Vishva-Bharti Shantiniketan :- Rabindranath, Social Reforms and Education.

"Rabindranath Tagore" - a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter, is not a new name for us. We have already portrayed his life beautifully in the blog :- Rabindranath Tagore and his eternal legacy

He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of us know him as the composer of India's National Anthem Jan-Gan-Man and also as the composer of Bangladesh's National Anthem Amar Shonar Bangla. He was also the first non-eurpoean individual to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, authoring Gitanjali - a beautiful poetical masterpiece.

Most of us do know his literary works. Apart from this, a very few people might remember him as a key initiater of the Bang-bhang movement and here it ends. What we'll do in today's blog is to study him as a social reformer and an educationist. When I got to know Rabindranath, as it were, in his all colours, I was simply stunned at his complexity of character and richness of thought. Therefore I write this blog to publicize that.

In 1862, Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath, was taking a boat ride through Birbhum, the westernmost corner of Bengal, when he came across a landscape that struck him as the perfect place for meditation. Captivated by the kaleidoscopic beauty of the luxuriantly canopied chhatim trees and palm groves that offered shade in the rugged, red coloured terrain, he bought the large tract of land that had charmed him, built a small house and planted some saplings around it.

At that time, the area was called Bhubandanga after a local dacoit named Bhuban Dakat, but Debendranath Tagore decided to call the place Santiniketan, or the ‘abode of peace’, because of the serenity it brought to his soul. In 1863, he turned it into a spiritual centre where people from all religions, castes and creeds came and participated in meditation.

In the years that followed, Debendranath’s son Rabindranath went on to become one of the most formidable literary forces India has ever produced. As one of the earliest educators to think in terms of the global village, he envisioned an education that was deeply rooted in one’s immediate surroundings but connected to the cultures of the wider world.

With this in mind, on December 22, 1901, Rabindranath Tagore established an experimental school at Santiniketan with five students (including his eldest son) and an equal number of teachers. He originally named it Brahmacharya Ashram, in the tradition of ancient forest hermitages called tapoban.

The guiding principle of this little school is best described in Tagore’s own words,

“The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.”

Blending the best of western and traditional eastern systems of education, the curriculum revolved organically around nature with classes being held in the open air. Tagore wanted his students to feel free despite being in the formal learning environment of a school, because he himself had dropped out of school when he found himself unable to think and felt claustrophobic within the four walls of a classroom.

In the year 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his book of poems Gitanjali. The award enhanced the prestige of Santiniketan and in 1921, Tagore converted the little school into a university called the Visva Bharati. The motto that Tagore chose for the Visva Bharati University, Yatra visvam bhavatyekanidam (where the whole world can find a nest), reflected his aspirations for the institution.

Tagore was one of the first to support and bring together different forms of arts at Santiniketan. He invited artists and scholars from other parts of India and all over the world to live together at Santiniketan on a daily basis and share their cultures with the students of Visva Bharati. He once wrote:

“Without music and the fine arts, a nation lacks its highest means of national self-expression and the people remain inarticulate.”

After knowing about Shantiniketan, I could straightaway feel intimately relatable to Rabindranath's idea. He first explored the universe in the shoes of a poet, walked the paths of life with the feet of a philosopher, and felt that the most painful pinch in his walkway, the most agonizing thorn, is our entirely cracked, deeply fractured education system!

It was very bold of him to experiment on education, which most of us now do not even dare to dream of. Ah, what to talk of today! We first found ourselves uncomfortable in our 1986 Education Policy as early as in 2020..freaking 34 years later - and still we're awaiting the implementation of its 2020 model.

Let me extract Rabindranath's own comments on nation building and Shantiniketan's role in it.

The people are living beings. They have their distinct personalities. But nations are organizations of power, and therefore their inner aspects and outward expressions are everywhere monotonously the same. Their differences are merely differences in degree of efficiency.

The peoples, being personalities, must have their self-expression, and this leads to their distinctive creations. These creations are literature, art, social symbols and ceremonials. They are like different dishes at one common feast. They add richness to our enjoyment and understanding truth.

Man as a person has his individuality, which is the field where his spirit has its freedom to express itself and to grow. The professional man carries a rigid crust around him which has very little variation and hardly any elasticity. This professionalism is the region where men specialise their knowledge and organise their power, mercilessly elbowing each other in their struggle to come to the front. Professionalism is necessary, without doubt; but it must not be allowed to exceed its healthy limits, to assume complete mastery over the personal man, making him narrow and hard, exclusively intent upon pursuit of success at the cost of his faith in ideals.

Being strongly impressed with the need and the responsibility, which every individual to-day must realise according to his power, I have formed the nucleus of an International University in India, as one of the best means of promoting mutual understanding between the East and the West. This Institution, according to the plan I have in mind, will invite students from the West to study the different systems of Indian philosophy, literature, art and music in their proper environment, encouraging them to carry on research work in collaboration with the scholars already engaged in this task.

India has her renaissance. She is preparing to make her contribution to the world of the future. In the past she produced her great culture, and in the present age she has an equally important contribution to make to the culture of the New World which is emerging from the wreckage of the Old. This is a momentous period of her history pregnant with precious possibilities, when any disinterested offer of co-operation from any part of the West will have an immense moral value, the memory of which will become brighter as the regeneration of the East grows in vigour and creative power.

Mind, when long deprived of it natural food of truth and freedom of growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students have fallen victims in the mania for success in examinations. Success consists in obtaining the largest number of marks with the strictest economy of knowledge. It is a deliberate cultivation of disloyalty to truth, of intellectual dishonesty, of a foolish imposition by which the mind is encouraged to rob itself. But as we are by means of it made to forget the existence of mind, we are supremely happy at the result. We pass examinations, and shrivel up into clerks, lawyers and police inspectors, and we die young.

Universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge. Through them the people should offer their intellectual hospitality, their wealth of mind to others, and earn their proud right in return to receive gifts from the rest of the world. But in the whole length and breadth of India there is not a single University established in the modern time where a foreign or an Indian student can properly be acquainted with the best products of the Indian mind. For that we have to cross the sea, and knock at the doors of France and Germany. Educational institutions in our country are India's alms-bowl of knowledge, they lower our intellectual self-respect; they encourage us to make a foolish display of decorations composed of borrowed feathers.

This it was that led me to found a school in Bengal, in face of many difficulties and discouragements, and in spite of my own vocation as a poet, who finds this true inspiration only when he forgets that he is a schoolmaster. It is my hope that in this school a nucleus has been formed, round which an indigenous University of our own land will find its natural growth a University which will help India's mind to concentrate and to be fully conscious of itself; free to seek the truth and make this truth its own wherever found, to judge by its own standard, give expression to its own creative genius, and offer its wisdom to the guests who come from other parts of the world.

What I find about Shantiniketan is it followed the footsteps of the ancient university of Nalanda. It invited every culture and art to showcase itself and promised the best education of its own motherland.

I hope this blog was informative and optimistic. Let us see if we too can experiment with education to make it more better for the Modern India. Amen!

Daksh Parekh.