Indian noted writer Tagore makes return to Java at JIS

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): As he stepped down at Jakarta's Tanjung Priok harbor in August 1927, India's poet philosopher Rabindranath Tagore burst into verse in praise of the "golden threads of kinship that existed between Indonesia and India".

The Little Theater at the Jakarta International School in Cilandak will resonate on Saturday night as an ode is once again paid to the legendary Tagore, not just a poet but also a social reformer, educationist, composer, painter and humanist.

Tagore's visit to Java and Bali were part of a series of lecture tours he organized for himself to share with the rest of Asia his romantic and idealized concept of a single eastern civilization. Most of Asia at that time was a slave of colonial masters and Tagore felt that Asia must find her voice if humanity was to be saved. The greed of western countries caused him great concern.

And wherever the Calcutta-born Tagore went he attracted large crowds, for he was already world famous. W.B. Yeats wrote the introduction for the English translation of Gitanjali (Song of Offerings), which won for Tagore the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Over the years, the Indian poet's initial concept of a spiritual East standing aloof from a materialistic West flowered into a world ideal that he hoped would one day unify all humankind. His religion, he explained to Albert Einstein during their 1930 conversation at Einstein's home near Berlin, was in the reconciliation of the super personal man, the universal human spirit in his own individual being.

Tagore advocated a worldwide commerce of heart and mind so that the individual's sense of purpose in life is enhanced. He took the initiative to contact leading thinkers in other parts of Asia. In Java one of his closest allies was Ki Hajar Dewantoro, founder of the Taman Siswa schools, and the country's first minister of education. Dewantoro was inspired by Tagore's talk of nationalism without closing the door to modernism.

A literal translation of kindergarten or the garden of children, the Taman Siswa schools remain the oldest national education institutions here, started in 1932. Dewantoro was impressed with Tagore's school at Santiniketan and Viswa Bharati, the world university founded by Tagore in 1918 with all the money he received as Nobel laureate. Dewantoro, painter Affandi and Dr. Ida Bagus Mantra of Bali visited the university of universal learning which Tagore saw as a center of Indian culture and also the thread linking India to the world.

The idea was to revive the traditional Indian way of teaching, in the open, under a tree, in close contact with nature. Both Tagore and Dewantoro believed that all the elements in one's own culture have to be strengthened, not to resist western culture but to accept and assimilate it, to get mastery over it and not to live at its outskirts.

Tagore died in 1941 but his ideas continue to live through the works of all those who look upon all civilizations in different continents as being complementary to each other. It is in the same spirit that Abhyudaya, an Indonesia-India cultural assembly came into being half a decade ago. Since then every May is dedicated to the memory of Tagore whose birth anniversary falls this month.

Chitrangada, an episode about a warrior princess from the Mahabharata which Tagore wrote as a dance-drama, was performed in the past by Indian dancer Nilanjana Ghosh along with Balinese dancers, and also Tridhara, yet another offering of Indian dance, music and song to Indonesian audiences.

"As we live, work and bring up children in foreign countries it becomes our personal responsibility to keep them connected with our culture and values," says Aparesh Mukerjee, production manager and one of the founders of Abhyudaya.

The highlight of the evening will be an excerpt from a film on Tagore made by Satyajit Ray, perhaps the greatest film maker of India and an alumnus of Santiniketan.

The Performance will take place at Little Theater, the Jakarta International School, Cilandak Campus, on May 19, at 6.15 p.m. Further Inquiries at 021-7500340