Santiniketan Then and Now:  A Comparative Study of the Educational Philosophy and Teaching Methods of Rabindranath Tagore and their Continuing Utilization at Visva-Bharati

 

Peggy Sorrell

 

 

International Studies 597

Independent Research Project

Spring 1999

 

Introduction

My original purpose for this paper was to explore the life of Rabindranath Tagore, specifically his role as educator, his educational philosophy and teaching methods, and the schools he founded at Santiniketan, collectively referred to now as Visva-Bharati.  This initial research led me to a questioning of the changes that have materialized at the schools of Santiniketan during the years after Tagore’s death in 1941 and after India’s independence, at which time Visva-Bharati was handed over to the Indian government due to insufficient funding from private sectors.  Because I could find little information on the state of Visva-Bharati during the past fifty years, I chose to further my research in this area and to specifically address the question of whether Tagore’s philosophy and teaching methods continue to be utilized at Santiniketan, and if so, to what extent.

 

Background Information on Santiniketan and Rabindranath Tagore as Educator

            When Rabindranath Tagore gathered a few young boys together in 1901 and began Brachmacharya Ashram, a boarding school at Santiniketan based loosely on the tapovanas, the ancient forest-dwelling communities of men who sought truth among nature, his vision was to provide a learning environment where children would be allowed the freedom to let their creative minds soar beyond schoolhouse walls and dull textbooks.  Twenty years later, he established Visva-Bharati, an institution of higher learning that he envisioned to be a place where not only various cultures of India could share ideas but also where the great minds of the East and West could unite.  A few years after Visva-Bharati was formed, Tagore established Siksha-Satra, a rural school where the village children could learn the skills needed to become self-sufficient.

            The memory of his own disheartening formal education and his great love for children kept Tagore forever busy during the last fifty years of his life keeping his schools at Santiniketan alive, despite social, political, and economic obstacles which threatened to dissolve Santiniketan and his philosophy that “education consists in the training of all the senses, along with the mind instead of cramming the brain with memorized knowledge” (Kripalani, 1962, p. 8).  In his essay “A Poet's School,” Tagore (1997b) refers to a trip with his father to the Himalayas at age ten where he was allowed to roam free and fully explore the wonders of nature, and he states that the “founding of my school had its origin in the memory of that longing for freedom, the memory which seems to go back beyond the sky-line of my birth” (p. 253).

            As a child, Tagore was rarely allowed this freedom, within or outside the classroom.  In My Reminiscences, Tagore (1917) states, “Going out of the house was forbidden to us, in fact we had not even the freedom of all its parts” (p. 12).  He spent many hours sitting on the verandah where “beyond my reach there was this limitless thing called the Outside . . . it seemed to want to play with me through the bars with so many gestures” (Tagore, 1917, p. 13).  He broke down these bars at Santiniketan where the children, weather permitting, learned their lessons outside among nature.  He allowed his students the freedom to take breaks when their minds wandered, and he strongly believed that children learned best when they were allowed to use their whole bodies.  In his lecture, “The Art of Movement in Education,” Tagore states, “I would allow all our boys and girls during class to jump up, even to climb into a tree. . . . This is really why my classes were preferred, not because I was any special good as a teacher”; he further states that by “repressing all activity of the body, so many school lessons remain absolutely dead and ineffective” (Elmhirst & Tagore, 1961, p. 107). 

Tagore felt his own formal education ineffective, not only because he was forbidden this freedom of movement but because he learned in an environment where unfair punishment was utilized, was forced to learn by rote from textbooks written in English instead of his native tongue, and was not allowed to use his imagination in the classroom.  At Santiniketan, he avoided incorporating all that was ineffective in his own childhood learning.  Corporal punishment was replaced with self-discipline.  In the beginning years of Brachmacharya, many of the students were problem children who were sent to the school by parents who wanted to be rid of them.  Ramaswami Sastri (1988) describes Brachmacharya as a republic of sorts where “[d]iscipline is enforced and punishment meted out by captains and courts of school justice elected and constituted every month by the boys” (p. 69).  This form of self-discipline by the children was also incorporated at Siksha-Satra.  Leonard Elmhirst, a graduate of agriculture at Cornell who helped Tagore start the rural school, states, “To encourage the children to set their own bounds and to reason out their own discipline, needs a real faith in their capacity and a real courage—the courage to stand by and watch mistakes being made without constantly interfering to set everything right” (Elmhirst & Tagore, 1961, p. 80).  Awards and prizes were not allowed, for Tagore felt they only produced an unhealthy spirit of competition that created disunity among the students.  He also strongly believed that children needed first to learn in their native tongue, and Tagore (1917) states of his own learning of English that “while one is choking and spluttering over the spelling and grammar, the inside remains starved, and when at length the taste is felt, the appetite has vanished” (p. 42-43).  When teaching English to his students at Santiniketan, he taught not by rote but through action.  When the children needed to learn the English verb “tearing,” he sent them out to tear leaves from a nearby mangoe tree (Elmhirst & Tagore, 1961).

            Tagore very much believed in the creative spirit and learning ability of the individual, that all people learn differently and have within themselves their own special uniqueness that should be explored and then shared to expand the knowledge of others.  He wrote his own textbooks for his pupils because he could not find ones that he felt were suitable, and to make up for times when he had to be away from Santiniketan, he not only wrote songs and plays for his students to sing and act out but participated himself whenever possible.  Music played a large part in Tagore’s life from childhood on, thus he felt it an important part of a child’s learning experience.  In a letter from Chicago where he was lecturing to raise funds for his school, he writes to William Rothenstein, a very close friend during his final thirty years of life:

                        I feel I am very much needed in my school this moment--for a wave of depression seems to have come over the people in charge of the institution in my absence. . . . You know I have my post of the flute player--and I have been absent too long from my work.  My school-people think it is money that they are most in need of, but, it is the music which they really want.   (Lago, 1972, pp. 101-2) 

Tagore (1917) further states, “The main object of teaching is not to explain meanings, but to knock at the door of the mind . . . . For what happens within is much bigger than what he can express in words” (p. 72).  He employed whatever teaching tool he felt necessary, whether it be literature, music, art, or nature, to open the minds of his students.

            Because these learning tools were absent in his own formal education, Tagore ended his schooling at the age of fourteen, and although he often stresses he learned little in the classroom, one could say he learned a lot about how not to learn; therefore, his education was valuable in establishing the philosophy of education that he brought to Santiniketan.  In another  letter to Rothenstein, Tagore writes, “I have a genuine love for all young things.  Feeding their minds with ideas and watching them grow gives me a great delight.  As my method of teaching is not at all mechanical and is adventuresome” (Lago, 1972, p. 252).  In ending this letter, he states that “of all the services to humanity teaching children is the most delightful one, provided it is done with the faith their minds are living and therefore not to be moulded, but nourished” (Lago, 1972, p. 252).    

            This nourishment extended beyond the younger students to those who attended the university.  In his book about the Nehru-Gandhi family, Tariq Ali (1985) speaks of Indira's experiences at Santiniketan when she was seventeen, and he briefly quotes her:  “Indira was reproached by the great man for avoiding his company, so she and her friends would sit at his feet, ‘talk of diverse subjects, watch him paint.  Often he would recite out loud.’  She no longer felt lonely and those times became ‘moments of supreme joy, memories to cherish’ ” (p. 119).  Vivek Ranjan Bhattacharya (1987) also writes of Indira's stay at Santiniketan and its influence on her life:  “For a few days Tagore observed her from a distance.  One day he saw Indira talking and laughing with some other girls.  When they saw him watching them, they fell silent.  Tagore immediately asked:  'Why do you stop laughing?  Are you afraid of me?  Why do not you come near me?  Do you think you would be bored by an old man?’ ” (192).  Bhattacharya (1987) states,  “Indira's stay at Santiniketan was short but the memory lingered.  She never missed the chance of visiting the place,” and in a 1966 speech, Indira says of Tagore, “He stood for the widening of the human vision . . . . All of his pleas and attempts were to lifting the human being to a higher level” (pp. 194-95).

            Another student, Satyajit Ray, who came to Visva-Bharati in 1940 to learn commercial art, went on to become a renowned film-maker who produced a documentary of Tagore's life along with several films based on Tagore's short stories and novels.  In a 1982 lecture, Satyajit says of his Santiniketan experience that “almost without my being aware of it, the place opened windows for me.  More than anything else, it had brought me an awareness of our tradition, which I knew would serve as a foundation for any branch of art that I wished to pursue,” and that if “Santiniketan did nothing else, it induced contemplation, and a sense of wonder, in the most prosaic and earthbound of minds” (Robinson, 1989, p. 55).  Above all, Tagore's depth of humanity and love for mankind permeated the atmosphere of Santiniketan. 

            Unfortunately, maintaining this atmosphere was not an easy one for Tagore due to financial difficulties and the social and political pressures of the time.  The raising of money to maintain his schools forced Tagore to travel and lecture extensively during his final twenty years of life, even when those travels left him physically and emotionally exhausted.  He sold his house at Puri and some of his wife's jewelry to support the ashrama where tuition and boarding were minimal and would have been free if Tagore had had the money.  When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the prize money went directly to fund Santiniketan as did also the proceeds from the sale of his published Bengali literature.  Kripalani (1962) states that by 1934, Santiniketan “threatened to become a white elephant which everyone was willing to admire but no one ready to pay for,” and that in India at that time, “the moneyed class pour offerings either in the laps of priests or in the pockets of politicians”; he then quotes Tagore who states, “If only I could put on an ochre wrap or a loin-cloth and hold a rosary in hand, money would pour in” (p. 377).  Kripalani (1962) further states that when “a Hindu millionaire offered a lavish amount for a girls' hostel in Santiniketan, provided it would be reserved for Hindu girls only,” Tagore refused the offer (p. 377).  Tagore had refused money at others time when the donors placed social or political stipulations on their offers.  Tagore's own position on politics was a deterrent to keeping his schools alive.  In 1922, he writes to Rothenstein:

                        When I was last in the United States trying to raise funds for my proposed university the British propaganda party tried their best to frustrate me and succeeded in their mission . . . . My idealism has hardly helped me in my relationship with the authorities in India . . . . After my return from the west I found the atmosphere of my country most unfavourable for my institution” (Lago, 1972, pp. 292-93). 

