A brilliant and outstanding poet, Rabindranath Tagore was also a novelist, painter, educator, musician and a playwright. He is universally recognised as the major classic writer of Bengal.

During his long, prolific and highly influential career, he was a leading figure of the Indian National movement, a contemporary of Gandhi, composer of the Indian and the Bangladesh National anthems, a powerful social, political and educational thinker and a winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Tasher Desh – The Kingdom of Cards, was written in 1933. Tagore was inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Western opera when he wrote Tasher Desh. It is a satirical portrayal of a society ruled by strict conventions. It is a cheerful, humorous, satirical play infused with the spirit of life.

A prince and his friend on a sea faring adventure land in a country of cards and encounter artificial unreality of a rule bound social system – a land so dead that can only come to life through a heavy dose of human desire, aspiration, idealism and laughter. Tagore uses the rigid metaphor of the cards to ridicule the sterility of caste, class and regulation. And only the wild, chaotic and subversive nature of the Prince or the human spirit can demolish this arthritic rigidity and compel effective change. As the subversive influence of the humans starts to spread through the Cards, the incongruity of the stratified and fossilised Card Country becomes unsettling absurdity within the card country itself.

The music of Tasher Desh is a stylistic blend of Indian classical music ragas and Western opera unique to Tagore and known as Rabindra Sangeet. The play is performed in English while the songs are done in the original Bengali.

Although he started in the nineteenth century, he became a Modern, never detaching his poetry and other works from the times in which he lived, always striving to extend his range and break literary conventions. According to William Radice – translator of his poems, “He carried his romanticism intact into the modern world, used it as a sceptre and a torch. Thus to children of neo-romanticism of the 1960’s …his educational ideals, his anti-materialism, his feminism, his version of the spiritual are all familiar. In this he is near.”

2011 is marked as the celebration of his 150th birth anniversary in India and across the world. The presentation of his play “Tasher Desh – The Kingdom of Cards” is our tribute to this genius of the modern Indian literature.