Kolkata :

The friendship of two legends — Dilipkumar Roy, musician and author, and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who was the premier of Bengal in British India and the fifth prime minister of Pakistan — was celebrated in the city on Friday, with Sri Aurobindo Institute of Culture and Hari Krishna Mandir Trust, Pune, in collaboration with the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture presenting the eighth ‘Dilipkumar Roy Memorial Lecture’.

Mofidul Hoque, trustee and member secretary of Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, was the keynote speaker. RMIC secretary Swami Suparnananda addressed the audience first, with high praise for Roy’s devotion and his musical genius.

Sankar Bandyopadhyay, HKMT secretary, recounted his experiences with Roy. “We called him ‘Dadaji’. Everything he did was guided by his spirituality. Though he travelled abroad, learned foreign music and brought new forms and innovations to India, his sole aim was ‘Bhagabat darshan’. There are several misconceptions about him, one of them being he was at odds with Rabindranath Tagore. But that is untrue. Tagore loved him like a son.”

Hoque narrated the journey of both Roy and Suhrawardy, both of whom travelled abroad in the early 20th century. “In 1919, Roy went to Cambridge for higher studies. Subhash Chandra Bose, too, was in England, but neck-deep into the freedom struggle. Bose had arranged for Roy’s accommodation, in between contacting the Irish rebels and travelling to Germany to scout for Indian fighters. Suhrawardy sailed to Paris in 1909. He went to Oxford and graduated in 1914,” Hoque said. He went on to describe how Suhrawardy befriended Jawaharlal Nehru while in Oxford and how Tagore’s Nobel win charged the entire Indian fraternity.

Educationist Sourindranath Bhattacharya and Ranjan Mitra, secretary at Sri Aurobindo Institute of Culture, too shared the stage.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Kolkata / TNN / June 28th, 2014