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This is the first part of the two-part article Rabindranath Tagore in Iran.

In November, 2011, Meira Kumar, speaker of India’s parliament, travelled to Tehran to represent India at the 150th anniversary celebrations of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth organised by the Iranian government. Her engagements in Tehran included unveiling, together with the speaker of the Iranian Majlis (parliament), a plaque in the parliament’s museum featuring the Persian translation of a Tagore poem. The first and the last stanzas of that poem, in the poet’s own English translation, read as follows:

                      Iran, all the roses in thy garden

                    and all their lover birds

                    have acclaimed the birthday

                   of the poet of a far-away shore

                  and mingled their voices in a paean of rejoicing……….

                  Iran, crowned with a new glory

                 by the honour from thy hand 

                 this birthday of the poet from a far-away shore

                 finds its fulfilment.

               And in return I bind this wreath of my verse

              on thy forehead, and cry: Victory to Iran!

This short poem, all of three stanzas long, finds its place in the 1933 anthology of Tagore’s poems titled Parishesh (The Ending). And it has a fascinating history that could do with a retelling today, his birthday, for a number of reasons, not least being that it was also written on his birthday. That was in Tehran. On the poet’s seventy-first birthday, one of the not many birthdays when Tagore happened to be away from home.

In the course of his extended travels across Iran in April-May, 1932, Tagore was warmly received by the country’s writers, artists, thought-leaders, government officials and ordinary citizens alike. The high point of the trip was the poet’s birthday celebrations on May 6, 1932, his birthday according to the Bengali calendar that year. Tagore was deeply moved by the wonderfully heart-felt felicitations which, he believed, spoke as much to Iran’s great love for himself as to its deep admiration for India. The little poem given above was a spontaneous outpouring of the poet’s gratitude to Iran and its people. 

Former Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar along with former speaker of the Iranian parliament (Majlis), Dr. Ali Larijani unveiled the Persian version of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem on Iran in Tehran on November 2, 2011. Photo: PIB.

Before we turn to how Tagore’s visit panned out, an interesting, and I think important, aside: Ms Kumar unveiled the plaque bearing the Tagore poem in company with her Iranian counterpart: the then speaker of the Iranian parliament (Majlis) Ali Larijani. When he was assassinated in Tehran in a targeted Israeli strike on March 17, 2026, Larijani was the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNCC), the country’s highest decision-making body. He had graduate degrees in mathematics, computer science and philosophy, was a scholar of Immanuel Kant and had been a university professor, a........

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