Rabindranath-Tagore, a soul rooted in Bengal, was inseparable from his Bengali background. He travelled all over the world, but no landscape could ever move him more than the flat, dry plain around his beloved Santiniketan.
The rivers of East Bengal inspired much of the poetry of his thirties, but it was the drier West Bengal landscape, with its spaciousness of sky and simplicity of earth, that he came to regard as his home.
Even the Himalayas - so important to his father, who took Tagore there when he was eleven years old - never meant as much to him.
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He belonged with the land, the flowers and the trees; the birds; the people - whom he cared for genuinely, not just romantically, combining his educational experience at Santiniketan with an agricultural experiment at the neighbouring village of Sriniketan; the music, which he enriched immeasurably with his two thousand songs; and above all the language of Bengal.
He may have moved to English at a particular phase in his life; but he never moved from Bengali. He insisted that Bengali should be the medium of instruction in Bengal's schools, and wrote several essays and lectures on this theme.
When he was invited in February 1937 to deliver the Convocation Address at Calcutta University, he made history by delivering it in Bengali. Back in 1895 he made a similar stand at the Bengal Provincial Conference, demanding (unsuccessfully) that all business should be conducted in Bengali.
His concern of the language went far beyond the literary use he made of it.
Near the end of his life, he wrote a technical treatise of the Bengali language, bangla-bhasa paricay (1938); when the Bangiya Sahitya Parisad (Bengali Literary Academy) was founded in 1894, he provided a list of technical terms.
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Via Bangladesh-Blogger
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