Tagore`s 16 unpublished classic works found

Spicezee Bureau

Kolkata: Sixteen of Rabindranath Tagore’s unpublished poems have been found among thousands of manuscripts in archives at Visva-Bharati’s Rabindra Bhavan. And all these poems are among the rare ones inspired by his own paintings. What’s even more interesting is the fact that Tagore has left notes at the end of each classic work, explaining the specific painting the poem corresponds to. Scholars at the Rabindra Bhavan archives stumbled upon these rare works by Tagore, which had been catalogued long back in the 1940s, but were lost and forgotten. Talking to a news daily about the discovery, Tagore scholar Nilanjan Bandyopadhyay said, "He (Tagore) was perhaps fed up with the way Visva-Bharati officials were delaying the publication of Chitralipi — the only book of his paintings published during his lifetime (in 1940). But at the fag end of his life, he was too tired to take it up. So, he busied himself with these poems in the belief that one day these would be published." And now, V-B is bringing out the poems and paintings in a book called ‘Namhara Rekhapath Beye’. Tagore himself had christened the exercise book ‘Rabindranath’s poems based on his paintings’. "It was not enough for a few scholars of the university to see and read these poems. We wanted the rest of the world to read them too, and see the paintings alongside," said Kumkum Bhattacharya, director of V-B’s publications division, while speaking to the news daily.