Excerpt of the 1916 Japan a Lecture, Delivered for the Students of the Private Colleges of Tokyo and the Members of the Indo-Japanese Association, at the Keio Gijuku University.
At first, I had my doubts. I thought that I might not be able to see Japan, as she is herself, but should have to be content to see the Japan that takes an acrobatic pride in violently appearing as something else. On my first arrival in this country, when I looked out from the balcony of a house on the hillside, the town of Kobe,—that huge mass of corrugated iron roofs,—appeared to me like a dragon, with glistening scales, basking in the sun, after having devoured a large slice of the living flesh of the earth. This dragon did not belong to the mythology of the past, but of the present; and with its iron mask it tried to look real to the children of the age,—real as the majestic rocks on the shore, as the epic rhythm of the sea-waves. …
Kodwo Eshun reads a 1916 lecture from Tagore. Evocation of the roots of Kobe as Dragon. In the letter the traveler the person that brings a specific optic. Kodwo Eshun talks about reception, misgivings and curiosity.
Extracts from old letters by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), shared by Natasha Ginwala at the first workshop of Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures Research Group, Iniva, London 2013. (Copyright 1917 by the MacMillan Company). Download the PDF here
Anna Boghiguian, A Play to Play (detail) 2013, Mixed media installation, Iniva. Photo by Thierry Bal
During ‘Tagore’s Universal Allegories’ exhibition Anna Boghiguian’s sat in the gallery writing imaginary letters to or from Tagore, but also between other people and places.
The Post Office – a play by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), shared by Natasha Ginwala at the first workshop, Iniva, London 2013.
The Post Office arrived as a text that offers an allegorical construction of the rural subject, and one that might have an interesting relationship to the broader projects of Tagore, at Santiniketan as well as Sriniketan. (Vivian Ziherl, Landings, workshop 3, Tagore Centre, London)
In that early dusk of a distracted age, When God in scorn of his own workmanship violently shook his head at his primitive efforts, an impatient wave snatched you away, Africa, from the bosom of the East, and kept you breeding in a dense enclosure of niggardly light, guarded by giant trees. There you slowly stored the baffling mysteries of the wilderness in the dark cellars of your profound privacy, conned the signals of land and water difficult to read; and the secret magic of Nature invoked in your mind magic rites from beyond the boundaries of consciousness.
…
Excerpt of poem Africa by Rabindranath Tagore, published in English in ‘Poems’, Visva-Bharati, Kolkata, 1946.
Anjalika Sagar points out that Tagore has actually never visited Africa.
Rabindranath Tagore at Boulogne-Billancourt, 1926/7, France, short film presented in March by Shanay Jhaveri. This is the garden were a famous photograph of Tagore among flowers was taken, and later emulated by Satyajit Ray.
