The Right Honourable Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Cllr Aldridge, Your Excellency, Mr Doraiswami High Commissioner of India, Dignitaries, Distinguished Guests. Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming today to what is an event of international significance. I would like to share with you the journey that the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) has made and the purpose of our Centre.

In 2011 when the Government of India took on the responsibility of celebrating Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary globally, we decided to set up ScoTs at Edinburgh Napier University and applied to the Ministry of Culture in India for a modest sum of money to build a website that would be a hub for Tagore Studies and establish a peer reviewed academic and creative journal, ‘Gitanjali and Beyond’.

An article came out in one of the national newspapers in India asking where was a Scot in Rabindranath Tagore? A similar question has also been raised here in Scotland as I have been asked, did Rabindranath come to Scotland? He didn’t, but my question to you is, does a great writer or artist have to visit a country to be celebrated or remembered there? If so, we would not have had the joy of reading Shakespeare or having the pleasure of knowing the significance and aesthetic excellence of Leonardo da Vinci’s work in countries beyond their respective nations.

Both Shakespeare and da Vinci were Renaissance figures and their work remains relevant today, defying nation-state boundaries and borders of the mind and they did not travel beyond their respective countries to be recognized elsewhere. Rabindranath too is a Renaissance man, his writing, ideas and philosophy resonate with us across the world. And at ScoTs we celebrate and build on his close friendship with the Scottish polymath, Patrick Geddes, also a Renaissance figure, benefitting from their shared ideas and work in education and the environment, as they embody a close socio-cultural link between Scotland and India.

Patrick Geddes travelled to India in 1914, turning his back on the War in Europe and till 1924, he spent the cooler months in India, providing plans for urban spaces on invitation and was a Professor of Civics and Sociology at the University of Bombay. On Rabindranath’s request, Patrick Geddes provided the plans for Visva-Bharati, Tagore’s international university at Shantiniketan and his geographer son, Arthur Geddes spent two years teaching at the rural reconstruction centre at Sriniketan, Shantiniketan’s sister institution.

When my parents met Arthur at the London School of Economics in 1961 during the centenary celebrations of Rabindranath, Arthur spoke to them in perfect Bengali. Arthur brought the idea of universities being in touch and working with the hinterland from Shantiniketan,to his own geographer’s position at the University of Edinburgh. His own PhD was on the soil in Birbhum district where Rabindranath’s educational institution is based.

There is another link between Edinburgh and the Tagore family, as Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, was given the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh in September 1842, and his gift of the Ragamala paintings is now with the Special Collections of the University of Edinburgh. The Special Collections also hold the ScoTs Tagore collection donated by the late Prof Indra Nath Chaudhuri, our Tagore Chair at ScoTs, Dr William Radice, the Patron of ScoTs and my father, Prof Bimalendu Bhattacharya.

Needless to say, we did not get the funding from the Indian Ministry of Culture, but the then Director General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), Mr Suresh Goel, understood our vision and objective and granted us a Tagore Chair in Prof Indra Nath Chaudhuri and two Senior Research Fellowships through a memorandum of understanding signed in November 2011. I was able to write my critical comprehensive biography, Rabindranath Tagore (published by Reaktion Books, London) with the prestigious International ICCR Fellowship.

We obtained funding from the Binks Trust and were able to employ a Research Associate in Dr Christine Kupfer and develop our ScoTs website, and start our international journal, Gitanjali and Beyond, both of which were launched in 2015, and we are working on issue 11 of our journal as I speak.

Today ScoTs is an autonomous charitable trust, registered with OSCR and administered by a brilliant board of trustees and has several Research Affiliates.

At ScoTs we celebrate, propagate and build on Tagore’s work, ideas and philosophy, and that of his circle, which was international, and the foremost and most relevant for us is Rabindranath’s friendship and collaboration with Patrick Geddes.

For many years I have been requesting the Indian. Consulate to give us a statue of Rabindranath. Once again, the ICCR has stepped in to fulfil our dream, gifting us the beautiful statue of Rabindranath sculpted by the centenarian, the renowned Indian sculptor, Ram Vanji Sutar. The installation of the bust has been generously managed by Benjamin Tindall Architects. All along this journey, the Indian Consulate has been a supportive collaborator. I want to mention two former Consul Generals, Mrs Anju Ranjan who actually commissioned Rabindranath’s bust for ScoTs, and Mr Bijay Selvaraj, who arranged for it to be brought here. And the current Consul General of India, Mr Siddharth Malik and the HOC, Mr Azad Singh with their team, have lent their unstinting support to ScoTs.

I had wanted the two friends, Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes to be together and with the support of Sandeman House and Garden, the Scottish Storytelling Centre, the Scottish Book Trust, the Edinburgh City Council and the Government of India, we have realised what was once a dream. So like Martin Luther King, I could say, ‘I have a dream’, but unlike his dream, this dream has come true with the tremendous support we have had from India and in Scotland. The two friends, both internationalists and humanists, are with us now and can talk to each other beyond life as it were, and remain not just a symbol of ScoTs, but as a place of pilgrimage and inspiration for all of us who want to see Scotland and India, Britain and India continue a socio-historic bond through mutual understanding and respect that both Rabindranath and Geddes embody.

Today, Rabindranath and Geddes’s shared ideas on the primacy of forests for the future of human life on earth, will be presented by our talented creative team in a dance drama, Palash: Flame of the Forest. It was sponsored by ScoTs with funding from Creative Scotland’s National Lottery Open Fund and funding from IASH and Edinburgh Napier University as part of the Tagore Geddes Festival held last September, under the theme: ‘Forests are our Future: By Leaves we Live’. Payal Debroy, the narrative scriptwriter of Palash will now introduce the dance drama.

Thank you very much.