Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark comer of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
Blog
16 posts
This post is a message to those who have signed up for email notifications of the Gitanjali and Beyond Journal. Today represents the beginning of a large further development of the journal to bring it digitally in line with larger print publications on the internet.
We established the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) at Edinburgh Napier University in November 2011, the idea was to rely on Rabindranath Tagore as a representative of India’s modern consciousness and create a platform not only for educational and cultural collaboration between British and Indian institutions, scholars, researchers and artists, but with the world, to take forward the message of Rabindranath’s internationalism.
On 30 November 1917, Jagadish Chandra Bose – Tagore’s good friend and fellow Bengali polymath – opens his own research institute. For Bose, newly retired from his position as Professor in Physics at Presidency College Calcutta, the Bose Research Institute is a lifelong dream come true. For the occasion, Tagore composes a song that remains the institute’s official anthem to this day.
Victory to Him, whose voice thunders forth Truth. Whose right arm smites the unrighteous, Whose guidance leads mortals across death! (chanted by the devotees to Bhairava [1])… The issue of Sustainability and Secularism was scheduled to be published in the summer of 2023 as we felt it was a crucial subject in today’s world which faces the devastating impact of the climate crisis and the rise of religious intolerance across the world.
In his essay, ‘Wealth and Welfare’, Rabindranath says, Property is [the] medium for the expression of our personality…. “Our highest social training is to make our property the richest expression of the best in us, of that which is universal, of our individuality whose greatest illumination is love. As individuals are the units that build the community, so property is the unit of wealth that makes for communal prosperity when it is alive to its function. Our wisdom lies not in destroying separateness of units, but in maintaining the spirit of unity in its full strength.’ [1]. 623- 624, 1930)
When Natasha van Bentum first wrote to me about her husband, Henri van Bentum’s 100 Mandalas which have been structured as reflections on Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali poems, I was intrigued. I asked Natasha to send me samples of this project, and she was willing to send me the entire opus of Organiverse and Gitanjali.
Writing in 1962, Bengali writer, academic and raconteur Syed Mujtaba Ali recalls a particular memory while he was a student at Visva-Bharati. He had taken a newly acquired autograph book to his Gurudev Rabindranath, asking for a message. Rabindranath had written: ‘May my country realise that its fulfilment lies in truthful harmony with other countries’.
In February 2019 the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) at Edinburgh Napier University collaborated with the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and held an International Conference on ‘Samaj and Freedom(s): The relevance of Gandhi and Tagore’s Ideas Today’. We had thought provoking and insightful reflections on the subject from several established academics, educationists and social workers in the field, presenting on the subject.