Exhibition by Richa Jha
Abanindranath Tagore's Khirer Putul in Bangla, published in 1896, is one of the first printed children's books in India for leisure reading. Tagore, his protg Nandalal Bose, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (who founded the Bangla children's magazine Sandesh), his son Sukumar Ray and grandson Satyajit Ray were the pioneers of children's book illustrations in India.
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Time of India
2 days ago
- Time of India
Rabindranath Tagore's handwritten letters to be auctioned next week
Kolkata: A set of 35 handwritten letters of Rabindranath Tagore along with 14 envelopes will go under the hammer next week for an estimated price of '5-7 crore - the biggest auction of the works of the Bengali polymath in terms of price and scale. A heart-shaped sculpture, the only known sculptural piece attributed to Tagore, will also be sold for an estimated price of '55-70 lakh. AstaGuru Auction House will hold the online auction on June 26-27. The rarity and the historical significance of these works by the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in literature make this event special. The auction is expected to generate interest and enthusiasm among art and literature lovers, scholars and institutions. "This auction presents collectors and institutions with access to two exceptional works that provide unique insight into Rabindranath Tagore's creative evolution, across literature, visual art and even sculpture," Astaguru chief marketing officer Manoj Mansukhani told ET. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Revitalize seu corpo e recupere sua potência, virou febre entre os homens Baixa na libido Saiba Mais Undo The letters, written between 1927 and 1936, detail Tagore's engaging correspondence with the sociologist, musicologist and his confidante, Dhurjati Prasad Mukherji. Each letter bears the weight of a distinct moment, and 12 are written on different letterheads - from Visva-Bharati, his Uttarayan residence, Glen Eden in Darjeeling and aboard his houseboat, Padma - tracing Tagore's intellectual and geographic journey, AstaGuru said in a catalogue. Live Events "Tagore's letters to Mukherji have pivotal historic value and are important documents for understanding his literary mastery as well as his reflection on his own music," Abhra Ghosh, a prominent Tagore researcher, told ET. Though deeply personal in tone, several of these letters are preserved through a string of publications in journals such as Parichay and books like Chhanda, Sahityer Pathe, Sur O Sangati and Sangit Chinta. "These letters should be in the possession of Rabindra Bhavana of Santiniketan which preserves Tagore's manuscripts, correspondences, paintings and sketches, other than his personal belongings. I would urge the auction house or the collector of these important documents to think to this end," Ghosh said. In some of these letters, one would find Tagore's criticism of Bengal's rigidity as he argues that real creativity comes from adaptation. Just as Bengali literature flourished by moving beyond Sanskrit, he expressed hope that Bengali music too could grow independently but he stressed on the need for disciplined creation rooted in deep inner realisation, drawing on the classical rigor of dhrupad or Hindustani music.
Scroll.in
15-06-2025
- Scroll.in
Sunday book pick: Ghost stories by Satyajit Ray in ‘Ghosts, Supernatural and Tales of the Uncanny'
In one 'ghost' story by Satyajit Ray, a well-to-do writer – an intellectual – is stranded by a farm on a deserted road. The scarecrow guarding the crops makes for an eerie company. The longer the writer looks at the scarecrow, the more human it appears to be. Especially the clothes that it has been made to wear. The shirt, torn and discoloured, looks familiar too. When the writer eventually dozes off, he dreams of the servant he had fired on charges of thievery. He used to wear a similar shirt. The servant had denied stealing his master's watch but the writer was not interested in hearing him out. In the dream, the servant tells him where he suspects the watch has disappeared to. The writer wakes up and eventually makes his way home. On searching the spot that the servant had spoken of in his dream, he finds his watch safe and secure, ticking away. A haunted past Satyajit Ray's ghost stories – written with the young reader in mind – have been recently published as Ghosts, Supernatural, and Tales of the Uncanny by Puffin. The fifteen stories in the collection (translated primarily by Gopa Majumdar, with two by Indrani Majumdar and another two by the author) are neither gory nor horrifying, but delightfully spooky. Well-suited for children (and readers of all ages, really), the stories speak to how class conflicts, colonial hangover, animal cruelty, bad childhood memories, and guilt create horror later in our lives. There are no possessed children in these stories – the young are blemish-free, but as years pile on, callousness and cruelty become second nature, turning each of us into perpetrators of horror. First published in the Bengali children's magazine Sandesh, each of the stories is accompanied by Ray's beautiful illustrations. I must have spent a minute or two admiring the ingenuity of his calligraphy and sketches. Two stories in the collection, 'Anath Babu's Terror' and 'Mr Brown's Cottage', were adapted for the screen by Sandip Ray for his 2012 movie, Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy. In 'Anath Babu's Terror', a ghost hunter goes to a haunted house in search of an elusive ghost. The ghost does appear but will Anath Babu live to tell the tale? 