You are right to note the 150th anniversary of the birth of the poet Rabindranath Tagore but neglect his politics in your editorial (The poet at 150, 30 April). For example, he repudiated his knighthood in protest against the Amritsar massacre in 1919, which he got in 1915 from George V, while denouncing the Raj and advocating independence from Britain. Furthermore, he wrote the song Amar Shonar Bangla in 1905 in response to the partition of Bengal by Curzon along communal lines, raising public consciousness against the political divide. The song was later adopted by Bangladesh as its national anthem.
Its relevance can be seen with the recent Foreign Office batch of documents released revealing the "guilty secret" of the end of empire suggesting we weren't as benign as we like to imagine. If we had Tagorians today we should have members of the great and the good similarly handing back their royal titles and awards, now we know what evil deeds were committed at the end of the empire in East Africa. So in short he was very much a political poet, using his words and deeds to move people and that's a very important part of his legacy.
Murad Qureshi
London
• We are pleased that you are urging your readers to rediscover just how "various and interesting" a man Tagore was. Yes, "various and interesting" but he is also as relevant to our time as ever. Even at the expense of disagreeing with his friend, Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore stood for universal values above nationalism. For this very reason the Dartington Hall Trust, for which Tagore was the inspiration, has established an annual Tagore festival, held at Dartington in Devon. While celebrating the artistic and visionary significance of the man, we also wish to highlight, via the festival, the contemporary importance of his life and imagination in transforming our social, political and environmental consciousness so humanity may live in harmony with itself and the earth.
David Green Chairman, Dartington Hall Trust
Satish Kumar Resurgence magazine