India launches Tagore 150th anniversary events

India kicked off celebrations on Saturday to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of iconic poet and playwright Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched the festivities for the poet who won the Nobel in 1913 and is revered by the world's 250 million Bengali speakers in India, neighbouring Bangladesh and elsewhere.
The events, planned over one year, aim to stir new interest among a wider audience in the Bengali writer's novels, music, plays, poems and paintings, the government said. "A number of commemoration events have (also) been planned abroad, particularly in countries with which Tagore had some association," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a speech in New Delhi.
Tagore, who established an open-air university in India's West Bengal state, also penned the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India. He produced some 50 volumes of poetry including his acclaimed Gitanjali (Song Offerings). Jorasanko Mansion in state capital Kolkata, the poet's birthplace and also where he died in 1941, was bedecked with flowers for the occasion.
In New Delhi, Singh, addressing diplomats and fans from India and Bangladesh, also announced an award in the name of the poet, who was part of a national campaign for India's independence from British colonial rule, granted in 1947.
"A jury headed by the prime minister will select each year a citizen of the world of outstanding public eminence who in his or her life and work epitomises the high universal ideals that Tagore stood for," Singh said.
The award will "recognise his very distinguished contributions towards the promotion of international brotherhood and fraternity", Singh said. Tagore, who also spent time in what is now Bangladesh, renounced his British knighthood in protest over a massacre of hundreds of civilians by British-led troops in India's Jallianwala town in 1919. Several states including Meghalaya and Tripura in India's remote north-east were also celebrating the event with seminars, plays and readings from Tagore's voluminous works, which for many mirror India's spiritual heritage.