WKND Special: Dubai resident documents Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's musical influences on Russia

Dubai - The story of Tagore’s contribution to the song remained unknown for 37 years for a wider audience beyond Russia, till Suvra Chakraborty and his significant other, Paramita, who have been Dubai residents since 2012, came into the picture

Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the polymath and a litterateur par excellence, still remains the tour de force behind the bilateral ties between his native India and the erst-while Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the world’s largest country that had ceased to exist on December 26, 1991, as a Dubai resident stumbled upon fortuitously a few years ago.

Dubai is the backdrop of the literary bonhomie between India and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

The bilateral cultural bonding over Tagore was made known to a wider audience because of Suvra Chakraborty and his significant other, Paramita, who have been Dubai residents since 2012. Tagore, who is Asia’s first-ever Nobel laureate and won the coveted prize in 1913 in colonial India, had written more than 2,000 songs and touched the hearts and souls of millions across the globe. However, about three decades after the multi-faceted universalist passed away, Alexey Rybnikov, a young Russian composer, who was then 25 years old and later went on to scale dizzy heights in the course of an illustrious career, found the perfect words for his magnum opus song, Poslednyaya Poema, or The Last Poem (turn over for a summary) that have distinctive literary echoes of Tagore’s writing. Rybnikov created the most magical song of his life that became a chartbuster in the erstwhile USSR and remains a cult classic after four decades.

The story of Tagore’s contribution to the song remained unknown for 37 years for a wider audience beyond Russia. Suvra, who — like Tagore — belongs to Kolkata, has been a Russophile since his formative years. (He had left for the then USSR for higher studies in 1985 and has also lived in Ukraine, now a part of the CIS, for over two decades.)

In 2017, on a business trip to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a central Asian nation and a part of the CIS, he connected the fascinating dots between Tagore and Poslednyaya Poema by a simple twist of fate.

As luck would have it, he gatecrashed a party at Tashkent, where Poslednyaya Poema was being played, and whose linkage with Tagore’s last novel was a music to the Russophile’s ears.

An excited Suvra came back to Dubai and plunged himself headlong into research on Tagore’s tryst with Russia. He found out that Tagore had visited Moscow in 1930 but the then Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had taken umbrage to the litterateur’s critical assessment of the Communist regime and had barred a Russian daily from publishing his interview.

It came to light that on the orders from Stalin, the daily, Izvestia, did not publish Tagore’s interview in 1930, which was later printed by the same publication in 1988, because of the then Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, which was the reformist policy to restructure the political and economic system of the Communist regime.

These and many other hitherto unknown or little-known facts have come alive in Suvra and Paramita’s labour of love, a 20-minute-long documentary, called Last Poem, which is predominantly conceived and shot in Dubai amid the last year’s Covid-19-induced lockdown restrictions and as a tribute to the strong Indo-Russian cultural ties.

The documentary, which has been primarily shot on iPhone 8, is an evocative narrative of how a timeless song, which transcended geographical and cultural barriers, has evolved through the decades to a totem of highbrow art form and universalism.

What made Suvra and Paramita make Last Poem?

“It has been our relentless pursuit to find the genesis of the soulful creation. It became the focal point of our lives. In hindsight, the creative exercise also helped us keep our minds off the raging contagion that was disrupting normal life,” said the happy couple, who have been married for 25 years, in unison. Suvra went around connecting the dots as he painstakingly did the research work, including tracing Rybnikov, who is now 71 years old and was living in a dacha (cottage) in a Russian country-side, where the Internet connectivity was dodgy.

The documentary also features Uzbek national and cultural icon, Farrukh Zokirov, one of the first performers of the song in the erstwhile USSR. Zokirov’s rendition underscores mu-sic, like truth to power, has transcendental abilities and is a great leveller. Zokirov, who went on to become the cultural minister of Uzbekistan and has been an artistic director of the folk-rock band Yalla since 1976, is a superstar in his home country.

Suvra and Paramita have been urban gypsies, who drew on their immediate and extended family’s talents to lend the documentary an authentic and artistic touch.

Their sons — Rajarshi and Saptarshi are pursuing higher studies in the Neth-erlands — were involved in post-production, including composing background musical scores and lending voiceovers. The deft touches of Bhisma Pratim, Lagnajita and Abhishek — Suvra’s cousins — are on show in the documentary. Bhisma Pratim’s crisp editing and artistic use of archival footage are ad-mirable. Abhishek, who graduated from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, India, last year, did the pencil sketches depicting the Tashkent sequence of the documentary since travel to the location was out of bounds because of the Covid-19-related restrictions.

In an ode to the vibrant Indo-Russian cultural ties, Lagnajita, a prominent playback singer in her native Bengali and in Bollywood, sings a Russian song as the end credit rolls on.

The documentary’s maiden screening was held in Dubai on June 9 at Para-mount Hotel in Dubai.

Altogether, six consul-generals in Dubai from Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Belarus and India were present on the occasion.

Plans are afoot to organise a screening of the film at the Indian Consulate in Dubai on July 9, which will also kickstart the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of Indian Independence.