The Nobel Foundation is preparing to celebrate with full splendour the passing of 100 years of Rabindranath Tagore’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Foundation has invited the Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid to attend its awards ceremony at Stockholm on Dec 10 in an unprecedented tribute to Tagore, reports the Telegraph.
The Foundation in its 113 years of administrating the prestigious prize has never invited individual governments or their ministers to the award ceremony the way it extended the invitation to India, the Kolkata-besed paper says.
Tagore was the first non-European to win the Literature Nobel and a first Asian to be honoured with the prize which is why the centenary of his victory was picked for the rarest celebration, senior Swedish and Indian diplomats told the Telegraph.
The poet was declared the awardee-designate on Nov 13, 1913 and was officially conferred with the prize on Dec 10 that year.
Traditionally, local missions represent their countries unless a serving government leader, such as US President Barack Obama in 2009, is the recipient of a Nobel.
“The Swedish government has endorsed this decision by the Nobel Foundation and we look forward to hosting foreign minister Khurshid in Stockholm this December,” Dag Sjoogren, the first secretary (political) at the Swedish embassy here, told the newspaper. “We are also hoping for a bilateral meeting on the sidelines.”
But the celebration will not only be limited to Stockholm as the Swedish Embassy is working with the Calcutta Metro to establish “Nobel Walls” to pay tribute to India’s Nobel laureates, according to the daily.
The walls will be put up at three city stations which has maximum exposure to the public and are in neighbourhoods with a Tagore connect.
One of these three Nobel Walls will be a permanent part of the city.
The embassy is also said to be setting up similar Nobel Walls at Metro stations in Delhi.
Tagore, physicists CV Raman and Subramanyam Chandrasekhar, geneticist Hargobind Khorana, Mother Teresa, economist Amartya Sen and chemistry Nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan are the seven Indian Nobel laureates who will be featured on the walls.
The Swedish government will also organise a series of cultural events in Kolkata on Oct 25 and Oct 26 to coincide with the announcements of the Nobel winners for 2013.
Olavi Hemilla, a Swedish who specialises on Tagore, will speak at a seminar in Kolkata along with Delhi University professor Radha Chakravarty who has produced various work on Tagore.
Hemilla had played a significant role in convincing the Nobel Foundation in 2005 to replace Tagore’s Nobel medallion stolen from Visva-Bharati.
Kolkata will be visited by a curator from Stockholm’s Nobel Museum to deliver a workshop for young conservation enthusiasts. The school-goers of Kolkata will be able to participate in the annual Nobel Memorial Quiz arranged by Sweden for school children for the first time.
Tagore himself had translated Gitanjali or ‘Song offerings’ into English in 1912, which included an introduction by Irish poet WB Yeats.
The Nobel citation for Tagore said, he received the award “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.
A British official had read a telegram by Tagore to the Swedish Academy, which decides the winner of the Literature Nobel for the Nobel Foundation.
“I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother,” read the telegram that responded to the citation.
Then Governor Lord Carmichael handed over his medal and diploma in Calcutta.
Tagore, did, visit Stockholm in May, 1921 to deliver an acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy where he invited the members of the Academy to visit Santiniketan, where he was setting up Visva-Bharati.
“Help us to make this university a common institution for the East and the West. May they give the contribution of their lives and may we all together make it living and representative of the undivided humanity of the world,” said Tagore.
The Nobel Foundation after the passing of 100 years is set to honour on Dec 10 “the man they first recognised as a symbol of the bridge between the East and the West”, concludes the Telegraph report.
Source: Bd news24