'Mr Brown's Cottage' is another haunted house story set in the erstwhile remote Fraser Town in Bangalore. After learning about a certain Simon from Mr Brown's cheaply purchased diary, the protagonist sets off for the cottage, wondering who this Simon might be. In both stories, the men are propelled by curiosity as they try to uncover mysteries that have lain buried for many years. My introduction to 'Mr Brown's Cottage' was as a radio play, and I remember being adequately thrilled when the big revelation came. The story about the scarecrow and the writer was adapted as 'Kagtarua' by Sandip Ray in 2014 for the movie Chaar. Play Satyajit Ray was a young man when India gained independence. He had witnessed some of the worst atrocities of colonialism and later, he also saw how difficult it was to rouse from the colonial hangover. This makes for an interesting subject in ghost stories. In 'Indigo', Ray imagines what the coloniser's guilt might look like, whereas in 'The First-Class Compartment', an Indian man who derides everything Indian is reminded of his place when the ghost of a white sahib calls him a 'nigger' and threatens to throw him off the coupé he is travelling in. The ghosts of history do not die so easily. Phantoms of the mind Dolls have proven themselves as useful mediums for ghosts. In 'Bhuto' and 'Fritz', the dolls of a child and a ventriloquist are not inanimate objects, but those capable of feeling human emotions. The dolls are subjected to neglect and indifference, and in 'Bhuto', the doll is also a medium of the protagonist's arrogance. In the end, the dolls come alive to teach a lesson that the humans were long overdue. The most remarkable stories in the collection – 'Ratan Babu and That Man' and 'Khagam' – also happen to be translated by Ray. The two stories are as different from each other as they can be. In 'Ratan Babu and That Man', a man is surprised to find another person who is so similar to him in temperament and mannerisms. But soon, it starts to bug him. In 'Khagam', the senseless killing of a snake costs a man dearly. In fact, Ray seems to suggest that animal cruelty is one of the most horrific crimes that a human being is capable of, making it one of the recurring themes in his stories. Another affecting story on animal cruelty is 'A Strange Night for Mr Shasmal'. Other animals turn up at Mr Shasmal's home to make him pay for killing a dog. No ghost story collection is complete without a delectable vampire story. 'The Vicious Vampire' is a story about just that – a vicious vampire. However, the initial tone of the story is somewhat comical. A man, deathly terrified of bats, finds the animal hanging upside down in the house where he is vacationing. But this isn't the end of his troubles, for he will soon cross paths with the local vampire. Ray's ghost stories take the readers to every corner of the country. His protagonists – all men! – encounter these vicious, scary, (and sometimes) anxious ghosts in small towns and villages. From remote sites in Rajasthan to Karnataka and Bihar to West Bengal, the ghosts appear in front of only those who seek them. Deliciously unnerving and pleasurably unsettling, Ray's ghosts are phantoms of the mind – and not so much of material.
Indian Express
13-06-2025
- Indian Express
Tagore and Yeats: How a Nobel-winning friendship fell apart
At the turn of the 20th century, few non-European writers captured the Western literary imagination as powerfully as Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore. For many, especially in Britain, he was a symbol of tranquility in the face of industrial exhaustion. Central to this mythmaking was William Butler Yeats – the towering 20th-century Irish poet and co-founder of Dublin's Abbey Theatre – who became Tagore's most celebrated Western champion. Yeats's role in introducing Gitanjali to the Anglophone world is by now a well-trodden narrative. His preface to the 1912 English edition of the collection of spiritual verses that Tagore had self-translated from Bengali was instrumental not only in launching the poet into the global literary spotlight, but also in helping promote it for the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. Though Tagore translated the verses himself from Bengali to English, it was Yeats's endorsement that positioned him as a 'seer' in the eyes of the Western literary world. In 1913, Tagore, became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation praised his 'profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.' Tagore met Yeats in June 1912 at the house of English painter and cultural intermediary William Rothenstein. Yeats, presented with the English manuscript of Gitanjali, was immediately moved: 'I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days,' he wrote in the introduction, 'reading it in railway trains, or on the tops of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.' As literary scholar Dr Ragini Mohite writes in her 2025 article, 'Yeats, Tagore, and the Nobel Prize in Literature: Imprimaturs in Modernist Cultural Conversations' (International Yeats Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2025), this introduction helped construct the image of Tagore as a saint-like figure, one who seemed to channel 'the Indian civilization itself.' For Yeats, Gitanjali was akin to scripture. He likened Tagore to the English poet William Blake, and imagined India not as an exotic Other, but as a mirror. As Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg professor Dr Carl O'Brien observes in his article 'Rabindranath Tagore's India and WB Yeats's