Rabindranath Tagore is one of India’s most celebrated personalities. During his eventful life of eight decades he won international acclaim as a playwright, poet, song writer, novelist, educator, philosopher and humanist.

He wrote his first drama opera – Valmiki Pratibha – when he was barely twenty. He wrote over 2000 songs and established a genre of Bengali music. He translated some of his own poems from Bengali to English and became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in 1913. He is probably the only poet to have composed the national anthems of two countries: Amar Shonar Bangla for Bangladesh and Jana Gana Mana for India. And yet Tagore considered nationalism and nation-states as a ‘great menace’. He founded the Santiniketan School in 1901 and established the Visva-Bharati University in 1922. His Sriniketan scheme encompassed rural reconstruction, experimented with combining science and tradition and had as its basic premise, self-reliance. He travelled widely across Europe, America and Asia and dreamt of a globe without borders. At the age of sixty he turned his attention to painting and managed to produce a remarkable oeuvre during the twilight years of his life.

On 7 May, 2011 the Indian High Commission in Nairobi, in association with the Kenya Bengali Cultural & Welfare Society, presented ‘Jiboner Jatri’ – Rabindranath Tagore’s journey through life. It was a multilingual and multimedia presentation conceived, scripted and directed by Jayantee Shome, a student of Tagore’s school at Santiniketan; and produced by the Bengali Cultural & Welfare Society.

Actors, musicians, dancers, narrators and videographers combined to put on a show of a calibre and finesse rarely seen in Nairobi. The story was narrated in English and took us through Tagore’s childhood to his last journey highlighting his school at Santiniketan; his poems in Gitanjali; his songs and paintings; his travels and his thoughts on social and global concerns.

To the reader this may sound somewhat dense and academic but with the very innovative use of song, dance and music interwoven with images thrown on a large screen which formed the backdrop; an exhilarating pace and variety was achieved. There was not a moment of boredom, and no significant flaw in the production.


It was a show of world class standards and therefore all the more lamentable that so few of Nairobi’s performers, artists and theatre-lovers got to see it. The audience in the Apa Pant Hall was almost entirely Bengali with a smattering of non-Bengali South Asian invitees. Not only was it inspiring, it was a great learning experience as Tagore has much to teach us in the 21st century. And though the songs were all in Bengali, at no time did the audience feel a language barrier – the spirit of Tagore always came through.

H E The High Commissioner of India Sibabrata Tripathi made a closing speech in which he emphasised the central role that culture plays in human development. There was much appreciation for his initiative in ‘bringing’ Tagore to Kenya.

AwaaZ is privileged to have had the opportunity to view the performance   and urges the Indian High Commission and the Bengali Cultural & Welfare Society to consider making the show available to a wider Kenyan audience. After all we are not even half-way through Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th year!