Song and dance to celebrate Indian Bard's anniversary

He's been dubbed India's very own Robert Burns and is regarded by many as the greatest writer in modern Indian literature.

Now, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rabindranath Tagore is being celebrated at one of the Capital's universities. To mark his life, Edinburgh Napier University has been holding events featuring some of India's finest academics and artists at its Craiglockhart campus.

Festivities and seminars also took place around the world to celebrate the life of the Indian poet, philosopher and artist, who died in 1941 at the age of 80.

Principal and vice chancellor of Edinburgh Napier University Professor Dame Joan Stringer said: "As a university, we research and celebrate the very best human minds, from Robert Louis Stevenson to modern day business entrepreneurs.

"Tagore was India's Bard and an inspirational person whom Edinburgh Napier University enjoyed showcasing. Our links with India are very strong and we have around 900 Indian students at the university."

The university even hopes to set up a Scottish Centre for Tagore Studies in future.

If funding is secured from the Indian Government, the Tagore Centre would include a library with books and journals by and on Tagore, and other writers who shared his ideas, as well as an interactive website to spread his works.

Around 50 people attended a lecture by Professor Uma Das Gupta, historian and Tagore biographer, at Edinburgh Napier last week, and up to 100 people turned out to a song and dance event at the university the following night.

Musician Sonali Ray entertained the crowd by singing and playing the harmonium alongside her husband Anjan Ghosh, who played the Indian tabla drums.

Dancers then took to the stage for the evening's finale, including Phule phule dhole dhole and Purano shei diner kotha - Tagore's adaptations of Burns' Ye Banks and Braes and Auld Lang Syne.

Spectators were also treated to a performance from India's "dancing queen" Professor Amita Dutt.

A Bengali poet and novelist, Tagore - who founded the Visva-Bharati University in Bengal - was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

In his early 50s, he turned himself into a pro-active bilingual writer by translating a group of his poems which became his English Gitanjali - the Bengali book for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature - and much more.

He was an accomplished artist, an educationist, an environmentalist, a rural reconstructionist, a political thinker and philosopher. India's Bard also had links with Scotland after establishing a close friendship with Edinburgh stalwarts Patrick Geddes - the pioneering Scottish town planner - and his son Arthur.

The 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth was May 7.