At this time, the Swadeshi movement and Mahatma Gandhi's support for non-cooperation ran opposite to Tagore's beliefs, for he felt strongly that cooperation was the only way to eventually achieve peace and unity between the East and West.

            Tagore also had trouble finding teachers for Visva-Bharata, not only because of lack of funds but because he wanted scholars who concurred with his philosophy of what constitutes the ideal educator.  In another 1922 letter to Rothenstein, he states, “I hope some day we shall have adequate means to be able to invite from England someone like Prof. Gilbert Murray who has the detachment of mind of a scholar and a broad outlook upon life full of human sympathy” (Lago, 1972, p. 293).  Murray turned down his invitation, and in future letters to Rothenstein, Tagore speaks of other failed attempts to bring scholars to Santiniketan (Lago, 1972).           

            Finding students for Santiniketan was at times as difficult as finding the appropriate teachers because Tagore’s educational philosophy differed from that supported by other schools and universities in India.  Robinson (1989) states that although Satyajit Ray agreed with some of Tagore's philosophies, he was at first hesitant to attend Visva-Bharati because he “concurred with the common Calcutta view of graduates from Santiniketan:  that they were sentimental, intellectually second-rate and, if they were male, effeminate” (p. 47).  Ray initially enrolled mostly to please his family—his father and grandfather were close friends of Tagore (Robinson, 1989). 

            The “effeminate” notion arose partly due to the coeducational aspect.  However, female enrollment was sparse in the early years of Santiniketan because the education of women, especially village women, was at the time not a high priority in India.  During his own formal education, Tagore's younger sister was allowed to attend class with him and the other boys, but he mentions that the teacher did not really care if she learned because she was a girl.  Elmhirst states,  “He would have liked girls also in Siksha-Satra from the start, but village parents were not willing to part with them” (Elmhirst & Tagore, 1961, p. 35).  Bhupendra Nath Sakar (1974) states that Tagore was a pioneer in introducing coeducation in India, and he quotes Tagore on his philosophy of the role of women in education, both as students and educators: 

                        If women do not join hands with men, no institution can truly grow. . . . When I was young, I felt the tyranny of the school.  I felt distressed at school, because there were classes and no individuals. . . . The school in India is a creation of men. . . . The country, I should say, is deprived of the great strength that women potentially have. . . . I have drawn my inspiration from women.  They have given life and brought me up and have been a source of inspiration creating Beauty.   (pp. 38-39)

Elmhirst recalls that when Tagore hired a theatre in Calcutta where his plays could be performed by his students, staff, and himself, he “broke all the ancient traditions about not permitting girls of good and respected families ever to appear in public on the stage whether to sing, dance or act” (Elmhirst & Tagore, 1961, 10).

            Despite these social, economic, and political obstacles that continued to cross Tagore’s path and threaten the future of Santiniketan, his schools are still alive today, though how much they retain of Tagore's vision is unclear.  At the time of  Visva-Bharati’s conception, Rothenstein wrote to Tagore, “[I]f you build well now, the foundations you are laying should support walls to outlast all of us now quick and strong” (Lago, 1972, p. 285).  But even before his death in 1941, Tagore had his doubts.  In a 1937 letter to Elmhirst, he expresses those doubts:

                        I myself attach much more significance to the educational possibilities of Siksha-Satra than to the school and college at Santiniketan, which are every day becoming more and more like so many schools and colleges elsewhere in this country:  borrowed cages that treat the students' minds as captive birds, whose sole human value is judged according to the mechanical repetition of lessons. (Elmhirst & Tagore, 1961, p. 37) 

Tagore (1977a) wrote of those captive birds in his short story, “The Parrot's Training.”  In this story, the professors are so focused on their own abilities to impart knowledge that they fail to recognize the needs of the student, personified in the form of a bird who the professors thought ignorant and in need of a higher education.  They cage the bird, force feed it lessons, and their  teaching method “was so stupendous that the bird looked absurdly unimportant in comparison” (p. 329).  The professors are so bursting with pride in this method that the bird dies unnoticed, stuffed full of worthless information that cuts off its freedom, individual expression, and finally its will to live.

            Mohit Chakrabarti (1988) states that Santiniketan has “stood the test of time,” and that an accurate evaluation of Santiniketan cannot be easily done “from an apparent look or through mere scholastic performances,” but through living there, “spending hours in her silence . . .  enjoying her sunrise and sunset . . . taking active part in seasonal functions and festivals . . . to come closer to Santiniketan and know her not by a casual glance at lifeless eluding statistics but through inner, sensitive, dedicated living” (pp. 82-83).  Chakrabarti (1988) also states that the essence of Tagore's philosophy is currently alive, that Santiniketan still “is, as she should be for ever, an abode of pilgrimage, a solace for bruised civilization and a source of inspiration and reawakening of the goodness of mankind” (p. 82), and that it carries with it the future wish that Tagore expressed in an address given to the ex-students of Santiniketan a decade before his death:  “[M]y hope has been so to enrich the life of this place that those who come here may imbibe the creative urge for an ideal, and carry it into their work outside, that in our Ashrama the spirit of world humanity may be manifest” (p. 81).

 

Literature Review

            As mentioned previously, I could find little information on the status of Visva-Bharati in recent years and whether Tagore’s teaching “methods” are still being utilized.  Most of what I have read, including material published in the past decade, focuses on Tagore’s educational philosophy and the progress of Santiniketan during Tagore’s lifetime.  I could find little in my reading that substantiated Chakrabarti’s comment that the essence of Tagore’s philosophy has indeed remained alive at Santiniketan in recent years.  One source, a 1975 report by the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare on the status of Visva-Bharati, is helpful in determining what was not being implemented at that time;  however, I have been unable to find a follow-up report and therefore cannot do a comparative study to determine if recommendations in this report, some of which concur with Tagore’s educational philosophy, were indeed implemented.

 

Methodology

            In my search for more recent information, I accessed the Visva-Bharati alumni page on the Internet.  I then contacted those alumni with available e-mail addresses and asked if they would be willing to share their knowledge or personal experiences of Visva-Bharati.  Those who responded were very willing to share their experiences and also forwarded addresses of alumni and professors not listed. 

            I then developed a questionnaire to send to those respondents.  The questions I chose specifically address issues pertaining to Tagore’s teaching philosophy and are geared to elicit personal responses from alumni that would reflect their experiences while attending Visva-Bharati and how those experiences coincide with Tagore’s original vision of Santiniketan.  Six alumni responded to the questionnaire, and although I was forced to use a random sample due to limited responses, the individuals who responded are diverse with respect to time period they attended Visva-Bharati (ranging from 1955 to 1992), gender (two females, four males), and ethnicity (one British, four from both rural and urban settings of West Bengal, one from a Hindi speaking region).  There is also a possible diversity in social class, although I did not ask respondents to comment on this.  Alumni comments are retained in full in the appendix for the purpose that they lead to further insight into their experiences at Santiniketan beyond that which I have quoted in the following section.  I have obtained permission from all respondents to use their names and to edit their responses for clarity, and I have retained their original responses as much as possible in light of this editing.  For reader clarity and to distinguish between respondent comments and quotes from literature reviews, the respondents names are as follows:  Abhijit, Ankhi, Bipasha, Nigel, Sugata, Ujjwal.

Findings and Observations

 

Classroom Environment

            The outdoor classroom still exists at Santiniketan and most alumni responded favorably to this learning environment.  Nigel, currently a professor in the United States, responds that he found this atmosphere very relaxing and hopes to introduce this outdoor environment into his own teaching when “the appropriate class appears.”  Bipasha notes that the natural environment associated with the outdoor classroom introduces "always an expectation for change . . . . suddenly thousands of migratory birds would cover the sky . . . there would be change of seasons with change of colour all around you.  I was very conscious of this change in nature which made each day a very different experience.”  She compares this to the “claustrophobic” feeling she had when she later attended school at Cambridge, U.K.  Abhijit comments that while the outdoor environment was great when he was younger, he later found it a distraction while writing examinations.  Mukherjee (1962) states that Tagore expressed regrets that as students “reach the higher classes they refuse to attend to anything that does not concern their examinations” (p. 139).  During his own visit to Santiniketan in 1958, Mukherjee (1962) observed that there was “an increasing tendency noticeable among the senior students, and even among staff, to value curricular studies and examination results at the expense of those other activities which constitute the heart and soul of the school of the institution” (p. 453), one of those activities that of learning through nature.  It appears this is the case with Abhijit’s experience of the outdoor classroom during his senior years, yet he also positively comments, “I think I started liking nature very much after studying in Santiniketan.  Big city Indian students do not see nature much.   I still miss the smell of new leaves in Santiniketan.”  Ujjwal states that “the environment was a really pleasant one, and the open-air classes were very helpful in boosting our ideas and enriching our knowledge.”  These experiences are in keeping with Tagore’s philosophy that learning involves appreciation of life and one’s surroundings.

 

Teachers and Student/Teacher Relationship

Although Tagore had his vision of the ideal teacher, finding the right teachers for Santiniketan was always a constant struggle.  Tagore says of the ideal teacher:

If the teacher does not himself possess learning how can he impart it to others?  He is like a lamp lighting other lamps.  But a lamp cannot put light into other lamps if it does not itself burn and shed light.  The teacher who merely repeats bookish knowledge mechanically can never teach anything and can never inspire.

. . . [The institution’s] atmosphere should be open and free, like an open door, wherein teachers and pupils may mix together like the members of a family.  (Mukherjee, 1962, p. 165)

As most respondents note, the “family” atmosphere is still present at Santiniketan, but also, as both Bipasha and Ankhi state, not all teachers at Visva-Bharati are ideal. 

Because Ankhi attended Santiniketan in the 1950’s, her experiences with teachers coincide more closely to what Tagore visualized as the ideal student/teacher relationship, and she notes that many of her teachers were once students who had been taught first hand by Tagore.  She further comments, “We constantly argued with our teachers on subjects we knew nothing about; we had some guts and audacity, but we were never snubbed and always given a patient hearing then corrected.”  This is reminiscent of Tagore’s own style of teaching in which he welcomed this type of response from his students.  Mukherjee (1962) states that “instances are on record as to how [Tagore] freely tolerated—nay, encouraged—even impertinent utterances in his classes which should very much annoy an average teacher.  He even went to the extent of allowing his students openly and publicly to criticize the cherished fundamental ideals of the institution” (p. 373).

