Among the hidden cultural assets not on permanent display display in Croydon Council’s Museum are 2 drawings by Rabindranath Tagore: Five Profiles Overlapping and A Head both in ink on paper. These were both donated to the Croydon Corporation by the artist in 1935, it being reported on even in The Calcutta Municipal Gazette.
Born in 1861-1941)
Tagore was a Bengali poet, musician, painter and thinker who was very
influential on poets like Yeats, William Butler and Robert Bridges, and on Gandhi.
The 150th Anniversary of his birth
in 2011 was commemorated in two ways:
· Prince Charles unveiled a bust commissioned by the Tagore Centre UK in Gordon
Square.
· Kings’ College London’s India Institute established
the Tagore Centre for Global Thought.
A Tagore Festival was held in the Square in May 2013.
The Heritage Lottery Fund approved
funding for the Tagore Centre UK to
start a project celebrating his life.
He visited England in 1912. One of his stories was
adapted by George Calderon
for the romantic comedy The
Maharani of Arakan performed at the Albert Hall that year and elsewhere in 1913.
In 1913 Thomas Sturge Moore (1870 – 1944),
the poet, author and artist, nominated Tagore for the Nobel Prize in
literature. Moore has trained at Croydon School of Art. Moore also helped with
the publication of various translations of Tagore’s his works.
The Maharani of Arakan was published in 1915, the year of Calderon’s
death. It contained a character sketch of Tagore, compiled by K. N. Das Gupta,
was illustrated by Clarissa Miles and contained photographs by Walter
Benington. Having recovered from his war wounds the British actor Robert
Coleman played in the 1916 performance of the play on the London stage.
Tagore returned the
knighthood he received in 1915 in protest at the Amritsar Massacre, involving
the killing of over 300 Indian civilians by a senior British military officer on
13 April 1919. Amritsar was the holiest city of the Sikhs. He tried to arrange
a protest meeting in Calcutta and then renounced his British knighthood as ‘a
symbolic act of protest’.
Tagore was back again in Britain in 1926 and
helped found Dartington Hall School. While on a European and US trip in 1930
his paintings were exhibited in London. His works were also displayed in
Croydon in 1936.
In 1940 Oxford University arranged a special
ceremony in India to honor him with a Doctorate
Of Literature. He died the next year.
A blue plaque was put
up to Tagore him at 3 Villas at Hampstead Heath in 1961.
Some of Tagore’s sayings are still relevant today.
· ‘Don’t
limit a child to your own learning, for he was borne in another time.’
· ‘The
highest education is that which not merely give us information but makes our
life in harmony with all existence.’
Hopefully the Tagore drawings will be displayed by the Museum of Croydon along with an exhibition about his life, ideas, and influence, perhaps in association with the Tagore Centre.
· Tagore
Centre UK www.tagorecentre.org.uk.
· The Maharani can be read on-line at: http://archive.org/details/maharaniofarakan00caldiala
In a letter in May 1916
D. H. Lawrence, who had previously taught at Davidson School in Croydon, scorned the writing of Tagore, was
contemptuous of Hindus and was clearly an imperialist:
‘I become more
and more surprised to see how far higher, in reality, our European
civilizations stands than the East, India or Persia ever dreamed of. And one is
glad to realize how these Hindus are horribly decadent and
reverting to all forms of barbarism in all sorts of ugly ways. We feel
surer on our feet, then. But this fraud of looking up to them - this wretched
worship-of-Tagore attitude - is disgusting. "Better fifty years of
Europe" even as she is. Buddha worship is completely decadent and
foul nowadays: and it was always only half civilized.’
Despite these views
Lawrence was a friend of Mulk Raj Anand.
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