Paper Boats

Paper Boats (1913) is an illustration by Surendranath Ganguly (1885–1909; name also appears in sources as “Ganguli” and “Ganguili”) for Rabindranath Tagore’s poem Paper Boats. It was published as one of eight colour plates in the Macmillan edition of The Crescent Moon, which Tagore translated from the Bengali himself (Tagore, 1913). The plate is credited as “from a drawing by Surendranath Ganguli” (Tagore, 1913). Ganguly also contributed a second plate, Benediction (Tagore, 1913). The Wikimedia Commons record gives the date as 1913 and notes that the image is in the public domain because the artist died in 1909 (Wikimedia Commons, 2006). The work must therefore have been produced before the book appeared. The original medium, dimensions and present location are not documented in the sources consulted, so any claim about materials here is inference from the artist’s training and milieu. Ganguly got training at the Government School of Art, in Calcutta, under E. B. Havell and Abanindranath Tagore (Prinseps, 2023). That training places him in the Bengal School, a Swadeshi-era movement that drew on Mughal, Rajput and Japanese models (Study of the Mother Archetype, 2025). The Bengal School’s characteristic wash technique has been linked to Abanindranath’s pan-Asian outlook and to the presence of Japanese artists in Calcutta through the friendship between Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Kakuzō (Study of the Mother Archetype, 2025). Okakura’s role in bringing Japanese painters to Bengal is also emphasised in scholarship on Japan–Bengal exchange (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, n.d.). I think watercolour wash on paper would therefore be the likeliest medium for a work of this circle, but this remains a contextual inference rather than a documented fact. The poem itself concerns a child who floats paper boats downstream. The child writes his name and his village on them, hoping a stranger in a distant land will find them (Tagore, 1913). In this reading the work expresses a child’s imagination and a longing for connection beyond the local world. Published in the year of Tagore’s Nobel Prize, the plate also shows Bengal School artists reaching an English-language readership through the poet’s international reputation. That interpretation is mine, not a claim made in the sources.