            Although it is stated in the 1975 Report of the Committee on Visva-Bharti that there exists “a serious inadequacy in our university system today that in respect of matters pertaining to education or instruction, the system does not seem to provide a channel of communication, either formal or informal, between the teachers and the students” (Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, 1975, p. 70), Bipasha, who attended Visva-Bharati shortly after this report was published, begs to differ:

I was taught by older generation teachers who also taught my mother twenty years before my time. . . . They were very strict yet the amount of respect they commanded was something that was not seen among any other new generation teachers. . . . There were teachers in school who were very friendly, who sang in chemistry classes, chatted with us about our personal lives in our spare time, and took part in dramas and sports. . . . The old generation teachers are remembered by me as good teachers, good human beings, good elders.

However, she admits that most “new generation teachers lacked this balance. . . . they were too casual with us which made us disregard them, or they were too academic and boring to be remembered.”   Nigel states that he became very close to one of his teachers, and although he admits that “Santiniketan is very far from a modern day ashram,” he believes “the teacher/student relationship in India is generally different and deeper, and is built on a recognition of differences.”  Abhijit comments on the informality between students and teachers, that “we used to know their entire families and consider our school as a big family.”  Ankhi states that although there were both good and bad teachers, “we were so genuinely loved and cared for by them all . . . I used to walk into my teachers’ homes or classrooms whenever I was stuck with a tough lesson. . . . It was as if it was our birth right that we could walk into a teacher’s house at anytime. . . . They were personally attached to us and were very protective.”  Mukherjee (1962) says that Tagore’s  “doors were always open to the young learners who would visit him for assistance in lessons or advice on their creative ventures in writing” (p. 71), which corresponds very much to the experience Ankhi had with her Bengali language professor who helped her in his home with her philosophy lessons when she was having problems understanding the lectures of her philosophy teacher.  Sugata notes students had to learn by example and by participation in class, and he believes this method of instruction would not have been possible without teacher involvement.

Tagore’s active presence and his involvement in selecting the appropriate teachers very much shaped the Santiniketan of earlier years.  Ankhi talks of the changes taking place while her daughter attended school, and that while some of the newer teachers “took time to absorb the different environment and Tagore’s ideology,” others “could not cope with the informal teaching method, with the pressure of innumerable, extra-curricular activities,” and she recalls that some of them “grumbled that students sang songs and danced and played more than they studied or tried to score higher marks.”  With younger teachers coming in who have no direct connection with Tagore, Bipasha’s comment that the older generation teachers were the good teachers could well signify that the presence of Tagore’s ideal teacher at Visva-Bharati may eventually become only a part Santiniketan history.

 

Coeducation

            The responses to the coeducation experience weigh both on the positive and negative side.  Because of the personal nature of these responses and the lack of available written material of this nature on students who attended Visva-Bharati during Tagore’s time, it is difficult to make a comparison.  Tagore brought coeducation to Santiniketan for the purpose of allowing more women to be educated, and his initial experiment only lasted for a couple of years.  Mukherjee (1962) states that “it grew and prospered till it became rather uncontrollable through various reasons” (p. 64).  Whatever these reasons were is not stated, but this comment could possibly correlate with Nigel’s statement that “there is a certain cruelty about letting boys and girls mix freely and then marrying them off to other people.”  This brings up the cultural aspect of India with regard to arranged marriages and certain religious and social customs, so in that respect, coeducation can have a negative impact.  However, this would also be the case in other coeducational schools.  Nigel’s reference to the rumor that girls are sent to Santiniketan to find a husband, if true, appears to be a reflection on the social background of the student rather than on the school’s educational opportunities for women.

Bipasha very positively spoke about her coeducational experience.  She states, “After I left Santiniketan, I came to Calcutta and studied in this girl’s college . . . . My experience at this new girly set-up was very bad indeed. . . . Before coming to Calcutta, I never realized that men and women were actually different except in their appearance.”  Her experience at Santiniketan allowed her to be “natural,” and she now does not “see the world divided into men and women.  I see it as individuals with millions of different needs and characteristics.”  Ankhi states that “girls brought up and educated at Santiniketan grew up unconsciously to be very self-confident with strong personalities.  We climbed trees, fought and played with boys, rode cycles, went swimming, and did manual labor side by side with the boys . . . . but we never lost sight of our femininity.”  Ujjwal states that “the major difference between coeducation in other schools in India and Santiniketan was the feeling of all classmates being a member of the same family.”  Both Nigel and Bipasha became more comfortable about their sexuality and in turn more comfortable about themselves which fits into Tagore’s concept of the full educational experience that reaches beyond purely academic learning.

 

Visva-Bharati as a Meeting Ground for East and West

            The one aspect of Tagore’s vision that he realized would not meet his expectations was that of uniting the East and West at Santiniketan.  Mukherjee (1962) states, “[T]he historic meeting of the East and West, Tagore regretted, was not bearing fruit, because the West had met the East not through humanity but through the machine, and changing Kipling’s oft-quoted lines in this context, [Tagore] observed:  ‘Man is man, machine is machine, / And never the twain shall meet’ ” (p. 328). 

Tagore first wanted to unite various cultures of India, secondly various cultures of Asia, and thirdly those from the West.  From the students’ responses, this has happened and is still happening to some degree but not as fully as Tagore had once envisioned.  Bipasha states that although she did not meet any “world figures” at Santiniketan, she “was exposed to western ideas through Tagore’s writings.”  She also comments that the Santiniketan library contains foreign literature, but “the teachers could not breed interest in them.”  Although she has a good understanding of East and West, she learned this more from her family’s interest than from Santiniketan.  Abhijit’s response that he “experienced the West (so called) in Moscow” implies he gained little knowledge of other cultures while at Santiniketan.  Nigel states that he experienced other cultures but informally through friends who were interested in him as both “a foreigner and a person,” and that Santiniketan is “an extremely Bengali place.”  Bipasha speaks of gathering with people of different cultures at Santiniketan through addas, a very informal way to meet and exchange ideas with people by just chatting about everything and anything.  She states, “I have participated in such addas where my grandmother, my school principal, a renowned film actress of India, a Korean dancer, my nine year old cousin, and the tea shop owner Kalo (a very old and simple rural man) have all sat together and chatted about everything on earth.”

Sugata speaks of visiting professors “from Canada, from Japan, and a host of others,”  but adds that  “they came to learn about Tagore—not to share their ideas.”  Tagore wanted Santiniketan to be a place where people of other cultures would come not to just learn but to exchange knowledge.  This did happen to some extent in the earlier days.  Mukherjee (1962) quotes Miss Marjorie Sykes, a British woman who joined Visva-Bharati in 1939, who states, “Visva-Bharati makes full use of its visitors!  Very few are allowed to escape without sharing their special knowledge . . . .The musician must play his instrument, the orator must show his oratory” (p. 194).  The 1975 Report of the Committee on Visva-Bharti addresses the absence of visiting scholars to Santiniketan:

[N]ot enough use has been made by the University of the presence on the campus and the immediate neighborhood, of well-known scholars and other distinguished people, who have been attracted to Santiniketan and have made their permanent homes there. . . . It should go further and encourage artists, scholars, scientists and other distinguished persons to visit Santiniketan and stay with the University community for short or long periods. (Ministry of Education, p. 88).

Sugata comments that “Visva-Bharati being the meeting ground for the East and the West has remained a poet’s dream,” and that it is Tagore’s works alone that attract Westerners.  Overall, the alumni responses suggest that, while there is an extent of sharing of knowledge between cultures, it is the atmosphere of Santiniketan, rather than any formal programs, that promotes this sharing.

 

Teaching Methods and Impact on Learning

            Tagore never claimed to have a set method of teaching, and according to Mukherjee (1962), who has done extensive research on Tagore’s educational philosophies, “there is no known document where Tagore worked out any complete list of subjects that he considered to be essential for being taught in schools or colleges” (p. 387).  Mukherjee (1962) quotes a “modern commentator” who says of Tagore, “He had no curriculum of studies or such.  He had, instead, a curriculum of life” (p. 356). 

Tagore did experiment with various methods, and his methods are noted as progressive; however, if one method did not work, he was never hesitant to try another.  Bipasha makes an interesting point that, because of the diverse cultures and social classes of those who attend Visva-Bharati, it would be difficult to have a strict standard of teaching methods.  She states, “How the teachers evolved a method or how they gave individual attention to these different people from different backgrounds, I do not know. As far as I can remember, it was personal attachment to weak students that made teachers understand their problems, and each teacher had his or her own way of handling and helping these students.”

While at Santiniketan, Tagore noticed that “a number of boys have shown remarkable powers . . . developed not through the orthodox method of copying models, but by following their own bent and by the help of occasional artists to inspire the boys with their own work,” and Nandalal Bose, an art instructor at Santiniketan during Tagore’s time, states, “[I]n other art schools the original pictures are done last of all. . . . Our method is totally different.  First we initiate them to do their original pictures, the rest afterwards” (Mukherjee, 1962, p. 404).  Bipasha’s art education at Santiniketan coincides very much with this teaching method.  She states, “I learned painting because I was taught how to observe the nature around me minutely and appreciate it.  I was never asked to copy a picture. . . . Now what has happened is that I can sit in my room and paint a picture on rural India without looking at a photograph.”  Mukherjee (1962) observes that the principles of teaching art during Tagore’s time “included the encouragement of bold and courageous attitude towards the adoption of fresh standards and conventions, drawing inspiration through occasional picnics and excursions from the scenes of Nature and the commonplace experiences of everyday life and discovering hidden meanings” (p. 404).  This is also very similar to Bipasha’s experience:

We would go for picnics and excursions with our sketchbook. . . . Teachers, instead of teaching, would take us to the nearest river and tribal villages where we would get drenched, sing crazily, sit inside a hut and sketch the soaked calves sucking milk from their mother.  We were simply given the environment to observe—no one taught us painting, no one taught us to write poetry. 

