This is a recording of a Dance Drama staged at the Tom Fleming Centre for Performing Arts, Edinburgh in September 2024 as part of the Tagore-Geddes Festival, this dance drama held the audience spellbound.

Patrick Geddes’ words and Rabindranath Tagore’s songs, a collaboration based on deep friendship between the Scottish town planner and Indian national poet, were incorporated seamlessly in a production which saw the narrator, dancers and musicians pour their souls into a hymn to the planet and a plea for its continuity.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome. Today, we want to tell you a little story, a story that has been woven together with music, words, and thoughts from Tagore and Geddes’. Music, like nature, has no language and no boundaries. So, through music, we depict a story of unlikely love that blossomed within the harmony of the forests—a companionship that danced with the streams under the vast skies. Come into our world and travel with us as each leaf of our forest comes alive to talk to us. We present to you our dance drama, “Palash: The Flame of the Forest.”

The story begins with the words of Tagore himself: “How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief phenomenon and product of life. This is a green world with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon leaves.”

I walk through the gentle grass of the forest. The sky is filled with the sun and the stars. The world is bursting with the wonders of life, and in the midst of it all, I have found my place.

Listen, listen, listen to the leaves, for they are restless. Their hearts know not where they go, nor the purpose of their flight. They chase the shadows of a dream through the day and through the night, with desires they cannot define and passions they cannot name. They wander through life’s path in search of fleeting fame. Oh, restless hearts forever on the roam, seeking solace in the winds, yet never finding home.

Listen, listen to the leaves, for they are restless.

“Where have you come from, oh beautiful stranger, with eyes that shimmer like the morning dew? What distant land, what far-off adventures have you brought here to skies so blue? Did you wander through forests of emerald green, where whispers of ancient tales are told? Or did you sail across oceans serene and pristine, with waves of sapphire and shores of gold? Did you dance with the stars in the midnight sky or follow the path of the silvery moon? Did the winds of the desert sing to you as you wandered among the dunes?”

Oh, beautiful stranger, with a smile so rare, like a fleeting glimpse of dawn’s first light. What secrets do you hold? What stories do you share from realms unknown and out of sight? Stay a while; let your journey rest in this humble abode with hearts so kind, for in your presence, we feel truly blessed—a bond of wonder and tales intertwined.

Ah, but I’ve heard this song somewhere in my travels—a Scottish-Bengali connection unravels. For no matter where in the world we are, nature speaks in the same sweet tone.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots to the dust of the earth in every blade of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

The peacock’s feathers fan like a rainbow, shimmering in the golden sun, and in this dance of love’s delight, our hearts beat wild as one. In every leaf and in every tree, nature hums love’s melody.

Listen, listen to the cry of the dying tree. Listen to the cry of the dying tree as our world is lost and creatures flee. The leaves that stood as ancient gods now burn and turn to blackened shards.

A home once safe is now lost to greed, where ancient oaks in silence bleed. Where humans reached with grasping hands and leave behind a scarred land.

Listen, listen to the cry of the dying tree.

On that stormy night when my doors fell apart, I was unaware that it was you. The world went dark, all lamps blown out. I stretched my uncertain arms towards the black skies. Whom do I seek? I lie there quietly in the dark. Am I perhaps in a dream? And then, when morning arrives, I see you standing upon the emptiness that was once my home.

They stood where roots ran deep in soil, where years were marked by sweat and toil. But now, the land that gave them birth is lost to them for all its worth. Alas for the lost wanderer. Alas for the forsaken. Alas for the homeless.

Endless tears from the heavens flow.

The air is thick; the sky turns red. Where safety lay, now fear has spread. The paths once known are lost in haze as families run through nights ablaze.

The fire fades; the embers die. The smoke ascends into the sky. Their whispers linger in the breeze—a fleeting touch amongst the trees. No trace remains of loved ones bright, but scattered dust in pale moonlight.

