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(From top) Sugato Bose, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Amit Chaudhuri and Tahmima Anam. (Anindya Shankar Ray)
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Who else but Rabindranath Tagore dominated the inaugural session of the first Calcutta Literary Meet, being held at the Book Fair in association with The Telegraph.
Discussing the poet was an eminent panel from epar and opar Bangla — poet-novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay, Bangladeshi editor-activist Mahfuz Anam, his daughter and writer Tahmima Anam, Harvard professor Sugato Bose and writer Amit Chaudhuri. The theme: Tagore @150 — Bengal, Bangladesh and Beyond.
Gangopadhyay spoke about the “Tagore syndrome” that once pervaded Bengali literature. “If you could not write like Tagore, it was not considered literature,” he said. In the 1930s, young, rebel poets like Buddhadeva Bose, Achintya Sengupta and Premendra Mitra bucked this trend. Through the 1950s, Tagore was criticised on and off. “There is no longer any need for this Tagore baiting.”
On the other side of the border, Mahfuz Anam and many others had recited, sung and “lived Tagore” during the Bangladeshi liberation movement. “As a student, a political worker and a Muktijoddha, I have been inspired by him. When Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan banned Tagore, we rose united as a nation against the outrageous act. Tagore’s O amar desher mati and Sonar Bangla were our anthem. We did not celebrate Tagore as a poet, we lived him on a daily basis,” said Anam, the editor of Daily Star, an English newspaper in Bangladesh.
Both the songs were also personal favourites of Netaji, said his grand nephew Sugato, who spoke on Tagore’s travels in Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Latin America, West Asia and Europe.
Tahmima made a critical comparison of Tagore’s Nashtaneer and Ray’s Charulata saying: “While Charulata has a sweet romantic ending, Tagore is much more forbidding in Nashtaneer, which ends on a bitter note and as a woman writer this appeals to me.”
Amit Chaudhuri talked of two Tagores. “One who is present in the constellation of nationalist icons and the other who loved the superfluous, took delight in the sensation of the lived life as manifest in his poems in Balaka and Purabi.”
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