Tagore @ a click

Rabindranath Tagore’s works…now just a click away. Ahead of his birth sesquicentenary next year, the Society for Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR), an organisation funded by the West Bengal Government’s IT department, presented the bard’s admirers with a virtual Tagore library in Bengali. The website www.c-rachanabali.nltr.org hosts the myriad-minded poet’s formidable body of works in its entirety.

“We want to reach audiences around the world who can read Tagore (in Bengali),” said Anupam Basu, Professor of Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT, Kharagpur, and honorary director of SNLTR. The website containing the Bard of Bengal’s songs, poems, short stories, novels, plays and other works was launched by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee at the Writers’ Buildings earlier this month. Two teams from IIT-Kharagpur and BESU, Shibpur provided the technical knowhow into the project.

The website is the first comprehensive online portal of Tagore’s works, though there have been sporadic efforts to give him an online presence. However, most of the efforts fizzled out due to lack of funds or proper expertise.

The three main components of the task were digitisation of Tagore’s works into a Unicode font, organising the works and creating a search engine.

A major obstacle in the project was the absence of a good web-compatible Unicode Bengali font that allows people to read Bengali text on the web smoothly. This was tackled by SNLTR’s new set of Bengali Unicode fonts – Bangla Academy and Vidya. Prof. Suryasarthi Barat, Director of BESU and a member of SNLTR, had told ILK in an earlier interview, “Bringing Tagore online has been our dream for a long time. But along with this, what we are also trying to do is use the Unicode as a standard so that people all over can make proper use of the site.”

Font problem aside, another issue that cropped up was Tagore’s unique spelling style. This was solved by following the standard set by Vishwabharati, the university Tagore founded. Pabitra Sarkar, eminent Bengali language expert and academic, who is also a prominent member of SNLTR, had said earlier, “There is no way to ascertain the exact spellings Tagore wrote. So, we choose to follow whatever Vishwabharati published as the standard.”

Many readers would not be able to share the experience of reading Tagore’s complete works on the website due to the absence of a translated version, feel some city intellectuals. When asked about it, Anupam Basu stated that translating Tagore’s works would be a different project altogether.

Many may not be able to read Tagore in the original script. But those who can are busy immersing themselves in his works – online.


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