With regard to other teaching methods, Mukherjee (1962) states that “special attention  was paid to the development of the pupils’ faculty of observation, and boys were made to observe a single insect or a single flower from birth to death” (p. 65), and this is very similar to Sugata’s experience of learning through nature: 

Nature study was an integral part when we were kids.  We'd go out in hoards, collect samples of plants and tiny bugs ourselves, draw sketches to an extent whatever we'd be able to after looking at the real thing, and only then would our life science teacher let us open the relevant part of the book to see how to look at and draw the various sections of the plants conforming to the standards of text book biology, etc.

Abhijit also comments favorably on this type of learning environment, stating, “I only liked botany class.  It used to be a mobile one, and our teacher used to show us all kinds of plants, birds, etc.  We were supposed to remember their names and learn about them.  It was fantastic.”  During Tagore’s own formal education, he only enjoyed a science class in which his teacher taught by example instead of only by textbooks, so both Abhijit’s and Sugata’s experiences are very much like one Tagore, as a child, would have relished.  With regard to the nature aspect, a comment by W.W. Pearson (1916), one of the first teachers at Tagore’s school, bears repeating:

This open air class work has its great advantages, for it keeps the minds of the boys fresh in their appreciation of nature.  I remember in the middle of one class I was suddenly interrupted in my teaching by one of the boys calling my attention to the song of a bird in the branches overhead.  We stopped the teaching and listened till the bird had finished.  It was spring time and the boy who had called my attention to the song said to me, “I don’t know why, but somehow I can’t explain what I feel when I hear that bird singing.”  I could not enlighten him, but I am quite sure that my class learnt more from that teaching, and something that they would never forget in life.  For myself my ears were opened and for several days I was conscious of the songs of the birds as I have never been before.  (p. 58)

Several students commented on examinations but only briefly in a matter-of-fact manner.  Sugata states, “I’d say it was more learning by examples that kept us going.  But cruel exams were there, no matter how much Tagore, or for that matter, each and every student wanted to do away with exams.”  Nigel states, “As for exams, all students take them, and they are much like those in the UK educational system.”   Tagore was never much a believer in examinations, although he knew that they needed to be integrated into his school in order for his students to meet the Matriculation standards of Calcutta University.  Abhijit comments that the aesthetic classes were easy, required no exams and therefore were unimportant.  This comment is understandable from the point of view of a student whose career focus is not on the arts and also when placed in the context of the emphasis on examination scores for entrance into higher education.  One of among many of Tagore’s thoughts on examinations is as follows:

[W]e are made to tread the mill of passing examinations, not for learning anything, but for notifying that we are qualified for employments under organisations conducted in English.  Our educated community is not a cultured community, but a community of qualified candidates.  Meanwhile, the proportion of possible employments to the number of claimants has gradually been growing narrower. . . . (Tagore, 1922, p. 180)

Tagore often commented that the older students were more interested in exam results than acquiring knowledge or learning from other avenues such as nature. 

Mukherjee (1962) states that Visva-Bharati has been criticized for having low academic standards and speaks of one professor who had “criticized the deficiency of Santiniketan students in respect of exact knowledge and intellectual discipline” (p. 437).  However, to bring in Tagore’s philosophy of the fullness of the educational experience, Mukherjee (1962) argues, “That Visva-Bharati did not show more spectacular results in the academic sphere can be explained by the simple fact that it never aspired to be purely a centre of academic studies in the conventional way like most other universities and so attracted few scholars who had the merits or the ambition to shine in that line” (p. 437).  How much this is true at present would be difficult to analyze without having access to statistical data on Visva-Bharati alumni.  None of the respondents made mention that there were major drawbacks to their own education at Visva-Bharati that would prevent them from excelling.  Bipasha notes of her own experience:

In school I did not concentrate too much on studies or exams, as the atmosphere did not breed competition; but later in life, when I was placed in a competitive environment, I somehow never had a problem.  I went to the most competitive institutions of Delhi and now U.K., but never did I have problems in ranking first or doing well in studies, seminars, or exams.

However, Bipasha does comment that the atmosphere at Santiniketan, because competition was not encouraged, bred students that lacked initiative, that there were many high achievers in Tagore’s timed compared to now, and that “information about professions and opportunities that were coming up all over the world” was not available for the students.  It is stated in the 1975 Visva-Bharati report that a program needed to be implemented that would “involve a continuing awareness of job opportunities and requirements in the region and in the country, and also a continuous revision of the curriculum in the light of the changing requirements in the job market, as well as in the area of higher studies” (Ministry of Education, pp. 24-25).  Ankhi also expresses an opinion similar to Bipasha’s on student initiative:

I think our natural talents were more appreciated and encouraged than bookish knowledge, which was sometimes very unfair to those brilliant students, as brilliant minds need acknowledgement at times.  We did have special prizes and scholarships for best academic results, but they were distributed very quietly, and boasting about it was considered vulgar. As a result, there were many brilliant students who hardly studied, never developed any ambition, and could not recognize their own potential as future academicians.  Some did excel later but many could not cope with the tough ruthless world outside Santiniketan and became lost in ordinariness.  Our teachers guarded us from all the realities of life which had its good side but also disadvantages.           

A “duty” of the Visva-Bharati Executive Council, as stated in the 1975 Visva-Bharati report, is “to institute fellowships, scholarships, studentships, medals and prizes” (Ministry of Education, p. 45).  Whether this remains only a duty or is being implemented is not stated, or if implemented, if awards are publicly announced.   From the previous remarks by alumni, it appears that while Tagore’s reason for not allowing recognition by prizes has merit in preventing unhealthy competition, it is a drawback for those students who excel further when recognized for their outstanding achievements.

 

Santiniketan Experience and Impact on Life

Tagore (1997b) expressed his belief that “the minds of the children of today are almost deliberately made incapable of understanding other people with different languages and customs” (p. 261), and he elaborates further in a letter written in 1924:

[A] great responsibility was laid upon me to bring about a true meeting of the East and West, beyond the boundaries of politics and race and creed. . . . The fuller idea of Visvabharati now included the thought of a complete meeting of the East and West, in a common fellowship of learning and a common spiritual striving for the unity of the human race.  The stress was now to be laid on the ideal of humanity itself.  (Mukherjee, 1962, 190)

Several alumni responses emphasize that Tagore’s vision of uniting various cultures is still at work at Visva-Bharati and has made a positive impact on their lives.  Bipasha states, “My friends [in U.K.] are surprised to see how easily I can mingle with any culture and people.  I am comfortable wherever I am, be it in a tribal village or a formal place like Cambridge.  This is a very typical characteristic of people who come from Santiniketan . . . . What I owe to Santiniketan’s education system is to be comfortable with everyone.”  Ujjwal similarly responds, stating, “The biggest impact it has had on my life is that I can see everyone as a good friend.”  Nigel states that Santiniketan gave him “a fundamental widening of my world view, an extremely close bunch of friends, both Bengali and foreign, a most beautiful language, and a love of poetry.”

Santiniketan has also positively influenced the careers of these alumni.  Nigel states,  “I want to design a broad non-majors course on Time that incorporates scientific, philosophical, and literal views on time. Tagore is the inspiration for this, and this is my strongest meeting point with him in terms of my work life.  He had such a strong sense of the transcendence of the moment, and  that’s what I seek in my work life.”  Ujjwal comments, “I am yet to be a teacher, but if I have the chance to teach, I shall definitely adopt the education system of Visva-Bharati.  I believe that only education through nature and friendly relationships with students can improve the knowledge of students and help develop our society.”  Santiniketan also has influenced Bipasha with regard to her continuing studies and possibly her future work.  While there, she developed an understanding of and compassion for the poor.  She and her classmates made crafts and food to raise money to help build a school hut for the tribal children and to buy instruments for a group of village children “who wanted to become Bauls and wander around the country singing Baul songs.”  She states, “This is what made me very interested in the development of poor regions and poor people of the world.  That I am doing a Ph.D. on this particular topic is because of my understanding and exposure to such a cause at a very young age.”

Also among the responses are Abhijit’s comment that he learned to love nature and Nigel’s of learning to love music, both of which are integral parts of Tagore’s philosophy on education.  Tagore, who was foremost always the poet, would have been greatly pleased that Nigel, a student from a foreign land, had learned to love poetry while attending Visva-Bharati, and that students, through their experiences at Santiniketan, are still learning to fully appreciate and understand people of other social classes and cultures.

 

Critical Evaluation of Visva-Bharati, of Experiences, and Participation as Alumni

One criticism of Tagore’s philosophy was that he put too much emphasis on the full development of the person and not enough on that which would help students compete when they left Visva-Bharati.  Bipasha’s comment that Visva-Bharati now produces a limited type of people, mostly in the arts and the humanities, can be counteracted, however, with the argument that many more schools produce people in the “modern competitive professions” because these professions are more lucrative financially, and therefore, those schools unfortunately limit instruction in the arts and humanities.  It was never Tagore’s vision to “produce” only students who become famous or financially successful.  Tagore (1997) says of the poet, “Why should he make himself accountable to those who would assess his produce by the amount of profit it would earn? (248), and so, relating this to his educational philosophy, the success of students should not be judged purely on financial success.

            I would have to argue against Bipasha’s comment that she is included in those who will never reach high in life.  She is currently finishing her Ph.D. which she states is “European Food aid to India for the growth of the national dairy co-operative sector.  I want to see whether international food aid actually reaches to the poorest people and poorest regions.”  To say that her work is less important than that of bankers and computer programmers may be an aspect of modern thinking.  However, if Santiniketan were to “unstagnate”  by turning out more “modern professionals” and less in the field of humanities, then it would lose its uniqueness and become like many other schools. 

Nigel comments, “The most immediate gift was my playing of an instrument, writing songs, and the courage to perform them,” and after Santiniketan, “I went through a phase on ending my talks at meetings and universities by pulling out my ukulele and playing a song about trilobites.  It did my career a wonderful amount of good.”  That the former helped his career reinforces the importance of fullness in education that Tagore so strongly promoted.  Bipasha comments that Tagore wanted “to have a system which would make ‘frogs leap out of their well’, ” yet “unfortunately, today in Santiniketan, there are ideas which evolve and die within the well.”  However, Nigel’s combining of music with lectures is a refreshing  “leap”  that no doubt positively influenced the lives of others; otherwise, his playing would not have positively influenced his own career.  His may not be a totally original concept, yet it is nonetheless unique in this modern world of ours.

