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 commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and the country’s top nuclear envoy. (Before his latest stint, in fact, Larijani had been the SNCC’s secretary once earlier as well.) It’s not easy to visualise another statesman-academic anywhere in the world who could wear so many different hats as effortlessly as Larijani did. Large swathes of Western media, however, insist on straitjacketing Larijani as chief tormentor of democracy in Iran – and no more. Which is far from surprising, though. The West has taught itself to think of the world outside of it only in terms of a virtuous/evil binary, and everything about Iran is firmly, indubitably evil. Nuance is not the ‘liberal’ West’s strongest suit in the 21st century. The peripatetic poetTagore had been a keen traveller since his early years and confessed to his wanderlust often enough. He had travelled widely, and repeatedly, across western, northern and eastern Europe, the US, Japan, China, southeast Asia, Egypt, Canada, Mexico. Brazil, Argentina…. However, the two countries he didn’t visit until the 1930s (when he was into his seventies) – Russia in 1930 and Iran in 1932 – happened to be the only ones about which he movingly wrote that his ‘life’s pilgrimage’ would have remained incomplete had he not been to these lands. It’s more than a little surprising, therefore, that while most of his travelogues are well-known and very popular reads – and he wrote a great many of them – his elegantly-written travel diary of Iran (titled Parasya-Yatri, or ‘A Traveller in Iran’) has attracted relatively little attention, even in India. This, despite the close and organic links between the cultures of India and Iran that date back millenia. Tagore was always keenly aware of those affinities, as witness his Hibbert lectures at Oxford delivered in 1930 where he said:It has been a matter of supreme satisfaction to me to realise that the purification of faith which was the mission of the great teachers in both communities, in Persia and in India, followed a similar line.It is to those historical links that Jawaharlal Nehru was alluding in his Discovery of India (1946) when he wrote:Few peoples have been more closely related, in origin and throughout history, than the people of India and the people of Iran.The chief of Iran’s cultural mission to India seemed to second Nehru when he wrote this on the eve of India’s independence:The Iranians and the Indians are like two brothers who, according to a Persian legend, had got separated from each other, one going east and the other to the west. Their families had forgotten all about each other, too, and the only thing that remained in common between them were the snatches of a few old songs which they still played on their flutes. It was through these songs that, after a lapse of centuries, the two families recognised each other and were reunited.Iran and TagoreTagore’s sojourn in Iran went a long way in sealing that reunion. And who could fill the bill as India’s cultural ambassador to Iran better than the poet? It’s not only that he had intimate familiarity with Iran’s political and cultural history, he had long known and admired the work of some of Iran’s greatest poets. As he had occasion to tell his Iranian audiences many times during his visit, he had been exposed to the sublime mystic lyricism of (the great 14th-century Persian poet) Hafiz’s poetry when he was still very young. Tagore’s father, the formidable classics scholar and religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, was widely read in Persian literature and he often recited Hafiz’s verses to young Rabindranath and explained their meaning. Indeed, while visiting Hafiz’s mausoleum in Shiraz – a visit that moved him deeply – Tagore told everyone present that he was paying his respects at a shrine his dead father had had the highest reverence for but could never visit. He went on to add in his travel diary:Sitting near the tomb a signal flashed through my mind, a signal from the bright and smiling eyes of the poet on a long past spring day. I had the distinct feeling that after a lapse of many centuries, across the span of many deaths and births, sitting near this tomb was another wayfarer who had tied a bond with Hafiz. So the poet who had had bouts of ill health in recent years and nearly made up his mind not to venture out on long trips any more, couldn’t yet resist the urge to travel to Iran when King Reza Shah Pahlavi extended an invitation to Tagore to visit Iran and be the king’s guest. The invite came in late 1931 and was relayed via different channels including Iran’s Consul-General. Rabindranath Tagore about to board his flight to Iran. Photo: Public domain.Tagore hesitated at first but, as he writes in his diary, soon sensed that it would be wrong of him to turn down such a heartfelt invite. He was also eager to see for himself how Iran, after years of strife that pulled it violently in different directions