workshop. Prof Carla Sassi Associate Professor of English, Prof Nigel Leask University of Verona. Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, School Chrys Salt of Critical Studies, University of Poet, Director, The Bakehouse. Glasgow. Prof Amrit Sen Prof Murdo Macdonald Professor of English, Visva- Art Historian, Dundee Bharati University. University. Kathryn Simpson Prof Somdatta Mandal School of Arts, English & Professor of English,,Visva- Languages, Queen's University, Bharati University. Belfast. Dr Christine Marsh Prof Alan Spence Independent Tagore Scholar. Author, poet and playwright, Professor Emeritus in Creative Prof Tapati Mukherjee Writing, University of Aberdeen; Director, Rabindra Bhavana Director, Sri Chinmoy Centre in Archives, Visva-Bharati Edinburgh. University. Dr Alexander Supartono Prof Martha C. Nussbaum Photography, Edinburgh Napier Philosophy Department and Law University. School, University of Chicago. Nigel Planer Playwright, Poet, Actor. 2016 | GITANJALI & BEYOND 1: vii-iix Contents Bashabi Fraser Foreword vii Christine Kupfer Introduction: Spirituality Beyond Religion xiii Articles Ashim Dutta Transnationalist Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore 1 Chi Pham Câm lặng (silence) in Receptions of Rabindranath Tagore in Colonial Vietnam 23 Murdo Macdonald Education, Visual Art and Cultural Revival: Tagore, Geddes, Nivedita, and Coomaraswamy 39 Christine Kupfer Atmosphere in Education: Tagore and the Phenomenology of Spheres 59 Tom Kane Tagore's School and Methodology: Classrooms Without Walls 83 Kitty Scoular Datta Humanist Spirituality and Poetry: Rabindranath Tagore and George Herbert 103 Blanka Knotkova Tagore in Czech Literary Translation: Interpretation and Gender Analysis 119 Chris Marsh Understanding Rabindranath Tagore’s Spirituality as Deep Ecology, Deep Anthropology and Political Theology 135 http://gitanjaliandbeyond.napier.ac.uk/ viii | CONTENTS Creative Writing Debjani Chatterjee Three Paintings 159 Anjana Basu Chitrangada 169 Hannah Lavery Five Iona Poems 177 Ronnie Goodyer The Spirit of South East England 185 LesleyMay Miller Three Gardens 191 Jaydeep Sarangi Poetry by Subodh Sarkar 197 Shawkat Hussain Punishment by Rabindranath Tagore 203 Nigel Planer Extracts from Plays by Tagore 215 Art LesleyMay Miller Speaking Trees 229 Rebeca Gómez Triana Reading Rain 233 Samit Das Journey in Time & Space: Visual Archives of Rabindranath Tagore 239 David Williams Stillness and Occurrence 247 2016 | GITANJALI & BEYOND ix | CONTENTS Book Reviews Elizaveta Ilves The Other Side of Tagore 277 Bishnupada Ray The Ontological Wall 281 Christine Marsh Commemorating and Reviving Tagore 285 2016 | GITANJALI & BEYOND 2016 | GITANJALI & BEYOND 1: vii-xi Foreword Bashabi FRASER, Editor-in-Chief hen we established the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) at Edinburgh Napier University in November 2011, the idea was to rely on Rabindranath Tagore as a representative of India’s modern consciousness and create a platform not only for educational and cultural collaboration between British and Indian institutions, scholars, researchers and artists, but with the world, to take forward the message of Rabindranath’s internationalism. ScoTs now has a website which has been developed as a hub for Tagore Studies and may be viewed at http://www.scots-tagore.org. ScoTs is a research centre welcoming scholars to work/write on Rabindranath and his circle which is global. It has established a Distinguished Lecture Series, organises seminars, conferences, film festivals, curates exhibitions, has an excellent library and has started an International Tagore Network through its website. While its various activities have expanded, making it a vibrant academic and cultural centre, it has been working on establishing its own international peer reviewed e- journal with two sections: Part I: Academic and Part II: Creative, which encapsulate Rabindranath as the thinker and his creative persona and accommodate his international circle of intellectuals and artists. The name of this very special journal was conceived by me early in 2012 and I shared the idea with many Rabindranath scholars and lovers who agreed that Gitanjali and Beyond would be most appropriate as a title for our purposes. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Bashabi Fraser. http://dx.doi.org/10.14297/gnb.1.1.vii-xi | http://gitanjaliandbeyond.napier.ac.uk/ viii | BASHABI FRASER So what signifies the choice of the title, Gitanjali and Beyond? It is true that Rabindranath’s translated prose poems in his English collection, Gitanjali, was central to the Nobel Committee’s decision in conferring the Nobel Prize for the first time on someone beyond Europe and the USA—to an Asian, after which it became one of the most translated books in the world in multiple countries and languages and has never gone out of print.1 However, it was and is still widely believed that the Nobel Prize for Literature was based on this one book of ‘Song Offerings’: namely, Gitanjali. Michael Collins2 has shown this assumption to be erroneous as the Nobel Library received other English translations of Rabindranath’s works in The Gardener (1913), Lyrics of Love and Life (1913) and Glimpses of Bengal. Moreover, the Nobel Library also received Bengali editions of Rabindranath’s works: Naivedya, Kheya and Gitanjali and had a Bengali scholar in Esais Tegner, Jr who had the facility to read the original works. So the Nobel Prize award went to books beyond the Gitanjali, and not just to English translations of Rabindranath’s writing, but also to some of his original Bengali works. William Radice3 has, in his ‘Introduction’ to his translation of Gitanjali, pointed out (as many other scholars have done) that the English Gitanjali was not a full translation of the Bengali collection of the same name; in fact, only 53 poems in the English version are from the Bengali Gitanjali. The English collection included an eclectic selection of poems made by Rabindranath himself from other collections: Naibedya (1901) and Kheya (1906). As Radice also affirms, Gitanjali is a collection of more than songs, as it has ‘song-like poems’ (Radice, xvii), a variety of sonnets and ‘ballad-like poems’ (ibid), so the collection is not just of songs or poems from the Bengali Gitanjali, but of poems and songs beyond it. Rabindranath arrived in England with his manuscript of 103 prose poems for his friend William Rothenstein who had expressed a wish to read Rabindranath’s work in English. The collection was published the same year with an ecstatic and moving ‘Introduction’ by W.B. Yeats. The volume became the iconic text associated with what the West hailed in Rabindranath as the mystic poet, the eastern Sage—an image Rabindranath did not contradict and went along with in the immediate heady days of the global attention he received in his many invitations to speak at public gatherings and meet leading intellectuals and dignitaries of 1 See Bashabi Fraser, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Global Vision’, special guest edited issue of Literature Compass, Guest Ed. ‘Introduction: Rabindranath Tagore’s Global’, Vol 12, issue 5, May 2015, DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12231. 2 Michael Collins, Empire, Nationalism

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