Thursday

12May 2016

16:00 hrs

Library

Film & Talk

Glimpses of India
THE STORY OF GITANJALI
A Rabindra Jayanti Special

India 2008, 30min
Director: Malaya Bhattacharya
Language: English

Preceded by a talk by an expert

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore was born in May 1861 at the time when India was in a political, social and cultural ferment. He began his career as Bengali poet very early and at the age of 14 had read out a composition in a cultural meeting. Life'’ experiences came to leave a deep impact on Tagore’s poetic mind. Tragically in a very short span, death visited him with merciless regularity: he lost his wife, sister-in-law, his two children and his father. Troubled and deeply disturbed, he got solace through poetry and perhaps answers through spiritualism. These poems proved cathartic for the bereaved poet. Sudden illness in 1912 compelled Tagore to divert himself from serious writing and he randomly chose poems from his various authologies of poetry to translate them into English for his collection Gitanjali or Song Offerings. This was an activity which he himself confessed would be only a schoolboy exercise. The documentary film seeks to highlight the fascinating story of how Gitanjali went on to win the noble prize in literature in 1913. The impact of Gitanjali in the West was deep – it was translated into all major European languages and offered spiritual strength to a wide range of people, from poet Wilfred Owen who went to his death fighting as a soldier in the First World War with a poem from Gitanjali in his pocket, to French Prime Minister Clemenceau, who turned to reading Gitanjali when war was declared.
Malaya Bhattacharya has been working as a producer and director of documentaries and feature films hand has won two Indian awards for Best First Film and Best Director.

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