Patrick Comerford
I was first introduced to the poetry and thinking of Rabindranath Tagore in the mid-1970s by the Irish poet Brenda (Meredith) Yasin (1921-1980), who was active in many peace campaigns and in social justice issues. Brenda was a daughter of James Creed Meredith (1875-1942), a Supreme Court judge who had once been involved in the Kilcoole gunrunning in 1914 and who became a Quaker and a pacifist later in life.
I got to know Brenda and her husband Said Ahmed Yasin (1917-1998) after I moved from Wexford to Dublin in 1974 . They had married in Delhi in 1946, and he worked for the UN and the World Bank, and served in the new Ministry of Agriculture formed after the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
After they moved to Dublin in 1961, Said studied to be a vet and lectured in veterinary medicine in TCD. He was Pakistan’s Honorary Consul-General in Ireland (1970-1994), and they maintained close family friendships with the Bhutto family, including Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928-1979), a former president and prime minister of Pakistan, Begum Nusrat Bhutto (1929-2011), an advocate of women’s rights and democracy, and their daughter, Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), Pakistan’s only female prime minister to date.
I still remember the distress of Brenda and Said when the former President Bhutto was executed on 4 April 1979, and their concern weeks later when I was due to visit Pakistan on my journeys to and from Japan as a student.
Like her father, Brenda Yasin was a Quaker. She took part in protests against the Vietnam War in Dublin, campaigned for travellers’ rights, and was very supportive when I was involved in restarting the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) later in 1979.
She was only 58 when she died on 11 April 1980 in Glengarriff, Co Cork, and she was buried in Friends’ Burial Ground, Temple Hill, Blackrock. A book of her poetry was published posthumously. Said died in 1998.
I rediscovered the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore when I discovered the Service of the Heart, one of my favourite Jewish anthologies. It was published in London by the Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues in 1967, and the edition I have is dated 1969. It a rich treasury of spiritual resources, and later I continue to use it in my prayers and reflections.
One of the poetic prayers I have used on occasions, ‘Lord, where shall I find You?’, is a translation by Rabbi Chaim Stern (1930-2001) from David Frischmann’s Hebrew version of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem Gitanjali.
I thought of Brenda and Said Yasin, and of so many ways in which I have been enriched by both Quaker and Jewish spirituality, earlier this week when I was in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, close to Friends’ House on Euston Road, and when I saw Shenda Armery’s bronze sculpture of Tagore, which was unveiled in 2011.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, playwright, songwriter, philosopher and environmentalist and the first Asian Nobel laureate. Two of his poems have become the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and he also inspired the national anthem of Sri Lanka.
Tagore was born on 7 May 1861, in Kolkata, India. He wrote several poems, short stories and screenplays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his contribution to literature, specifically for his collection of collection of poems, Gitanjali, Song Offerings. He was knighted in 1915 but rejected the knighthood in 1919 in protest after the Amritsar Massacre. He died on 7 August 1941.
The bronze sculpture of Tagore in Gordon Square was unveiled by Prince Charles (now King Charles) on 7 July 2011 to commemorate Tagore’s 150th birthday. Gordon Square is close to the faculty of law at University College London, where Tagore was a student in 1878.
The date of the unveiling also marked the anniversary of the suicide bombing on a bus at Tavistock Square, close to Gordon Square, six years earlier on 7 July 2005. The bomb was part of the 7/7 bombings, and 13 passengers, as well as the bomber, Hasib Hussain, were killed on the No 30 bus from Marble Arch to Hackney.
The sculptor Shenda Armery also sculpted busts of Margaret Thatcher and the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Betty Boothroyd. Her other public work includes the Ambrika fountain in London Zoo.
In his speech, Prince Charles said ‘Tagore has always been regarded as exceptional in the breadth and depth of his work as a philosopher and writer of songs, as poet and playwright, in his interest in education, rural renewal and farming and as a painter crossing the divide between East and West.’
He descried Tagore’s work as ‘very relevant for our time, particularly his understanding of a principle which is so dear to me, so much so that I have made it the title of a recently published book – Harmony.’ Prince Charles referred to the 7/7 anniversary and hoped ‘the inscriptions on this bust will shine out as a beacon of tolerance, understanding and of unity in diversity.’
At the unveiling, Kalyan Kundu, founder and chair of the Tagore Centre UK, also referred to the bombing and described ‘the unveiling of a statue of an apostle of peace’ as ‘a significant and timely reminder that a world of resentment and fear benefits no one and only brings with it pain.
The bronze bust sits on of a substantial stone plinth, which has a carved inscription and two bronze plaques inscribed with the verses of ‘Thou hast made me endless’, from Tagore’s best know-poem, ‘Gitanjali (‘Song Offerings)’, in English and Bengali.
On the plaque on the right face of the plinth, the plaque looks like a facsimile of Tagore's handwritten original text, right down to the inserted word ‘very’:
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.
This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,
and fillest it ever with fresher life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales
and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands
my little heart loses its limits in a great joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
Rabindranath Tagore
The plaque on the left of the plinth has the Bengali version of poem.
On the bust itself, the neck is inscribed on the right: ‘Shenda Amery, 2011’.
Gordon Square was developed by Thomas Cubitt as one part of a pair with nearby Tavistock Square. Much of the square is still occupied by ranges of four- and five-storey yellow London brick terraces, with the tallest group having balconies and a decorated cornices. The gardens of Gordon Square were restored in recent decades by the University of London.
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