            Abhijit’s criticism of Santiniketan, that it is somewhat of a “Tagore Cult” and if he were to go through the experience again, he “would have revolted against singing only Tagore’s songs and acting only in Tagore’s dramas,” is worth analyzing with regard to Tagore’s emphasis on bringing together various cultures.  Several alumni comment that Visva-Bharati is extremely “Bengali” in nature, and so too appears extremely Tagorean with regard to its songs and dramas.  Bipasha notes that not all plays acted out at Santiniketan were written by Tagore; however, the overemphasis on Tagore is in some respect narrowing the introduction to students of a variety of cultures.  Nigel’s remark that it is very hard to get on the list of the alumni association, thus eliminating possible advantages to improve the school, seems to imply that Visva-Bharati is limiting in some way outside influences that might more broadly expand Tagore’s philosophy of incorporating minds from different parts of the world. 

Several students comment that it is often hard to adjust to the “real” world after leaving Santiniketan, and this has been a common criticism of the school in the past.  Mukherjee (1962) summarizes the critic’s view, stating, “Normal life in the work-a-day world, it is said, has little of the beauties and delicacies cultivated at Santiniketan, whose products are likely to receive a rude shock and feel miserable when required to face the stark and drab realities of life, which most of them will inevitably have to” (435).  Although the alumni in this survey have all been quite successful, a much wider sample and/or a compilation of statistical data on alumni would have to be evaluated to confirm whether Visva-Bharati graduates are less successful than those from other universities.

 

Conclusion

            While it is evident from alumni responses that the teaching methods at Visva-Bharati have changed over recent years, some of Tagore’s methods are still being utilized at the school.  Tagore, a very progressive man, foresaw that, in light of modernization and competitive job markets, changes would be necessary in the university structure in order for students to compete with those graduating from other universities, as Mukherjee (1962) points out:

Tagore had many misgivings about the present as well as the future of Visva-Bharati. On the other hand, he had also resigned himself philosophically regarding its future destiny on the faith that if his efforts and experiments at Visva-Bharati had any truth in them, they would prevail; if not, his institution would deservingly perish  But in his heart of hearts he was convinced as ever about its value and its message for his country and the world” (p. 243).

That some of his methods still exist and receive favorable comments from recent students demonstrates the strength of Tagore’s educational philosophies, despite the fact that some students admit drawbacks do exist with regard to how these methods can be utilized in the job market.

            Responses from these alumni suggest that overall, Santiniketan has to some degree kept alive Tagore’s ideals, most notably learning from nature and observation versus through textbooks alone, instilling in students an appreciation of the arts and culture, and keeping communication lines open between students and teachers.  Tagore’s presence at and constant involvement with the school during his lifetime played a large part in keeping his educational philosophies intact.  Therefore, that some fifty years after his death his methods are still being incorporated at Visva-Bharati is evidence that they will continue, though to what degree and how long would be difficult to conjecture.  This is especially true if the administration emphasizes competitiveness with other schools regarding acceptance into program, examinations, and standards for evaluating student progress as opposed to emphasis on the uniqueness Santiniketan has to offer with regard to a fuller education which focuses not only on competition and grades but on humanity.

Appendix A:  Initial E-Mail to Alumni

 

Dear ___________:

Hi, my name is Peggy Sorrell.  I am interested in speaking to anyone who has attended Visva-Bharati and would like to share their experiences.  I am currently an undergraduate student (English Major/art minor) at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I am working on an independent study on Rabindranath Tagore.  Anyway, my focus at the moment is on Santiniketan, and I am very interested in hearing directly from students who have attended Visva-Bharati and how their experiences relate (or do not relate) to Tagore's philosophy on education and what he envisioned for this school; also, how your education there differs from the education you received at other schools, in India, the United States, or elsewhere.  Also, anything else you would like to add about yourself . . . . 

 

Would love to hear from you!

email address:  [email protected]

 

Sincerely,  Peggy

Appendix B:  Interview Questions

 

1.  With respect to Tagore’s concept of the “open-air” classroom and learning among nature, how would you describe the physical environment in which you learned and its effect on your learning experience?  Also, how would you describe the “inside” classroom environment?

 

2.  Tagore strongly believed in the importance of  the close relationship and sharing of ideas between student and teacher.  How would you describe your relationship with your teachers in this respect?

 

3.  Tagore was a pioneer of coeducation in India.  What are your thoughts or insights regarding this aspect of coeducation at Santiniketan compared to other schools in India or elsewhere from your own experience?

 

4.  With respect to Tagore’s vision of Visva-Bharati as a place for the meeting of “the great minds of the East and West,” to what degree did you experience this concept while a student at Visva-Bharati and how has this broadened your learning experience?

 

5.  Tagore was strongly against studying by rote and of too much emphasis put on examinations with little regard to the student’s learning experience.  Also, he felt that an educator should use whatever teaching tools were necessary, whether it be music, drama, learning among nature, etc., to open the minds of the students and encourage them to be learn both creatively and as individuals.  What are some of the various teaching methods you learned from and how did these methods impact your learning?

 

6.  What aspect of your experience as a student at Santiniketan has made the most impact on your life, and in what way have you incorporated this experience into your life (personal, as a student after Santiniketan, as an educator, etc.)

 

7.  Looking back, are there things you would like to have seen done differently while a student at Santiniketan, and if so, what specifically?  Also, if you are presently involved with Visva-Bharati as an alumni, what is the nature of your involvement?

 

8.  Other Santiniketan experiences or personal reflections you would like to add:

Appendix C:  Alumni Background Information

 

Abhijit:  Male student (1977 to 1987), Bengali, born in Calcutta, completed a combined bachelor and master’s degree course at Moscow State University, currently working in Moscow as a marketing manager for a commodity trading company.

 

Ankhi:  Female student (1955-65), Bengali, homemaker and mother of Bipasha.

 

Bipasha:  Female student (1977-85), Bengali, currently working on her Ph.D. in Development Economics at Cambridge, U.K.

 

Nigel:  Male student (1985-86), British, currently a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Riverside.

 

Sugata:  Male student (1974-1991), from Hindi-speaking region, currently working on his Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics at the University of Kentucky at Lexington.

 

Ujjwal:  Male student (1984-91), Bengali, from small village near Santiniketan, currently a Research Associate of Physics working at Energy Research Unit, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at Jadavpur, Calcutta.

 

 

Appendix D:  Alumni Responses

 

Abhijit

1.         As a small kid of fifth standard, it was great.  I could see people coming and going instead of listening to boring lectures of some of our teachers.  The only bad thing was writing my examinations.  Writing on papers (which used to be on the ground) and sitting on the grass was not at all comfortable.  On the whole, it was difficult to concentrate on studies.  I do not think that you can live sixteenth or seventeenth century life in the twentieth century.  This is absurd.  I only liked our botany class.  It used to be a mobile one, and our teacher used to show us all kinds of plants, birds, etc.  We were supposed to remember their names and learn about them.  It was fantastic.

2.         Our relationship with our teachers was quite informal.  It was a small place, and we used to know their entire families and consider our school as a big family.  We considered the principal of our school as the head of the family, and we used to consider him as a semi-god.  According to the rule formed by Tagore, we used to call our teachers dada which means elder brother.

3.         no response

4.         I experienced the West (so called) in Moscow.

5.         I do not think that teachers in Santiniketan have a special method of teaching.  We would have subjects like pottery, music, dance, woodcraft, etc.  We and our teachers used to take these unimportant classes easy in as far as we never were given examinations for these subjects.

6.         I think I started liking nature very much after studying in Santiniketan. Big city Indian students do not see nature so much.  I still miss the smell of new leaves in Santiniketan.

7.         I think I would have revolted against singing only Tagore’s songs, acting only in Tagore’s dramas.  As a whole, I would have revolted against the “Tagore Cult.”  I am just a member of the alumni association.  I have taken the membership to be in touch with old folks.

8.         In Santiniketan, we were not allowed to enter into the girl’s hostels.  We all used to imagine the world inside those hostels.  After coming to Moscow, for the first time in my life, I could enter into a girl’s room (with whom I had studied with in Santiniketan), and I was astonished to see that she lived the same way I lived.

 

Ankhi

1.         no response

2.         I joined school Patha-Bhavan in 1955 when the first generation of teachers were still alive and active.  Tagore's direct students were teaching us.  Our Vice Chancellor was Tagore's niece Indira Devi who was a writer/composer, highly intellectual personality, and a guiding force after Tagore.  The famous scientist, Mr. Satyen Bose, was our Vice Chancellor.  The next Chancellor,  Mr. S.R. Das, was among the first group of students of Santiniketan when it was not a coeducational school.  Tagore's son Rathindranath  and daughter-in-law were present then.  We grew up among these people.  Our teachers then were all very motivated and dedicated people. They were poorly paid and stayed in mud houses with thatched roofs, no fans, and no modern facilities.  We all walked bare footed in those days, but culturally and academically most of our teachers were too rich; their depth of knowledge and wide range, their brilliance and talent knew no boundaries.  Many of the teachers were very famous and well respected in India for their contributions in their respective fields.  But for us students, all of these big names meant nothing much.  We were not conscious of anyone’s fame there. The teachers were just one of us.

Some of our teachers were extremely brilliant, some were just good, some were average and ordinary.  A few were rather bad.  But in totality, we had excellent guidance in everything and, above all, we were so genuinely loved and cared for by all of them.

We never called anyone sir or madam.  I used to walk into my teachers’ homes or classrooms whenever I was stuck with a tough lesson. We did not know the word “appointment,” for we were welcomed always and taught then and there.  It was as if it was our birth right that we could walk into any teacher’s house anytime. When I look back now, I feel amazed how those intellectual teachers tolerated our invasion and had such patience with us. We precisely knew everything about each other, as it was a big joint family then.  Anytime any member of the teacher’s family was sick, senior students would sit round the clock and do the needful.  When our friends from the hostel fell ill, our teachers nursed them and brought them food, as their parents were not around.