and threatened to balkanize it, was reimagining itself under the new king. Tagore was aware how, since he came to power in 1925, Reza Shah was known to have dedicated himself to fashioning Iran into a non-sectarian, socially- and culturally- progressive society. He had initiated far-reaching reforms to the country’s educational and social infrastructure, promoted liberal and science education, and launched public initiatives to educate women and free them from familial and societal regimentation.Tagore was also heartened that while Iran under Reza Shah had begun a drive to embrace Western modernity, it was not doing so by jettisoning its rich cultural traditions. On the contrary, so the poet believed, Iran was modernising within the broad framework of its own, vibrant, centuries-old culture. The new initiatives and the new openness in state policy were helping build some kind of a national consensus around the path forward for modern-day Iran. That path envisaged a national regeneration in which the broad population participated with enthusiasm and hope. That, the poet fervently hoped, could be a model for all Asia which had been enervated by centuries of colonial neglect, superstition, religious intolerance, listlessness and lack of initiative. He accepted the invitation gratefully.A reassuring test flightBut there were concerns about his frail health not holding up to the 4,000-km journey to Tehran. Neither a long sea journey, nor a mix of ship and rail transfers, was considered desirable by the poet’s doctors, especially as it could be very warm out on the sea at that time of the year. Incredible as it may sound today, passenger air travel was virtually unknown in India at that point. Indeed, even though Tagore had travelled around half of the world and more, he had flown only once earlier– that, too, on a short-haul London-to-Paris flight way back in April, 1921. But, on this occasion, the only feasible mode of travel to Iran looked to be by air. The Dutch KLM airline provided a potential flying option out of Calcutta (now Kolkata). But worries still persisted about whether Tagore could cope with the strain of flying. Would the old and ailing poet be really up to the lengthy and demanding flight, his friends and well-wishers wondered? At that point, the Dutch Consul General in Calcutta came up with a brilliant suggestion: why doesn’t Tagore try out a short test flight to settle the swirling questions over his ‘flying fitness’? At the Consul’s initiative, KLM arranged for the poet a short test ride over Calcutta’s skies on February 21, 1932. The Consul and his wife accompanied Tagore on the 25-minute flight which climbed to a peak height of 12000 feet above ground. But for the roar of the airplane’s engine which was an invariable feature of all air-travel at that time, the poet was comfortable throughout that joy- ride and even enjoyed it. That helped set at rest all uncertainties about the planned trip to Iran. The ‘test flight’ was the talk of the town for some days thereafter, and Tagore’s nephew – the supremely-talented painter and graphic artist Gaganendranath Tagore (Abanindranath Tagore’s elder brother) – regaled Calcuttans with a hilarious cartoon marking the occasion.On to the land of HafizEventually it was early in the morning of April 11, 1932 that Tagore set off on his journey to Iran. Keeping him company were Pratima Tagore, the poet’s daughter-in-law, and the poet Amiya Chakraborty, his literary secretary. The aeroplane was a blue Fokker F-12 triple-engine carrier operated by KLM.Photo: Public domain.Taking off from Calcutta’s Dumdum airport, the flight made pit stops at Allahabad, Jodhpur (where it halted for the night), Karachi, and Jask (the tiny seaside Iranian desert town where they halted for the night on April 12) before ending the journey at Bushehr, arriving into this important port city in southwestern Iran on the morning of April 13, 1932, a Wednesday. Counting the four stop-overs, the journey took well over fifty hours. Tagore’s visit as a guest of the Iranian state started off in Bushehr.But that’s a story for another day. For now, let us take a quick look at the overnight halt town of Jask which, in Tagore’s time, was an unremarkable pit stop for aircraft refuelling, with miles and miles of desert sand all around and hemmed in on the south by the Gulf of Oman. Today, however, Jask’s location has handed Iran a potentially important strategic advantage in its ongoing conflict with the US. This arises from the fact that oil exports/deliveries from this port town can bypass the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by making use of the Goreh-Jask oil pipeline which enables transport of a million barrels of crude oil to the Jask terminal from inland Iran. So Jask is no longer a nondescript little town in the middle of nowhere. One imagines Tagore, who considered himself to be greatly in Iran’s spiritual debt, wouldn’t have disapproved.Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com