William Butler Yeats: The India Connection: Kabir and Tagore

Key Note Address by Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri: A distinguished academician, cultural administrator, cultural diplomat, Former First Tagore Chair at the Edinburgh Napier University and Chair of Indian studies at Bucharest University. Former Secretary National Academy of Letters and Director of The Nehru Centre, London and author of distinction

Panel discussion

Chair: Shri Soli J. Sorabjee, President IIC

Speakers:

A Dance on Deathless Feet: Unmasking Yeats’s India Connection

By Prof. Anisur Rahman, Professor of English and Honorary Director Centre for Coaching and Career Planning, Jamia Millia Islamia

Yeats’s Interest in India

By Professor R.W. Desai, noted Professor of English of Delhi University (retd.)

And Dr Keith Hopper 

At 15:00:  Documentary Films

1.      Affairs of the Heart: Yeats and the Women in His Life (16 min)

2.      Players and the Painted Stage: Yeats and the Theatre ( 25 min)

3.      The Other World: Yeats and the Theatre (15 min)

4.      The Mask: Yeats, the Public Man (25 min)

17:30: Readings and Performance

Readings from ten poems by Yeats and the contemporary artists like Kathleen Watking; Theo Dorgan; Sinead O’Conner;  Seamus Heaney; Donna Dent; Paula Meehan;  Ulick O’Conner; and Katherine Wade

Introduction: Dr. Santosh Pall, retired teacher of English from Delhi University is a Yeats scholar, Odissi dancer, freelance writer

Followed by

Readings by Sunit Tandon, Director General, Indian Institute of Mass Communication and Bhaskar Ghose, Formerly Director General, Doordarshan, Secretary, Department of Culture, Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Both are members of Yatrik Theatre Group

19.00:  Purgatory

A play by W.B. Yeats presented by Shaw's Corner  

Courtesy Dr Vinod Bala Sharma, Former Faculty member Mata Sundari College, University of Delhi

First presented in at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 19 August 1938 (a few months before Yeats' death), the play is about decline and fall of a family through its two remaining members: an Old Man (the father) and a Boy (his sixteen-year-old son). It is set outside the former family home, which the Old Man's father had drunkenly burned down, leading him to kill his father as the building perished. The Boy is skeptical about tales of his family's former grandeur, and is repelled by the Old Man's story of losing his own mother as she gave birth to him, and the decline subsequent events wrought on the family. Tonight, the Old Man tells the Boy, is the anniversary of his mother's wedding night. This was the night on which he was conceived after a bout of drunken carousing by his father, and thus when his mother's fate was sealed. At this point a ghostly figure appears illuminated in a window of the wrecked house. In an attempt to wrest his mother's soul from Purgatory, he suddenly stabs and kills the Boy. However it appears to be in vain: approaching hoof beats of his ghostly father returning to the bridal bed signal that no spirits have left the place, and the grim cycle begins again...

Yeats had been strongly influenced by the Noh theatre of Japan in the later years of his life and is seen through Yeats' use of the spirits of the Old Man's parents as a metaphor for the family's decline and of death and rebirth. Similarly, the sparseness of the setting, the use of only two characters and the play's relative brevity

(Collaboration: Embassy of Ireland)