St. Stephen’s Green is a beautiful urban park in central Dublin immortalized in James Joyce’s Ulysses. There I stood at the gates of this park on August 1 , 2017 , raring to catch up with someone whom I had known actually since the very moment I was born. So you can actually guess, it was not our first meeting. And this was to be my bucket list item in the whole Ireland trip which had left me utterly enthralled. After all, Ireland is a journey into the imagination, windswept History in Stone ,ancient rocks and great legends all rolled into one. And I had just come back from a trip to Galway , Ireland’s cultural capital (remember Ed Sheeran’s song Galway girl .. no wonder why he was crooning). As I made my way into the park, hoping to find my friend somewhere inside, I was simply taken aback by its size. I mean, this is a nine hectare / 22 acre park, in Dublin City Centre, maintained in the original Victorian layout with extensive perimeter tree and shrub planting and spring and summer Victorian bedding. At the entrance was a memorial to all those who died in the Potato Famine. Spread across the green’s lawns and walkways are some notable artwork. As I walked to the southside of the park, I noticed a fine old bandstand. Near the bandstand is a bust of James Joyce. As I watched the assorted groups of friends, lovers and individuals splaying themselves across the nine elegantly landscaped hectares of Dublin’s most popular green lung, I was yet to find my friend. Where was he, I wondered ? And then suddenly he appeared in sight , sheltered among the foliage of St Stephen’s Green. There stood the monument to a man often referred to as “the Bard of Bengal” , just a few paces from the James Joyce memorial. A monument that could easily be missed, commemorates someone with no connection to the park, born on another continent entirely, yet still bound to the Irish story. A bust which stands as a reminder of the historic ties between the people of Ireland and India. Presented by the government of India, it is a fine tribute to a man who had a significant impact on the thinking of William Butler Yeats, and who achieved fame as the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore was also a fierce opponent of imperialism and advocated widespread educational reform, two issues that were very important in the story of his influence in Ireland.
Tagore’s play, The Post Office (Daakghar), was performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1913, as a fundraiser for St Enda’s School in Rathfarnham, which had been set up by Patrick Pearse. Both Pearse and Tagore held radical views on how children should be educated and Tagore long held that teaching shouldn’t just explain things but inspire children to curiosity. He strongly opposed rote learning.
Pearse and Tagore never met, but in July 1912, in England, Tagore did meet up with Yeats. The Irish poet was much impressed by Tagore’s poems and wrote the introduction to a collection of Tagore’s poems (Gitanjali) translated into English and published that same year, 1912. This book of poems was so widely acclaimed that it was reprinted 12 times in its first year of publication. Readers, stimulated by Yeats’s approval for Tagore’s work, found the perfect source of Eastern spiritual guidance in Tagore. For the introduction of Tagore’s English-translated work Gitanjali (Song Offerings, 1912), Yeats wrote, “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants.”
The Irish poet wrote that he had become so overwhelmed by his contemporary’s work that he’d had to put away the manuscript, “lest some stranger see how much it moved” him.Yeats’s fascination with Tagore’s poetic works was intense and his interest in Tagore’s work fostered close cultural and political connections between Ireland and India. Rural Ireland was compared to Bengal and the work of the Gaelic bards of old was compared with Tagore’s writings. Yeats often spoke of a shared cultural memory that brought distant civilisations together and the literary links between Ireland, Bengal and India inspired by the friendship between Tagore and Yeats, extended into politics.
Many Irish political figures supported India’s quest for independence, finally gained in 1947. In many ways, the friendship between Tagore and Yeats stimulated the close links between India and Ireland that exist right up to the present day, since presently we have an Irish-Indian Taoiseach (Prime minister of the Republic of Ireland), Leo Varadkar.
Enough of time travel and history. Back to 2017. Another bucket list item had been ticked off.There he stood, bearded, with deep-set eyes and a cropped hairstyle typical of the time. Though armless, he wears loose robes atop an engraved stone plinth that bears the dates of his birth and death. And so we met again, this time in Central Dublin.But this meeting was no happenstance. Let me take you back to our first meeting. In fact the events that eventually led to this meeting in Ireland were actually set into motion long back when a young girl (my mother) first read the Tagore Novel Rajarshi. So influenced was she by the exploits of the saint king Gobindamanikya and his renunciation of violence and bloodshed as immortalized by the bard’s writing, that years later when it came to choosing a name for her new-born, she had already made up her mind … Rajarshi if it is a boy and Yagnasheni if it is a girl. On 9th May, 1988 as I made my way into this world precisely at 12:18 PM , the die was already cast.
Rajarshi and Rabindranath had met for the very first time 
~ Dedicated to the original global citizen (বিশ্ব-পথিক) on his 157th birth anniversary whose philosophy of life (জীবন দর্শন) remains as relevant even to this day , বাঙালির মনন যাকে ঘিরে আবর্তিত হয় , সেই বাঙালির শ্রেষ্ঠ ICON …
গুরুদেব রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
#RabindranathTagore #BardOfBengal #PoetLaureate #PochisheBoishakh #KobiPronam #TheRenaissanceMan
Calcutta Chromosome 