Remembering Rabindranath Tagore Volume - High Commission of ...

Message from His Excellency the President of
the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka
I
am indeed privileged to send this message to the Commemoration Volume published
to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, who stood out among the
greatest of Asians in the last century.
Gurudev Tagore, as he is respectfully known, had a unique combination of talent as a poet,
novelist, painter, playwright and educationist who reshaped Bengali literature and music in
India, the land of his birth, and brought honour to us all as the first non-European to be
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his great work Gitanjali in 1913.
In Sri Lanka, as in India and South Asia, he is also remembered for his profound influence
on the movement for Freedom from British Rule, with his strong support for Mahatma
Gandhi, bringing in a spiritual and intellectual aspect to the struggle for Freedom, which
inspired the leaders of the Freedom Struggle in Sri Lanka, too.
As the founder of Santiniketan, for research and teaching in India, he also made an
immense contribution to the development of a musical tradition that was rooted in the
land and its people. In this, he inspired many Sri Lankans to develop and appreciate our
own traditions of music and song. Gurudev Tagore, who sang the great inspirational poem
Vandey Mataram for the first time in a political context at the 1896 session of the Indian
National Congress, saw it accepted as the National Song of India. Later, he had the unique
honour of being the composer and writer of Jana Gana Mana the Indian National Anthem,
and Amar Shonar Bangla, the Bangladeshi national anthem. He also had a great influence on
Ananda Samarakoon, who wrote and composed our own National Anthem.
The programmes to mark this 150th anniversary of Gurudev Tagore's birth will help our
students in schools and universities, and the general public know more of his work in the
fields of music, literature and the humanities. They will help recall the inspiration he gave
to a generation seeking to be free of the yoke of colonialism, and build new traditions in
education and thinking that are free from fear, best expressed in these lines from Gitanjali:
"Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake."
I commend the initiatives of the University of Colombo in collaboration with the Indian
High Commission and Indian Cultural Centre in Sri Lanka, the Rabindranath Tagore
Society of Sri Lanka, the Universities of Kelaniya and Sri Jayewardenepura and the Ministry
of Cultural Affairs of Sri Lanka, for organizing this series of activities to remember and
honour this great Asian who reshaped and influenced thinking in our region and the world.
Mahinda Rajapaksa