141. Sing of Life

Rabindranth Tagore's profound meditations on life, nature, grace and brokenness in the Gitanjali won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Alternately a poet and a philosopher, his words remain a part of our intellectual and artistic landscape long after his death 80 years ago. This episode of BIC Talks features a conversation located in Priya Sarukkai Chabria's contemplative and courageous collection, Sing of Life - Revisioning Tagore's Gitanjali which chisels his prose poems into intense new poems. In the midst of a pandemic we are invited, through this book, to re-engage with Tagore's prescient ideas on translation and his views on nature, death and suffering. The author, along with translator and writer Arshia Sattar, explore the ways in which this work of Tagore remains relevant to the 21st century even as he points backwards to the long and diverse tradition of spiritual poetry in the South Asian subcontinent.