Chandigarh, May 8
In a rapturous creative span of over 60 years, poet Laureate Rabindranath Tagore gave to the world 2,500-odd songs, over 2,000 paintings and drawings, 28 volumes of poetry, dramas, operas, short stories, novels, essays, and diaries, and an equivalent number of letters. Researchers have not yet been able to exhaust the source of Rabindanath Tagore’s creative genius.

On his 150th birth anniversary, the polymath is celebrated for various facets of his personality, not here in India alone, and not just for his writings. In London, the British Film Institute is hosting a season of films inspired by his works. A two-day conference at The University of London will examine his legacy in Netherlands, Poland and Germany, among other things.

Closer to home, if Bangladesh shares the poet who penned its anthem with India, Ananda Samarakoon, the composer of the Sri Lankan anthem and a former student of Visva Bharti University, was so moved by Rabindra Sangeet that he created Geeta Sahitya music, a new style of Singhalese music in Lanka.

He wrote to Gurudeva, saying, he hoped his music ‘pleased’ him. Like Tagore, Samarakoon, too, had taken to painting in his later years and had changed his religion from Christianity to Buddhism after his return from Shantiniketan.

Samarakoon’s letters are in possession of the Tagore archives of Visva Bharati University and will be part of an international exhibition — Rabindranath Tagore: Pilgrimages to the East — to be inaugurated on May 9 at ICCR, Kolkata.

The show will later travel to Thailand and other Asian countries. The exhibition will also explore Tagore’s wanderlust, which took him to countries of the Far East and the West. India will also share a yearlong cultural calendar with Bangladesh on Tagore.

As Tagore progressed in his self-reflexive evolution, he moved from penning words to drawing lines. When he was around 70, he wrote to Rani Mahalanobis in 1928: “I am hopelessly entangled in the spell that the lines have cast all around me… I have almost managed to forget that there used to be a time when I wrote poetry.”

His paintings were displayed publicly for the first time in Paris in 1930 followed by an exhibition in Calcutta in 1931. Tagore’s early paintings were rendered in monochromatic schemes followed by two-tone and three-tone drawings.

Later, he began to make portraits and around 1931 became interested in self-portraits. His self-portraits carry a prophet-like serenity and an inner anguish, so visible in his study of heads and figures, which elicit maximum interest for the variety of styles— restrained and restless, bizarre and haunting. The pensive ovoid face with large soulful eyes that he painted obsessively over the years, continue to engage art lovers.

Tagore had once written an article entitled ‘My Pictures’ in which he wrote: “The universe... talks in the voice of pictures and dance... In a picture the artist creates the language of undoubted reality, and we are satisfied that we see. It may not be the representation of a beautiful woman but that of a commonplace donkey or of something that has no external credential of truth in nature but only in its own inner artistic significance.”

Tagore’s art, along with that of Abanindranath and Gaganendranath — the other two Tagores who influenced modern Indian visual culture— will be will on display at NGMA, New Delhi, from tomorrow.