India to hold festival in Egypt to mark Tagore’s birth anniversary

Cairo

The Embassy of India in Cairo and Maulana Azad Centre for Indian Culture will host the Tagore Festival from May 8-12, India’s Ambassador to Egypt Sanjay Bhattacharyya said. “In our efforts to build friendly relations between India and Egypt, we find that there is a strong bond particularly in the field of culture and there is a strong affection between the people of the two countries,” Bhattacharyya said.

“The works of Tagore are very popular here in Egypt. And I understand there are about a dozen translations of the Gitanjali itself. And of course there are many other books that have been translated into Arabic,” he said.

Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for Gi tanjali , is not unknown to Egypt; he visited Egypt as an adolescent in 1878 and later as a famous poet philosopher in 1926, when he met King Fouad and interacted with scholars in Alexandria and Cairo.

His friendship with Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqy is well known and he wrote a moving eulogy on his friend’s death in 1932. Tagore wrote about the beautiful relationship between the Nile river and the flourishing civilisation of Egyptians.  “Tagore and Egyptian writers and intellectuals have had a long association and we are having a painting exhibition in cooperation with the Egyptian Caricature Society to create new ways of analysing Tagore’s work. It’s certainly a way in which we can strengthen our culture connections,” Bhattacharyya said.

The festival will feature Tagore’s dance drama ‘ Shapmo chan ’ (Breaking the Spell) on May 9 by well-known Classical dancer Dona Ganguly, who hails from Kolkata (then Calcutta), the hometown of the great poet.

The movie ‘Ghare Baire’, based on one of Tagore’s novel, by legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray will be screened on May 10. Popular Rabindra Sangeet singer Shreya Guhathakurta will present songs written and composed by Tagore on May 11.

The festival will conclude on May 12 with a seminar on Contemporary Literature ‘Tagore, Shawky & Mahfouz’, which will feature Indian and Egyptians scholars and writers and will be conducted by the Supreme Council of Culture.

The Indian embassy has held several programmes on Tagore as part of a build up to the festival, which will be organised in cooperation with Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Supreme Council of Culture, Cairo Opera House, National Library and Museum of Modern Art.