International - India & World

Poland honours an old friend

Marcus Dam

Remembering Rabindranath Tagore

KOLKATA: In August 1942, Polish author and educationist Janusz Korczak and the residents of an orphanage that he ran staged a translated version of Rabindranath Tagore's play "Post Office", apparently against the wishes of the authorities in Nazi-occupied Poland. He and the residents met their end in a gas chamber within months.

Apart from a stopover at the Warsaw railway station in 1930, Tagore never did visit Poland. But his plans for a visit nine years earlier at the end of the First World War had generated excitement in local literary circles. The poet Antoni Lange wrote a Sanskrit poem of welcome. Nine years later, in the year Germany attacked Poland, the Indo-Polish Friendship Society was founded in Kolkata. Tagore became its founder- president. By then numerous translations of his works had appeared in Poland. There were occasions, a literary historian recalls, when more than one translation of his work appeared almost simultaneously.

To commemorate the golden jubilee of the establishment in 1954 of diplomatic relations between the two countries, Poland honoured the memory of Tagore by felicitating Visva-Bharati, the university founded by the poet, with a medallion and a citation. These were handed over to Vice-Chancellor Sujit Kumar Basu by the honorary consul of Poland here on Wednesday.

"We shall now be exploring ways to establish relationships with universities in Poland through educational exchanges," said Dr. Basu. "Poland was special to Tagore... ."

Says Director, Rabindra Bhavan, S. Sen: "The archives in the university contain a number of letters written by citizens of Poland to Tagore, experiencing their gratitude for showing them the meaning of freedom."

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