Category: background info

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“Accept each other’s right to be human with dignity” – Mahasweta Devi on what it takes for cultures to survive

I see one India in the pattern. You see another. Light and shadow play. History and modernity collide. Superstition and myth, Rabindrasangeet and rap, Sufi and Shia and Sunni, caste and computers, text and sub-plot, laughter and tears, governments and oppositions, reservations and quotas, struggles and captivity, success and achievement, hamburgers and Hari Om Hari, Sanskrit and sms, the smell of rain and the sound of the sea. A seamless stitching. Many, many hands have stitched, are stitching and will continue to stitch India. […]

I cling to the belief that for any culture as old and ancient as ours to have survived over time and in time, there could only be one basic common and acceptable core thought: humaneness. To accept each other’s right to be human with dignity. This then is my fight. My dream. In my life and in my literature. – Mahasweta Devi during her inaugural speech for the Frankfurt Book Fair titled “The Republic of Dreams”

Source: Tehelka, 21 October 2006 | Learn more: https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=7298
Mahasweta Devi 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair – TehelkaDownload

What Are Human Rights?
“Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.”
Learn more : Human rights | United Nations >>

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Tagore’s devotion to the ideal of a world without cruel, irrational discrimination – Unesco

Rabindranath Tagore sketched by Martin Monickendam (Amsterdam lecture, 23 September 1920)

Rabindranath Tagore: a universal voice

Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, educator, novelist, poet and painter, is without challenge one of the greatest and most noble figures of modern times. Not only was he awarded the rare honour of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he also won the distinction far more rare, less spectacular but much more significant, of having his works translated into different languages by writers of equal glory, Nobel Prize winners in their own right, such as André Gide in French and Juan Ramon Jimenez in Spanish.

India today does not celebrate merely the thinker and writer. Above all, India reveres Tagore’s generous, universal soul, open to the problems not only of his own land but of the world, the son of the Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, who had been one of the guiding spirits of the Brahma-Samaj. For one of his greatest works, the monumental novel Gora, Rabindranath was to choose as theme the trials and problems of this movement. It is not merely by chance that Unesco, among its many undertakings towards the celebration of Tagore’s Centenary, has decided to publish the first French translation of this very novel. For in this book the poet stresses with great fervour and by moving scenes depicted with all his skill as a writer, his zealous devotion to the ideal of a casteless world, a world without cruel, irrational discrimination between one human being and his fellow men. […]

Writing days after Tagore’s death in August 1941, Jawaharlal Nehru said : “Both Gurudev and Gandhlji took much from the West and from other countries, especially Gurudev. Neither was narrowly national. Their message was for the world.” Tagore was in truth a living link between East and West. And so he willed it. His entire life he fought against narrow distrust of foreign cultures. He had faith in the fruitfulness of cultural intercourse and friendship. With this message he was and remains a Guru to Unesco, and it is both fitting and imperative that Unesco’s homage to Tagore should join that of the rest of mankind.

Vittorino Veronese

Message from the Director-General of Unesco, to the Tagore Centenary celebrations in Bombay in January [1961] >>

Read this issue. Download the PDF >>

Date accessed: 3 September 2021

Listen to Tagore: Unlocking Cages: Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the Bengali writer and thinker Rabindranath Tagore: https://bbc.in/1KVh4Cf >>
The acclaimed BBC 4 podcast series titled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives has also been published in book form (Allen Lane).

“I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present,” he writes, “and remind us of future possibilities that are in danger of being closed off.”1

  1. Sunil Khilnani quoted in a review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian, 14 March 2016[↩]
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Was die südindische Musik immer interessanter macht

Ramachandra Shastry mit Ludwig Pesch in Kalakshetra (1978) © Rainer Hörig
Suedindische_Musik_Ludwig-Pesch_Meine-Welt_4-2018Download

Wie kaum einem anderen deutsch-stämmigen Musiker ist es Ludwig Pesch gelungen, tief in das Wesen der südindischen „klassischen“ Musik einzutauchen. Der Autor lebt heute in Amsterdam und ist als freischaffender Musiker, Sachbuchautor und Dozent tätig. Seine Erfahrung befähigt ihn, die karnatische Musiktradition auch einem Laienpublikum verständlich nahe zu bringen.

