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Indian gallery focus on Tagore’s China ties
May 16, 2013, 7:11 am

[AP]

Poet, novelist, musician, painter and playwright Rabindranath Tagore [AP]

A university in the eastern state of India has opened a gallery with a spotlight on the friendship between legendary Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and China.

The gallery, to be permanently exhibited by the Rabindra Bharati University, enlightens on Tagore’s contribution to cultural exchange between China and India.

Chinese Consul General in Kolkata Zhang Lizhong said at the inauguration ceremony that Tagore is not only a poet and philosopher well known to Chinese readers, but also a great sympathiser of the Chinese people’s struggle for a better fate in the first half of the 20th century.

He denounced both the opium trade imposed by the British on China and the aggression of China by Japanese imperialists, said Zhang.

The items displayed in the gallery are provided by Chinese and Indian institutions including the Shanghai Archives Bureau and scholars on Tagore who provided 250 Chinese books on the Indian writer.

Tagore’s ‘Talk in China” in 1924 emphasised the necessity of the two Asian neighbours to strengthen bonds across culture and together strive for the welfare of its citizens rather than look for material greed or power.

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for his collection, Geetanjali (“The Song Offerings”).

He wrote more than 1,000 poems and 2,000 songs and his work has been translated into all the major languages of the world.

With inputs from Agencies