The Hindu : National : Vietnamese leader at Tagore home

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Tuesday, Sep 04, 2007
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Vietnamese leader at Tagore home

Antara Das

Kolkata: The ancestral home of the Tagore family at Jorasanko had an important visitor on Monday: Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the Vietnamese revolutionary leader.

For her, the poet Rabindranath Tagore was as important as the visionary, who visited Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1929 and was warmly received there. He even donned the traditional Vietnamese costume.

“Tagore, as a representative of the Indian people, visited us very early in the day,” she said. That event should serve to strengthen the friendship between the two countries, she added.

“The victory of the Vietnamese people against oppression owed a lot to the support from people in India in general, and Kolkata in particular,” Madame Binh said. The two countries should stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the struggle to achieve a better society, she added.

Madame Binh, accompanied by a 36-member delegation, visited galleries in the Tagore Museum in the residential area — now also home to the Rabindra Bharati University. She paid respects at the room where Rabindranath breathed his last.

The Tagore residence — known as ‘Thakurbari’ or the House of the Tagores — has had close ties with Vietnam and its people. Said K.S. Das, Vice-Chancellor, Rabindra Bharati University: “This house, which had been the bedrock of India’s freedom movement and its fight against imperialism, also bears the proud heritage of being visited by Ho Chi Minh himself in 1958, a few years before the University was established.”

Madame Binh was felicitated by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. The Vietnamese delegation is here as part of the three-day Indo-Vietnam Friendship Festival 2007.

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