A Tribute to Tagore through Bilingual Rendition of “Sindhupare”

Martand Foundation, Udaipur, and the city’s famous art gallery, Takhman, jointly organized a lively recital of English and Hindi translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Sindhupare” (Beside the Sea) on 29 March, 2025 amidst the grassy exteriors of Takhman. Directed by Jarka Heller, the recital in Hindi was performed by Vilas Janve and in English by Manish Sharma.

Composed as a dream narrative, the poem presents a spiritual allegory with dramatic elements. The speaker in the poem recounts the experience of his mystic encounter with God through his distressful and suspenseful journey of detachment from the mortal world. He is divinely lured to come out of his trap of carnal comforts by God Himself who leads him in the guise of a veiled woman mounted on a black horse. What appears in the beginning as a cauchemar to the speaker eventually turns out to be a preparation for his ecstatic divine encounter in the end. Dying and death are but a necessary precondition for union with God. Thus, death, instead of being feared as an end-all and be-all, should be celebrated as a means of achieving a blissful proximity with divinity.

written in Bengali, the poem was translated into English by Prof. Sukanta Choudhuri and into Hindi by Vilas Janve.

The poem, abounding in vivid contrasting images of cold, darkness, desolation, suspense, mystery, festivity, light, beauty, and ecstasy, was rendered in English and Hindi alternatively with great impact. While Vilas who is a veteran theatre artist used his dramatic skills to provide suitable tonal variations in the course of rendering the poem in Hindi, Manish recited it in English with a charming phonetic clarity and appropriate intonation and rhythm. The performance was a novelty for both theatre-lovers and readers of literature. The director called the performance an experiment. And, hurray, the experiment proved a hit!