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Tagore still enthrals New York

Jyotirmoy Datta in New York

Nobel Prize-winning poet Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore continues to be toasted in the Big Apple, where he has a considerable following, even 40 years after his birth centenary.

The spirit of the poet was all over the place, from print to stage, recently, and to paraphrase a song by Gurudev, there was a 'fresh tide to revive the shoaled-up stream' of the Tagore Society of New York.

Last month a Bangladeshi theatre group, Charanik, gave five performances of Tagore's play Dak Ghar, or The Post Office, at the New York International Fringe Festival in downtown Manhattan.

The New York Times also ran an article recalling the famous debate between Tagore and Albert Einstein on whether the ultimate truths of the cosmos could ever be known.

Charanik's art director, Saleque Khan, an alumnus of India's National School of Drama and New York University, has taken many liberties with Tagore's play.

But the sell-out audiences at Theatre One Ninety Six in Manhattan's picturesque Chinatown not only accepted but also applauded the changes that had turned Tagore's Indian parable of a closed society into a universal one.

Tagore himself did the casting in the original production and played the role of Thakurda. It therefore must have called for extraordinary faith in their own creativity for Khan and producing director Sharfuzzann Mukul to have the lead character played not by a boy alone but also by girls of different nationalities.

Khan not only replaced the Bengali curd seller in the original play with a Chinese ice-cream vendor, but made iconoclastic additions. And refusing to accept Tagore's ending of the play with the boy Amal's death, he has merrily concluded his own version of The Post Office with a dance sequence in a children's paradise.

The success of Khan's production is explainable on two grounds: First, it was a reflection of the gratitude that the audience at the Fringe Festival, with a surfeit of lunacy and sex, must have felt at the loveliness and melancholy humanism of The Post Office.

Second, it was a genuinely international production, boy Amal being played by three different actors -- a Latino, a South Asian and a Chinese.

Khan's reinterpretation of Tagore now joins such historical versions of the play as the one enacted by children of a Warsaw ghetto just before they were taken away to Nazi extermination camps in 1942. This was aired by French Radio before the fall of Paris in World War II.

In another move to preserve the memory of the poet, the Tagore Society of New York, one of the oldest overseas Bengali groups that appeared to be continually splitting, had a meeting in which the members decided to bring some order to their working.

Founded in 1958 by Prafulla Mukherjee, the Tagore Society of New York had been a very active body in the first quarter century of its existence.

The centenary celebration of Tagore's birthday, or Rabindra Jayanti, organised by the society in 1961, was perhaps the grandest such celebration outside India, says one of the society's former presidents, Khondkar Alamgir.

"The next year, Tagore's King of the Dark Chamber was performed, an off-Broadway production that played for eight months," recalled Alamgir, who chaired the turnaround meeting.

Indo-Asian News Service

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