Tagore’s 1921 speech preserved at Humboldt

A treasured 1921 speech of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, recorded on a shellac disc, is preserved in a sound archive at Humboldt University.

Tagore delivered the lecture, “The message of the forest”, in Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University (present-day Humboldt University) for the first time on June 1, 1921. He went on to give an encore in front of thousands of listeners at the University on June 2 owing to the overwhelming response the speech received.

The recording of the final passage of the speech is kept in the varsity’s Lautarchiv (sound archive). This archive was founded by the linguist Wilhelm Albrecht Doegen in 1920.

The archive owns some 7,500 historic shellac discs with the voices of important personalities from the early-20th century as well as sample recordings of different German dialects and foreign languages as, for instance, Bengali, Hindi, Nepali, Punjabi, Sinhalese, Tamil, as well as Nepalese Gurung and Limbu.

At present, the only publicly visible memorial for Tagore’s connection with Humboldt University is his large bust by Gautam Satya Pal, a gift from the Government of India unveiled in the Institute for Asian and African Studies in 2006. After the 1921 visit, Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel laureate, visited Germany in 1926 and again in 1930.

A copy of the recording of the lecture travelled to India in 1959 when the former German Democratic Republic Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl sought to get his Indian counterpart Jawaharlal Nehru’s support for the official recognition of the East German State, according to official sources at the German Consulate here.