Tagore consistently argued that a truly Indian school must from the very beginning implement its acquired knowledge of economics, agriculture, health and all other everyday sciences in the surrounding villages; then alone can that school become the centre of the country’s way of living.
The poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the founder of an institution that we know today as Visva-Bharati University in the twin campuses of Santiniketan and Sriniketan in rural southern Bengal about a hundred miles north west of Calcutta. Starting it as an experimental school in 1901 he added an international university and an institute of rural reconstruction in 1921 and 1922. The making of this institution was central to his national and international concerns throughout his life. It was an education which sought to work for a common humanity, locally and globally, an institution that was to be unhindered by the territorially bounded model of the nation-state. The goal was India’s entry into the universal, as it were.
But this endeavour is a relatively unexplored dimension of Tagore’s biography. He is feted as a literary genius which he certainly was, but not seriously remembered as an educationist and rural reformer. By his own admission, the work he did for education and rural reconstruction was vital to him even if it meant living with a dialectical tension or a tension of opposites in his life. But the sad fact is that while Tagore continues to be celebrated, and rightly so, his cosmopolitan educational project in the Santiniketan and Sriniketan schools and Visva-Bharati ‘one-nest-world’ university has been marginalized by the imperatives of a competitive capitalism and nationalism.
Rabindranath Tagore । Illustration by MAYANK MANNA
MAYANK MANNA, is a 10th standard student of Vivekananda Mission School, Haldia, West Bengal. He is passionate about being an artist and can be reached at manasmanna.1979@yahoo.com
He took up the work when he was about forty years of age, till which time he had only been following his literary pursuits. He believed he had no gift for practical work and acknowledged he was no leader of men nor moral preceptor. Why then did he do it? Even to himself, he was first and foremost a poet — and to his nationalist contemporaries, except for Gandhi and Nehru who greatly valued his life’s work, and his ideal of an inclusive nationalism, to the rest of the nationalist leadership these were only a “poet’s fancy”? I would like to submit that Tagore thought and worked on three focussed goals in experimenting with his ideas of education and nationalism. First that, education rests where there is a natural field for the growth of scholarly learning, Second, that the fundamental purpose of a university is to produce scholarship and, third, to spread the ideal. To do this it was necessary to invite intellectuals and scholars who were devoted to research and discovery and creativity in their fields. A meeting-place of those minds was therefore conceived to be the right venue for a true university. In his prescience he knew it would not really work to replicate a foreign university. Education had to be intimately associated with the life of the people which a foreign university could not be. Tagore consistently argued that a truly Indian school must from the very beginning implement its acquired knowledge of economics, agriculture, health and all other everyday sciences in the surrounding villages; then alone can that school become the centre of the country’s way of living. This was the approach of total activity in his Visva-Bharati institutions at Santiniketan and Sriniketan.
Author of the books Friendships of ‘Largeness and Freedom’, Andrews, Tagore and Gandhi: An Epistolary Account, 1912-1940, Rabindranath Tagore an Illustrated life, Santiniketan and Sriniketan, Rabindranath Tagore: My Life in My Words and, several articles on Tagore. Can be reached at udasgupta@gmail.com
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