Return to earth, their bodies blend, for life begins where all things end. The wind will carry what is left behind: two souls dissolved and their names unkind. For love that burns must meet its cost—to earth and dust forever lost. Yet in the soil, new roots may find a hint of warmth of a whole new kind. From ashes cold, new life will rise like a memory through nature’s eyes.

The sky has filled me with light, so I will fill the sky with my song. Oh dear Polash, you spread crimson flames everywhere—a touch of red in the symphony within myself, a tremor in the heart of the flowers.

From the charred remains and ashen ground, new shoots of greens start reaching out. Leaf by leaf, the world revives as nature slowly rears. For nature knows no end, no haste. It mends each scar and redeems each waste. With time and care, the wounds erase, replaced by life in gentle grace.

So, leaf by leaf and day by day, the world finds light from dark decay. In nature’s hands, all things renew—a cycle old but always new. Listen to the leaves, for they’re restless. Listen to the leaves; for they are restless.

Now, every spring when leaves are born, the lovers take shape in the light of dawn. They curl in petals soft and sweet or dance in winds where branches meet. Though flesh and bone may turn to dust, their love endures in earth-deep trust.

We roam alone, lost souls found in the midst of this great world under this endless sky, in this cocoon of perpetual mystery and in this unending loop of space and time.

I would now want to invite Professor Alan Reich for a few words.

Wow, um, thank you. My name is Alan R. I’m a poet and professor of Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow, and Basabi asked me to say a few words to draw the evening towards an end. She asked me to do this in two ways: first of all, by reading a little passage here, and then by adding something to it.

So these are the words I’ve been given to read: Tagore’s poetry has always reflected the unity and shared vitality between humans and nature. His work celebrates the dance of existence that transcends individual forms and connects all beings in one continuous living tapestry. Tagore and Getty had a vision for the future of this planet, and their friendship was a symbol of this vision.

However, a somber and startling fact burns amongst us here today: Scotland’s ancient woodlands were taken, our love for leaves forsaken, species lost at great cost, and today only 17% of Scotland’s land area has been covered again by forests. Unbelievably, our beautiful Scotland is one of the least biodiverse countries in the world, ranking in the bottom 25%. At one time, Scotland was covered in the Caledonian Forest, a vast native species that stretched across the Highlands. Today, only 1% of the original forest remains. This is a result of centuries of habitat loss, deforestation, intensification of cattle farming, overgrazing, and overexploitation of land.

India is naturally more biodiverse; it ranks very low for habitat protection and has the highest rate of loss of biodiversity in the world. Again, this is because of deforestation, overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss. Our world is in a huge crisis with climate change, unsustainable development, and overurbanization. We are losing our leaves; we are losing our oxygen. Many indigenous people rely on forests for their livelihood, culture, and identity. We are losing our identity; we are losing love; we are losing life; and we are losing face to Tagore and Getty, who tried to warn us that this would happen.

We need to fight together to raise awareness, bring in stronger conservation measures, balance development with environmental sustainability, and, most importantly, make nature a part of our daily life.

As we end our little story here today, we remember the wise words of Tagore: “We live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.”

Now, Basabi asked me to end with a few words of my own, and I’ll do that via a poem. It’s so curious the coincidences that connect. This is a recent poem I was writing, thinking actually about these very things before Basabi introduced me to the text and the performance—this fantastic event that we’ve just witnessed.

“By leaves we live,” said Patrick Geddes. “The leaves of trees, the leaves of books, the leaving of childhood, of home.” The grand thing it is to get leave to live.

In the words of Nan Shepherd, quoted in beautiful tiny script on the Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note, we still live in a country where most of us can walk or go by bicycle or bus or by train or by car, and then walk again into nature. Nature is not something in Scotland we are always immured from. We can touch it; we can be part of it if we want to, if we choose to.

Into the wild, into the wilderness, Scotland is still a good country to live in, and some of us can see directly into nature simply by looking out of the window.

So my poem to end with is called “The Forest Floor.”

From my window, the blue sky sails through high Scotch oaks and beech, sycamore, ash, hawthorn, and spruce. Light makes shadows on innumerable tangles of branches—angled, twisted, stretching horizontal, thinning, leaning, curving down, or thinly sloping out above their neighbors, almost touching.