Ireland' (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 2019), Yeats imagined Indian culture 'not because of its strangeness, but because it was like meeting our own image… our voice as in a dream.' Yeats's framing proved decisive. Mohite contends that the Nobel committee's internal report relied 'entirely on Yeats's introduction,' even admitting that 'no biographical information was included with the proposal.' In Yeats's words, Tagore was 'the first among our saints,' someone who rose above worldly strife. By the time Tagore won the Nobel in November 1913, accusations circulated that he had not written the translations alone. Some, like British journalist Valentine Chirol, cast aspersions on his English proficiency; others suggested Yeats was the true author. As Mohite observes, Tagore's own disappointment with such insinuations was clear: 'It is not possible for [Chirol] to relish the idea of Mohammedans sharing this honour with Hindus.' While Yeats undoubtedly assisted in shaping the English Gitanjali—making editorial suggestions and contributing to its arrangement— he did so alongside others, sometimes with mixed feelings about his lack of sole control over the proofs. Nonetheless, Tagore remained the work's author and translator, and the Nobel Prize, as Mohite suggests, became a lightning rod for praise and critique alike. The Gitanjali for which Tagore was honoured was not his 1910 Bengali collection, but a curated English compilation — only 53 of the 103 poems were from the original; the rest were taken from other works such as Kheya and Achalayatan, stripped of rhyme and metre, and arranged for a mystical tone. In 1913, Yeats helped stage Tagore's play The Post Office at the Abbey Theatre. He also introduced Tagore to American poet Ezra Pound and secured publication through the India Society and Macmillan. This elevation of Tagore as a mystic suited the moment but troubled critics. Pound warned early: 'If his entourage has presented him as a religious teacher rather than as an artist, it is much to be lamented.' Tagore himself grew wary of this spiritual branding. In his delayed Nobel lecture (1921), he focused on his newly founded Visva-Bharati University, saying: 'I have used the money for establishing… a university where Western students might come and meet their Eastern brethren.' He had begun converting symbolic recognition into real capital for India's educational sovereignty. Yeats would win his Nobel a decade later, in 1923, as the national poet of the newly independent Irish Free State. His Nobel lecture, 'The Irish Dramatic Movement', celebrated the role of literature in shaping Ireland's national consciousness. As he wrote to Edmund Gosse, 'Of course I know quite well that this honour is not given to me as an individual but as a representative of a literary movement and of a nation.' Tagore, by contrast, was increasingly critical of nationalism. In his lectures (Nationalism, 1917), he argued that political chauvinism — whether Western or Eastern — ultimately imitated the violence of the Empire. His novel Gora (1909) goes further, challenging notions of religious and racial purity through a protagonist who discovers he is ethnically Irish but raised as a Brahmin Hindu. Yeats's nationalism, while not imperialist, was mythic. Rooted in Celtic revivalism, his plays and poetry built a romantic Irish self-image. While Tagore sought to dismantle cultural boundaries, Yeats idealised Ireland's past to inspire its future. Both poets looked to tradition, but Tagore's was dialogic and international; Yeats's, symbolic and insular. Their relationship soon grew strained. By 1935, Yeats wrote bitterly, 'Damn Tagore … Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. We got out three good books … then he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation' (Yeats, Letters, p. 834). This position contrasts starkly with his tribute just four years earlier in The Golden Book of Tagore (1931), where Yeats wrote, 'I am still your most loyal student and admirer.' This disillusionment, scholars say, stemmed not just from aesthetic disagreement, but from ideological divergence. Tagore, unlike Yeats, rejected nationalism as the foundation of identity. As O'Brien contends, Tagore denounced the violent mimicry of European imperialism in his lectures, notably in 'Nationalism' (1917) and 'The Spirit of Japan' (1916). 'By this device the people who love freedom perpetuate slavery in a large portion of the world,' he wrote, decrying both European hypocrisy and Asian complicity in adopting imperialist values. The literary crossing between Yeats and Tagore was a moment of rare poetic diplomacy. But it was also a cautionary tale. Recognition, especially in colonial settings, often demands translation, linguistic and cultural. In becoming the 'Indian saint', Tagore's political agency and artistic precision were partially erased. Yet, as Tagore reminded us, 'We cannot borrow other people's history. If we stifle our own, we are committing suicide.' Over a century later, their relationship remains a study in mutual admiration, ideological divergence, and the politics of literary framing. Yeats and Tagore remain twinned in Nobel memory, not as perfect collaborators, but as witnesses to a moment when East and West briefly, and uneasily, shared a page. Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics. She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks. She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year. She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home. Write to her at or You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More