But there were also disadvantages.  We could never “bunk” the class, could never fall in love or pass a letter full of self-written poetry, nor could we fight with each other or behave badly with anyone without being noticed by some dadas or didis.  These would be immediately handled firmly or reported to our guardians. We were extremely naughty students and enjoyed liberal allowances, but we never could cross the limit.  Our teachers could tell by looking into our eyes, when we were teenagers, who was interested in whom, and we wondered how they understood us so accurately.  We sometimes used to be irritated, but now I feel it was so because we were not merely their students, we were their own children.  They were personally attached to each of us and were very protective. We were with our teachers from 6:30 in the morning when our prayers started and after 6:30 in the evening when our game period was over; we spent hardly any time with our parents then. 

In the same way, we also knew what was happening in our teachers’ lives and with their families.  When young teachers would fall in love, we would be thrilled and quietly follow the development.  We wrote small poems or notes and kept them in our bags as an approval from our side. We would be thrilled if they married and too sad when they broke up. We had a few confirmed bachelor teachers and a few spinsters.  We were forever being matchmakers and wondered why they did not fall in love according to our pairing.  We wrote many parody songs on the peculiarities of some of our teachers (they knew all about it and laughed with us), and we called some of them by special nicknames given by some senior students and passed on by generations.

All of this was done in very good humour which is still an asset in the life of Santiniketan.  We learnt to laugh to ourselves and at each other without hurting anyone’s sentiments or insulting anyone.  Tagore had a great sense of humour and wit, and so had other teachers.  There is a famous real story that goes as follows:  Mr. Kshitimohan Sen (Dr. Amartya Sen's grandfather) was a close associate of Tagore, a Sanskrit scholar and a teacher at Santiniketan.  He was a very strict teacher with a great sense of humour.  One day a boy student did something naughty, and Mr. Sen gave one good slap.  The boy protested, saying, "Tagore does not allow anyone to hit students in this ashrama.  I shall report against you."  Mr. Sen caught him by the collar and pulled him up from the ground.  While he was hanging in the air, he gave him another good slap and said, “Well now, you are not on Santiniketan my dear, and Tagore's rules do not apply when you are off the ground.”

We constantly argued with our teachers on subjects we knew nothing about; we had some guts or audacity, but we were never snubbed and always given a patient hearing then corrected.  Backbiting,  unhealthy competition,  and jealousy were never encouraged.  These things were ruthlessly suppressed by senior teachers.  After each exam, the highest scorer’s name was never declared or given much glorification.  The environment never allowed us to be proud of our academic results.  I was an average student in school but a good dancer.  I was at the time more appreciated than the best students of our class.  I think our natural talents were more appreciated and encouraged than bookish knowledge, which was sometimes very unfair to those brilliant students, as brilliant minds need acknowledgement at times.  We did have special prizes and scholarships for best academic results, but they were distributed very quietly, and boasting about it was considered vulgar.  As a result, there were many brilliant students who hardly studied, never developed any ambition, and could not recognize their own potential as future academicians.  Some did excel later but many could not cope with the tough ruthless world outside Santiniketan and became lost in ordinariness.  Our teachers guarded us from all the realities of life which had its good side but also  disadvantages. 

Tagore had a vision and a philosophy for Santiniketan, but he could never do it alone.  There were famous and many unknown teachers who joined Tagore because they believed in him and made his dream come true. We had seen the sacrifices of those brilliant men who carried on Tagore’s legacy year after year and resisted any change or invasion from the materialistic world.

There was no system of tuition so no one took any money for extra coaching.  There was a famous dance teacher, Mr.Nayar, in the music and dance drama department, who taught me the Indian classical dance, Bharat Natyam, for ten years without taking a penny.  He thought I was talented and tried to groom me into a dancer.  There were many teachers in various departments who specially tutored students on their own.  Many of those students excelled in the performing arts and became great scholars who owe their fame to these selfless teachers.

I personally remember taking Indian and Western philosophy as my pass course subjects in college while my honours subject was Bengali Literature.  In our course, we had Russel's famous book, Problems of Philosophy.  Our philosophy teacher was a brilliant man but rather pathetic as a teacher, and we understood nothing of what he lectured.  We thought surely we would fail the paper.  So, one evening, five of us walked to the home of our Bengali professor and poet, Mr. A.Raha, and requested him to translate this difficult book into Bengali for us!  He listened and laughed aloud.  He closed his eyes and started talking, and we realized with a shock that he was explaining to us the first chapter of the book. We took running notes, and his ways of explaining made the contents so easy to understand.  We regularly went to him, and he explained to us Russel's philosophy constantly, comparing him with Tagore and other philosophers.  In our final BA exams, we scored first class marks on that paper (of course our philosophy teacher did not know about Mr. Raha teaching us.  We never thought of hurting him).  Such was our access to all teachers or professors in the university.  There was no question of insulting him by offering money or presents.  We simply touched his feet with pranam and got his blessing in return.  Now later of course the tuition fees have come into existence.  Talented or weak students still are coached at home but not without payment.

Hostel students miss their home food and home atmosphere, so our teachers used to invite them in groups on Wednesday (our weekly holiday was never on Sunday), and students relished the home food and had a great time.  Hostel students had study hours in the afternoon and in the late evening where teachers used to go to coach them in groups, a system that still continues today.  We, the children of teachers, were allowed to invite our hostel friends to our homes.  Our mothers cooked for a hungry and greedy lot, and it was great fun.  Today, I wonder how the ladies managed to do this when a teacher’s average salary was within 300-500 Rupees (around six to seven pounds or ten dollars per month).  Money or lack of it just did not matter.

One particular incident I remember vividly.  China attacked India, and we had to go to war.  We were in school then, and it came as a great shock.  We were given lots of wool to make socks for the soldiers.  Senior students knitted cardigans.  After the class hours, our teachers taught us to knit.  How many pairs we knitted, I don't remember.  Our Prime Minister, Mr. Nehru, appealed to all Indians to donate gold ornaments for our nation.  At Santiniketan, teachers, their wives, and our mothers gave away whatever little ornaments and money they had.  These ladies and teachers could not possess a single gold ornament for many years to come.  No one bothered or regretted it (in India, owning gold ornaments was too important, and they were valued highly, especially by married ladies).  Now we also donate for various causes but we donate the excess, never our last possession.  There is a lot of difference between the two.  This particular type of selflessness was a typical quality of Santiniketan inspired by Tagore and his followers.  As you know, Tagore sold all of his wife's ornaments to build Santiniketan and left the comfort of his rich and powerful ancestral home.

These incidents which we observed from very close quarters left a deep and lasting impression in our minds.  No other teaching method can be more powerful than these simple human gestures of love, kindness, care, cultural awareness, and patriotism which teaches one to grow up as good humans with a sense of value.

Bipasha's schooling in the 70's was a different period for India in general, and Santiniketan in particular.  We were then into a modern era with a fast changing quality of life, ambitions, and priorities.  Older generation teachers all had retired by then or expired.  Younger teachers came from the outside world.  They were better paid and lived comfortably.  For most of them, it was a secured, highly paid central government job with pension and other perks.  They are good humans and some are brilliant teachers.  Some of them came from English Medium Westernized city schools, and they took time to absorb the different environment and Tagore's ideology.  Some teachers blended into it very well and naturally.  Some could not cope with the informal teaching method, with the pressure of innumerable, extra-curricular activities.  Some, I remember, grumbled that students sang and danced and played more than they studied or tried to score higher marks.

I do not know whether they were right or wrong.  How are we to decide what is the right balance and where to draw the line?  How do we choose between carefree naturally grooming and educating in one hand and tutored cultivated sophisticated grooming with expensive education on the other hand?  Which one is more important in today's complicated, highly pressurized life's struggle?  My faith in Tagore and my instinct tells me Tagore's philosophy is eternally correct and relevant.  There are some philosophies and sense of values which do not change with time.  They have an eternal truth, whether the materialistic world today believes in it or not.

3.         When Tagore decided to start coeducational school at Santiniketan, he was taking a revolutionary step.  Society accused him of bringing in evil western ideas and corrupted minds. But Tagore went ahead.

It is true that girls brought up and educated at Santiniketan grew up unconsciously to be very self-confident with strong personalities.  We climbed trees, fought and played with boys, rode cycles, went swimming, and did manual labor side by side with boys. We were quite tomboyish in school, but as we grew up, we never lost our femininity.  How this combination was blended so naturally and what was the special element in the environment that made this possible I can’t explain.  Our critics say that “women species of  Santiniketan look extremely feminine and beautifully coy but appearance is deceptive; they have a feminine body with the steel structure inside.”  Honestly speaking this observation has a lot of truth in it.  (My handsome husband, very romantic man, soft at heart who is very caring and supportive could never handle this steel structure within me!!  For the last 32 years of our marriage, the poor guy is still struggling!!  Maybe secretly he holds Tagore responsible for this!!  Ha, Ha!!).

Jokes apart, it is true that we grew up to be very proud as women, but not arrogant or aggressive.  Tagore’s education gave us self-confidence and self-respect.  Generally speaking, women students learned to organize, manage, and handle any situation there.  We are given so much freedom and importance there.  We women have always been the real stars at Santiniketan.  Somehow women or girls are more enterprising and ambitious than their male counterparts at Santiniketan, a phenomenon I could never understand.

As for me, I developed a strong self-respect, an absolute faith in myself, a capacity to take any decision independently, and an attitude for logically analyzing human problems and taking a fair stand.  This is a common quality which Santiniketan imbibed in a majority of  female students.

4-5.      no response

6.         Santiniketan gave me a deep respect for education which is not related to bread earning but to a broader outlook on religion, aesthetic sense, and above all, dignified taste.  It has taught me to enjoy all gifts of life.  You may wonder why I remained a housewife and didn’t choose a career.  Frankly speaking, because I came from a broken family and experienced loss and pain in my childhood, I consciously chose to remain a housewife.  I made my married life, home, and Bipasha my only priority in life.  I have given myself to my full capacity for this cause, and I honestly tell you today that I have never regretted my decision ever.  Whenever I see my other girlfriends who have worked very hard and contributed in their respective fields and made a name for themselves, I feel very proud.  I have always identified myself with them.