Slender as the tall, slim, sturdy trunks, they might sway a little in the wind or, in a storm, might bend, and leaves shiver green like flames in a flaring fire, but cold in the rain or even just the early spring blue air coming among
them.

There, that squirrel moves so fast, then stops dead still—legs spread, claws caught on the bark. Then heads up, races again, and leaps to how can it know where or how secure? How planted and connected? How brittle or broken the next branch might be? It hits safely, darts on up and around into the woods, reappears further on, stops still, then moves again, and is gone.

There is an endless tension day and night. Animals and trees don’t sleep. The beasts might close their bodies down a while; trees never do. The tension never goes away entirely. A forest at night is dark but never asleep. Night creatures move and sound in their own time—darkly, but highly awake. The tension is acute.

Day creatures, that squirrel gone elsewhere, stay fast in their proprioception. We look on and study, can only imagine, get into sometimes for a moment or two. In the wilderness, things are within it. All of their lives, almost none of them die of old age. Predators, invaders, diseases brought in, removals, destructions—the industry mind, the numbers folk, the dollars talk, disrupt, pollution spoils.

But wilderness things connect: trees, squirrels, birds from sky to forest floor, mice, spiders, ants, and under the earth, the worms and nutrients of corpses. At dusk, the crows coagulate; their throats fill out with flowing music—caws, cacophonies of polyphonic soaring, growing massive individuations as the sky gets duskier and darker and the darkness starts to close things down.

They gather on the branches of the tall Scotch oaks and other trees en masse—a Catholic congregation of Protestants. And then at one moment, they rise, flying out of the mesh of the traps of the branches—all in curves and angles, fast, freely—then in a cloud of winged black bodies, connected and singular, curve up and out into the air and turn in an arc, then bar in another, then over our heads and return once again, and then take themselves off into darkness, as the sound of their crying and calling grows less and then less, and then settles into silence—not silence.

And we turn, go indoors to our rooms, to our beds, to our warming silence—not silence.

Thank you.

Cast and Crew:

Produced for The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies
Script Writer and Narrative Director: Payal Debroy
Dance Director and Choreographer: Tanwi Bhattacharya
Music Director: Subhranil Bhadra
Script Writer and Narrative Director: Payal Debroy
Meghomala Das – Narrator

Dancers:

Anuradha Chandra
Oxana Banchshikova
Shilpi Dhara
Abhishek Marik
Tanwi Bhattacharya

Musicians and Singers:

Hermann Rodrigues – acoustic guitar
Akashdeep Dey – vocal
Reya Kundu – vocal and Tanpura
Gourab Chowdhury – vocal
Ewa Adamiec – sitar and violin
Gourab Dey – vocal, keyboard, bass guitar and handsonic
Sankha Subhra Mukherjee – tabla and keyboard
Sangeeta Datta – vocal
Subhranil Bhadra – bass guitar, shaker, vocal and electric guitar

Guest speakers:

Murdo Macdonald
Alan Riach

Concept and Director of the Tagore Geddes Festival:

Bashabi Fraser

Sponsors:

The National Lottery Open Fund for Organizations, Creative Scotland

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh

Centre for Creative Practice, Edinburgh Napier University

Acknowledgements:

Trustees of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs):
Joyce Caplan
Gari Donn
Neil Fraser
Mridula Chakraborty
Nandini Sen
Murdo Macdonald
Steve Hillier
Sourit Bhattacharya
Anindya RayChaudhuri
Charles Bruce
Bashabi Fraser

Advisory Board Members:
Mairead NicCraith
Ullrich Kockel
Swagatam Sen
Nandini Sen

Videography:
Alex Dunedin

Volunteers:
Arunima Bhattacharya
Ferdousi Reza
Arnab Bhattacharjee
Rajni Punn
Fiona Robertson
Liz Mueller
Nandini Sen
Swagata Sen
Swagatam Sen

Special thanks
Jayalakshmi Garrabost
Judith Fieldhouse