Seit 1984 bildet die Zeitschrift MEINE WELT ein Forum des Austausches zwischen Migranten aus Indien und ihren deutschen Freunden. Sie erscheint dreimal im Jahr in einer Auflage von knapp 1000 Exemplaren – das größte Printmedium mit Indien-Bezug in der deutschsprachigen Presselandschaft!

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“There is an irresistible force shaping the course of the world fighting and conquering mechanism”: Rabindranath Tagore

It is significant that the poet believes that in the heart of mechanism there is installed a power that can emancipate us from mechanism. He has compared mechanism to a tired mountain. There is a trepidation within, a slowly moving process of disintegration, as a result of which the gigantic mountain will gradually crumble down and slip into the valley. This is how Personality will re-assert itself. Mechanism, therefore, is a temporary eclipse of Personality and will disappear before the incoming tide of Personality.

The parallelism here between the poet’s thought and that of Bergson is remarkable. Bergson believes that it is when the Life-force suffers a check that mechanism makes its appearance. Mechanism, however, disappears again with the restoration of the Life-force. It, therefore, represents only a temporary slowing down or retardation of the Vital Urge. […]

It is in this faith in the ultimate triumph of Personality that the mysticism of Rabindranath lies. The central idea of this mysticism which runs through the plays, Post Office, King of the Dark Chamber, Cycle of Spring, Waterfall and Red Oleanders is that there is an irresistible force shaping the course of the world fighting and conquering mechanism. To the rule of law, which apparently seems to be the last word of Science, there is opposed a force which, though invisible, is gigantic. This force is the force of Personality. Science tries to crush it, but it refuses to be crushed.

RABINDRANATH AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALITY by SISIR KUMAR MAITRA in The Golden book of Tagore: a homage to Rabindranath Tagore from India and the world in celebration of his seventieth birthday, p. 145

~~~

The truth Tagore so clearly expresses to-day is one that some Westerners have proclaimed but which transcends all distinctions between East and West because it is a truth about man as man. Let me now select but one aspect of it for emphatic mention. Tagore speaks of an “inner faculty” of our own, which helps us to find our relationship with the supreme self of man; elsewhere he calls this”an inner source of divine wisdom,” or an “inborn criterion of the real.” This is, of course, closely related to the keen sensitiveness which he tells us characterized his mind from infancy. He is occasionally made intensely conscious of an all-pervading personality “answering to the personality of man.” The experience of this inborn criterion is not unlike the “intimate feeling a father has for his son,” in which he “touches an ultimate truth,” the truth of their relationship.

THE INBORN CRITERION by HAROLD E. B. SPEIGHT in The Golden book of Tagore: a homage to Rabindranath Tagore from India and the world in celebration of his seventieth birthday, p. 246

The Golden book of Tagore: A homage to Rabindranath Tagore from India and the world in celebration of his seventieth birthday | View or download the full version (PDF, 31 MB) | Alternative searchable edition >>

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Santiniketan: Birth of Another Cultural Space – Free e-book by Pulak Dutta

“Of all living creatures in the world, man has his vital and mental energy vastly in excess of his need, which urges him to work in various lines of creation for its own sake […] Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space.” – Rabindranath Tagore in The Religion of an Artist 1

KG Subramanyam with Pulak Dutta – Santiniketan 2009

Source: Pulak Dutta. Santiniketan: Birth of Another Cultural Space. Santiniketan 2015. Contact: pulaksantiniketan@gmail.com | Download his free e-book here | Backup copy (PDF, 5 MB) >>

More on and by Rabindranath Tagore >>

Listen to Tagore: Unlocking Cages: Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the Bengali writer and thinker Rabindranath Tagore: https://bbc.in/1KVh4Cf >>
The acclaimed BBC 4 podcast series titled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives has also been published in book form (Allen Lane).

“I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present,” he writes, “and remind us of future possibilities that are in danger of being closed off.”2

  1. Quoted by Pulak Dutta (p. 97) from Sisir Kumar Das (ed.). The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol 3. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi 2006 (pp. 687-8) [↩]
  2. Sunil Khilnani quoted in a review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian, 14 March 2016[↩]