8.         no response

 

Bipasha

1.         The first impression that I have of  the “open-air” classroom is that it was great fun!  The memories of classes under trees have much to do with sitting on red pebbles which leave imprints on your bare thighs; very slyly collecting the pebbles and throwing them at guys whom you hate (when the teacher is not looking at you); writing love notes on dry leaves that fell from the mango trees; competing to get the best flower and interestingly textured leaves or berries for the teachers; and waiting greedily for a green little mangoe to fall on the ground so that we could just grab it, peel it with blades, divide it into twenty pieces and enjoy its sour taste.  In our moments of great boredom or relaxation, we chewed juicy grasses growing between the pebbly class areas.

I remember a chemistry teacher who had his classes inside classrooms or labs.  That dull grey tiny room with a huge blackboard and a noisy fan distracted me the most.  I remember dashing for the last bench and scribbling things on the desk, a very bad habit indeed.  Friends kept waving from outside the window, and I used to count the number of times the fan made a funny screeching noise.  I don’t remember a word he taught.  Yet there was another dingy room where we had our life science class, and we never took our eyes from our notebook in case we missed writing a word that the teacher had lectured.  So, distraction was a function of the teaching ability of the teacher and not the surrounding atmosphere.

The difference between a closed classroom and an open classroom was that in the latter there was always an expectation for some change.  For example, often a bird would shit on your head and there would be a roar of laughter; a mangoe would fall on the ground; sudden rains and unexpected holidays which we called “rainy days” would give us a break to get drenched; suddenly thousands of migratory birds would cover the sky, and we would gaze at them for hours; there would be change of seasons with change of colour all around you.  I was very conscious of this change in nature which made each day a very different experience.

When I came to Cambridge, I truly enjoyed my first year, but from second year onwards, I started feeling claustrophobic as nothing changed in Cambridge (U.K.).  The buildings look as old as ever, the weather is grey and dull, and the traditions and the way people behave and speak haven’t changed an iota in the last four years that I have been around.  This sameness in the atmosphere around me gets on to me at times.

2.         Experiences with my teachers have been mixed.  I have been taught by older generation teachers who also taught my mother twenty years before my time.  I have never again come across teachers who were so thorough with their subjects.  They were very strict yet the amount of respect that they commanded was something that was not seen among any other new generation teachers.  My base had been built by them, and still there are nights when I dream of them telling me what was right and what was wrong.  We were very scared of them, yet what I have gained from them still remains with me intact.  There were teachers in school who were very friendly, who sang in chemistry classes, chatted with us about our personal lives in our spare time, and took part in dramas and sports with us.

Our principal Supriyoda and his wife Subhradi were people who had many contributions in building my mind.  They had taken us to England for a cultural workshop and that was a lifetime experience.  We were ten young students from school, yet they not only made us perform dance dramas in different parts of England but all the workshops in different British schools were organized by us.  We were kids, only thirteen to fifteen years of age, who decided on the agenda, and the way to present it and teach it to other children.  We cooked together, performed together, sat with the principal of the school and discussed, and decided and invented ways to present things in a foreign land.  It was an ideal experience of equal participation and exchange of ideas.  The experience was repeated over and over again in the annual school excursions to different parts of India.  If Supriyoda and Subhradi were with us, the experience was worth living again.  They had the right combination of things that, according to my view, teachers should have.  They were friendly yet they were not too cozy with us.  We were in awe of them; we were very close to them, yet we did not dare to disobey them or disrespect them.  Most new generation teachers lacked this balance in school.  Either they were too casual with us which made us disregard them, or they were too academic and boring to be remembered.  The old generation teachers are remembered by me as good teachers, good human beings, good elders.  That is what I missed among the younger teachers in school.

3.         After I left Santiniketan, I came to Calcutta and studied in this girl’s college called Lady Brabourn College at Calcutta.  My experience at this new girly set-up was very very bad indeed, and I would not like to relive those nightmares.  Before coming to Calcutta, I never realized that men and women were actually very different except in their appearance.  The coeducation system in Santiniketan was so healthy that I could never guess that there could be any other set-up elsewhere.  At Calcutta, I found girls to be talking about men as a subject on which I had no comments or even understanding.  At Calcutta, boys were not allowed for our college festivals, and the college had guards to prevent men and dogs from entering!  When I came to Cambridge, U.K., I encountered feminist women for the first time.  I could not conform with their attitude either.  I did not smoke, I was not arrogant and sensitive about being a woman, and I did not understand why my female friends needed to copy men to be on a par with them!

At Santiniketan, I was taught to be natural.  And my natural self was that of a woman who was friendly and uninhibited.  I wore Western and Indian clothes, whatever looked pleasant on me, drank wine or tea whenever it suited my stomach, spoke with an Indian accent without bothering to correct it, and was very happy with whatever I was.  I was never doing things to make a statement about being a woman.  But my Indian friends abroad were indeed very weird.   Some of them chopped off their long hair because they thought their Indian appearance was not acceptable with their new found feminist ideology.  All of them started smoking to prove they were modern women from India.  They all acquired white men as boyfriends because they thought white men treated them more equally than Bengali men.

My coeducation in Santiniketan had somehow ( I don’t know how) bred a sense of being natural.  My friends tell me, of my body language, my way of speaking, choice of words, smile and expressions, that nothing changes, whether I am interacting with a man or a woman.  I have six very close friends in my life out of which four are men, including my husband, and two are women.  But frankly speaking, I can hardly make any difference in my attitude towards them.  I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but I am certainly not sensitive of being a woman.  There are times when I am accused of not being sensitive to issues concerning woman.  I do not comprehend the feeling of suppression or unequal treatment, as I have never experienced it in my family, my childhood at Santiniketan, or even later at Jawaharlal Nehru University at Delhi.  Now I am so comfortable with my identity as a person that I do not notice if someone is treating me differently because I am a woman.  In fact, sometimes my husband points it out to me, but otherwise I am quite blind to the issue.  I fail to see the world divided into men and woman.  I see it as individuals with millions of different needs and characteristics.  I do have problems in categorizing those feelings and needs in gender boxes.  Good or bad, this attitude is wholly an outcome of the coeducation system at Santiniketan.  My mother and grandmother who have studied there as well have exactly similar attitudes.

4.         Frankly speaking, in my time at Santiniketan (1977-1985), I did not meet any world figures at Santiniketan.  But surely I was exposed to western ideas through Tagore’s writings.  His writings on Europe, Russia and the world gave me a view that there are mostly positive things scattered all over the world in different forms such as music, literature, culture and people.  And there was this urgent desire in my mind to get out and experience those positive things.  But apart from Tagore’s own writing on the West which was of course a very big source of information and understanding by itself, our school curriculum was not updated enough to expose us to modern thoughts of the West.  I personally have a good exposure to Western ideas and culture because of my family.  My father was in the Merchant Navy, and so I had a chance to travel all over the world with my parents; as they had a very keen mind to absorb the best from all cultures, I gained a good overview of the West.  This helped me in grasping the right things when I came to study in U.K.  What my school taught me was to have an open mind to every culture and idea, and this spared me from having any kind of dogmatism about religion, language, culture or traditions.

In school, I had read Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, yet I must admit that the school agenda was more orientated towards Bengali culture and literature.  My grandmother knew much more about foreign literature, painting, and philosophy in her school days at Santiniketan than me.  Whatever I absorbed was from her understanding and knowledge and not from school.  My friends had not read Huckleberry Finn, Wind in the Willow, Alice in Wonderland, or even Enid Bulletins when we were kids.  Our library had all these, yet the teachers could not breed interest in them.  I got into the habit of reading foreign literature because my family was into it.  Now I feel I have the right balance of understanding about the West and the East with a strong base in both, but I cannot make out whether this has been a contribution of my school environment or family environment.  I would think it is the latter which has been more important in this particular aspect.

5.         Firstly and most importantly, I would talk about painting which is a very dear hobby of mine.  My husband is very keen to learn painting from me and we keep having these arguments about “how can I TEACH you painting?”  I learned painting because I was taught to observe the nature around me minutely and appreciate it.  I was never asked to copy a picture or any form at school, whereas my husband, who studied at Delhi, was taught to copy things.  Now what has happened is that I can sit in my room and paint a picture on rural India without looking at a photograph.  My composition is imaginative, and I am at ease with natural forms.  My husband is very good at photography and has a very technical approach to taking photographs.  He is very imaginative about techniques but less imaginative with his subject.  Even I am into photography, but my subjects are more alive according to the viewers.

Painting has never been a separate curriculum but part of every curriculum in my school.  We would go for picnics and excursions with a sketchbook; on a rainy day our school would give us a “rainy holiday.”  Teachers, instead of teaching, would take us to the nearest river and tribal villages where we would get drenched, sing crazily, sit inside a hut and sketch the soaked calves sucking milk from their mother. We were simply given the environment to observe—no one taught us painting, no one taught us to write poetry.

As far as the usual subjects are concerned, it is true that we did not have a very strict exam system.  Ranking in the exams was hardly important as long as you were popular in school for other activities.  In school, I did not concentrate too much on studies or exams, as the atmosphere did not breed competition; but later in life, when I was placed in a competitive environment, I somehow never had any problem.  I went to the most competitive institutions of Delhi and now U.K., but never did I have problems in ranking first or doing well in studies, seminars, or exams.

I do not remember any particular method of teaching in school because I have known no other method of teaching in other schools.  All I can say is perhaps that the most important method of teaching in our school was that of not having any set methods.  The teachers evolved methods according to the capacity and nature of the student.  As I was generally a good student, I remember nothing special about methods, yet I do remember teachers meeting up every week, especially with students who were not doing well, and helping them out.

You see, there were students from different backgrounds.  This is a distinct feature of Santiniketan.  In all other urban schools in India, students come from similar social and economic categories.  The name of your school would immediately show your social and economic status.  In Santiniketan it was totally different.  Students came from all strata.  I had classmates who were sons and daughters of security guards or poor shopkeepers of the surrounding villages, and there were also students from the renowned intellectual or rich families of West Bengal.  It was therefore not possible to have a uniform method of teaching.  How the teachers evolved a method or how they gave individual attention to these different people from different backgrounds, I do not know.  As far as I can remember, it was personal attachment to weak students that made teachers understand their problems, and each teacher had his or her own way of handling and helping these students.

6.         My personality is what I have got from Santiniketan.  Like most Santiniketan students, I am at ease always with myself and my surroundings.  My friends here are surprised to see how easily I can mingle with any culture and people.  I am comfortable wherever I am, be it a tribal village or a formal place like Cambridge.  This is a very typical characteristic of people who come from Santiniketan.

