Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Tagore Festival 2006

Tagore Festival is an annual program held in the Tagore Center, Channing-Murray Foundation, Urbana. Actually, the nobel-laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore stayed here for quite some time in 1912 to visit his son Rathindranath, who was a student at University of Illinois.

Every year, Tagore Festival is held to commemorate the poet.

In 2006, the two main guests were the poet/novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay and the Dramatist/novelist Momtazuddin Ahmed.


Sunil was born in Faridpur, Bangladesh, but migrated to India following the 1947 partition. Ironically, Momtazuddin was born in Maldaha,West Bengal, but migrated to Bangladesh (then East Bengal) following the 1947 partition.

Jaria and I enjoyed the program a lot ... it included a cultural program with a lot of Tagore/Baul songs, and speeches by the two main guests. Momtazuddin Ahmed knew Jaria and her family since she was a baby, so he was quite pleased to see her again.

There was also a great Bengali-style feast after the cultural events.

1 comment:

Dheeman said...

Sunil Gangopadhyay and Momtazuddin Ahmed! Great! As I was reading your lines about Sunil, I was thinking; he wrote in his biography that he wanted to come back to Bangladesh after the war of liberation. But his "Bangladeshi friends" didn't show any interest to his proposal. Well it may be better off for him living in West Bengal, he got the chance to write his solid stuffs with the help of an already established Book industry. In his very last para, his painful emotion about the whole situation came out magnificently.