I think our education system breeds in us a high level of acceptance.  I accept other people’s way of life and appreciate positive things from every place and culture, yet I am very Bengali with a strong sense of Bengali values.  I am at ease with my own culture and yet comfortable with other cultures as well.

When I first came to Cambridge, I heard a new phrase repeatedly:  political correctness.  I had not heard this phrase before.  My friends from Delhi were always very conscious about what they said and did.  In the eyes of the world they needed to portray themselves as politically correct.  Surprisingly it was me who became very friendly with Africans and Mediterranean people because I found them very warm, lively and spontaneous.  I made bad jokes on Ethiopia, my African friends made horrible jokes on India, and we laughed a lot about it.  My Indian friends were horrified by my jokes as they thought I was being politically very incorrect indeed.  Yet at the end of the year, none of my Indian friends made any close friends with the Africans, and not only Africans.  They had a very clannish attitude and maintained a close network with Indians who came from particular fashionable institutions of India like St. Stephens College Delhi and Doon School of India, etc.  Any scholarship holders coming from rural India were to be avoided.  The first question within our India circle was, “What does your father do and where did you study before?”

Being in Delhi for two years of my Masters had made me aware of how racist urban Indians were.  In Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, there were students from Africa who hung around in a small group because no one would speak to them!!!

What I owe to Santiniketan’s education system is to be comfortable with everyone.  I do not have to make an effort at being politically correct, as I say and do what I feel like.  I do not treat any one equally, as I am not in a position to treat anyone in any position in any case.  I don’t treat them—I  just interact with them without being conscious about equality, racism, customs, class, gender, etc.   I like people who are lively, spontaneous, intelligent and, above all, who are kind.  I have found friends who have these qualities in abundance, and they are from every sphere of life and from every part of the world, and I hardly care to place them as samples in boxes of gender, skin colour and economic background.  This is not a characteristic that is just in me; most of my friends from Santiniketan have this kind of outlook.  In other words, they have no rigid outlook.

7.         Well, looking back I can criticize many things in our education system.  The most important aspect being that the atmosphere is so relaxing and the place is so cut off from the real cut-throat world that we don’t know the meaning of struggle and competition.  Competition is consciously not encouraged in our school.  We were never made conscious about our ranks in exams.  All this is fine, but, in the long run, most of my friends lack any form of ambition.  In Tagore’s time, and even a few years after that, students from Santiniketan topped every sphere of life:  leading painters, musicians, authors, social workers, filmmakers, engineers, educators, and politicians; you name a profession and there were people who had excelled in that from Santiniketan.  I have heard from my grandmother that unhealthy competition was not encouraged at that time, but Tagore encouraged people to venture into different areas and professions.  He had sent my great grandfather to England to study agriculture.

In my time, things had changed.  Lack of competition meant lack of initiative too.  We had absolutely no information about professions and opportunities that were coming up all over the new world.  The world was changing so rapidly with the introduction of computers, and we had no clue about the vast area of jobs and the creative world that had opened up for students.  I had no clue about how to apply for Cambridge or any other good institutions of the world.  I chose to go to Delhi for my Masters because I realized that the flow of information was in urban areas of India.  It was a very competitive environment, but at least I had the option to choose what I wanted to do.  The choice was so very limited in Santiniketan.  Ninety percent of my friends are school teachers, some are mediocre painters, some are ordinary medical or sales representatives, and a number which can be counted on fingers have ventured into international life.  None of them have reached to the top, and I doubt if anyone, including me, would reach very high in life.  We are very happy and satisfied with what we are or what we have, but it is sad that the relaxed nature has bred into us lack of initiative to venture into new fields.  Santiniketan these days breeds very stereotypical people in context of professions, and you would find none in the field of modern competitive professions like Banking, Management, Computers, Business, Civil Service, Army, or anything of the sort.  There is certainly nothing wrong in producing people in the areas of art and humanities, and there is nothing great in being a corporate man.  But my point is that the institution breeds a limited type of people, which is worrying.  Limitation breeds stagnation, and Santiniketan is now at that stagnating stage.  Tagore wanted to create a system which would make “frogs leap out of their well.”  He wanted to have a system which would give that “big push” to leap out of the well with your original ideas and place those ideas in the world forum.  Unfortunately, today in Santiniketan, there are ideas which evolve and die within the well, and the big push for the leap outward is missing, which is very sad indeed.

My relationship with Santiniketan is much more than an alumni.  My relationship is personal.  My family has been living there for four generations, from Tagore’s time, and has contributed much in building up the institution.  My grandmother, Sujata Mitra, is involved in vocationally training Muslim and tribal women of the rural areas surrounding Santiniketan to combat the exploitation by men and become self-sufficient economically.  Her brother, Santideb Ghose, has been taught by Tagore and is a renowned singer himself.  But more than that, he has worked for the promotion of folk music and culture of Bengal and is closely involved in organizing the Poush mela which is a rural fair started by Tagore to promote rural handicrafts, music, and culture through rural-urban communication.  He is an authority on Baul and Sufi music, Rabindra sangeet, and dance and education.  Tagore had sent him to Indonesia and Sri Lanka to learn different dance forms that could be used to develop a dance form of Bengal.  My own grandfather, Sukhomoy Mitra, is a painter taught by Nandalal Bose who was the pioneer in forming the Bengal school of thought on painting.

I have been brought up in Santiniketan by these people and the system, and the place is like my mother to me.  I love it dearly and go back to it every year.  I do criticize it a lot because I am so closely associated with the place and the system that the faults are very disturbing for me.

8.         Santiniketan’s environment is what teaches you.  It is not the curriculum nor the teachers nor books that are important. What remains with me is the experiences I gathered in day to day life which I could never experience again in any other place or institution.  I’ll give you a few examples.

Throughout the year we had different cultural programmes through which we welcomed different seasons.  The change in nature was something that we observed very closely, and we were very excited about this change.  We had Barsha-mongol, a celebration to welcome the rainy season which was Tagore’s favourite season.  Then there was Bosonto-utsab for spring and Magh-utsab for winter.  These were called ritu-utsab, meaning seasonal celebration.  These were very important for us, and we looked forward to them.  For each celebration, we had different clothes and colours, special songs written by Tagore, and dances.

From early morning with little baskets in hand, we would go looking for the flowers that were typical of the season. Then we would make ornaments with those flowers and leaves.  We would stick or stitch the flowers on big strong leaves and wear them on our heads and dangle them from ears and neck.  Then we would dip the flowers in our buckets and rinse out the colour.  For example, in summer we would use Polash, which is fire-coloured, and rinse out the colour and dye our saris in it.  We wore those fire-coloured saris and then, in a procession, we would dance through the streets to Tagore’s residence.  In the rainy season, we would wear blue saris, plant trees very ceremoniously and then dance in a procession around those trees.  In spring, we would wear yellow saris, adorn ourselves with colourful flowers, sing and dance throughout the day, and play “coloured powder” with each other.  The festival is called Holi in the rest of India.  But our holi was not a special event, as we celebrated such events before the arrival of each and every season.  In autumn, we performed a series of plays, as there was not much colour left in nature, and we mourned the advent of winter.  These plays were mostly written by Tagore and sometimes they were humourous plays written by other famous authors.  These events were started by Tagore and still continue without the spirit dying.

These events have left a big influence in my life.  I learned to observe nature and its changes.  I learned to identify the difference in each season and, above all, I learned to respect it, love it, cherish its beauty, and feel very happy in it.  This is something which is missing from any other educational institution.  Consciousness about nature is something that is politically correct and a social agenda which is artificially thrust on people who appreciate nothing about it.  Love for nature is part of my spontaneous self, and I would not spoil it because I love it the way I love myself.  It just comes automatically to me.  Now I have house plants which grow in my dark flat in the centre of London.  It is a big joke among my friends that I treat my plants like children and sing with them.  I can tell if there is a degree of change in their colour or movement of their leaves.  My husband used to find it unnatural, but for students of Santiniketan such instincts are most natural.  I have not cultivated my understanding and love for nature.  It comes to me naturally.

The other events that have left a great impact in my life and habits are events where we did everything together.  I have mentioned about our excursions to different parts of the country every year.  I started going on these excursions when I was nine years old, and we did everything on our own with teachers treating us like adults.  There were other similar events like the Gandhi Jayanti.  Tagore started this event to remember the day Mahatma Gandhi had visited Santiniketan.  On this day, the gardeners, guards, maids, cooks, and clerks all were given a special holiday.  Teachers and students from all departments got together and cleaned each and every building of the university; this used to be in winter when streets were covered with dry leaves. We swept the streets, cooked at the student’s kitchen, served, and washed the utensils; we did the repairing that was needed, gardening, and toilet cleaning.  All of this was a massive task, yet teachers and students did it without any complaint and inhibition, and we also enjoyed it thoroughly.

I am not conscious about class, caste, background and kind of jobs; I find dignity in everything.  This is something that crept into me while I did all kinds of things that we generally don’t do in India.  In America or England, children are used to doing things for themselves and thus are self-sufficient.  But in India, you see, everything is done for them by maid servants.  There is a strong class distinction between the two.  In our case, we called our teachers as Krishna-di and Supriyo-da (di meaning elder sister and da meaning elder brother), and called gardeners as Roshkay-da and maids as Sumati-di.  In my childhood, I didn’t even realize that there was any difference between these two sets of people.  Even now, if you go to Santiniketan, you would see my friend Bodhi sitting with  Ramu-da, a rickshaw puller, and sharing a fag and chatting about everything in life. This is a rare sight in other parts of India.

There was another annual event called Anondo-mela—a fate for happiness.  Small children from school were allowed to do whatever they please to earn money.  I remember being eleven years old and setting up our own shop.  We made the shops with long saris borrowed from my mother. Throughout the year we had made handkerchiefs, bags, masks, paper dolls, and weird art objects, and we sold them on that day.  We also cooked very bad snacks and sold them too.  People came and ate all this half-cooked food, bought things, and paid us a lot of money.  We had a school committee which collected the money.  Then we would have these very serious meetings among ourselves on how to disburse the money for the development of poor people.  In my time we spent the money for building a school hut for the tribal children; we not only gave the money but helped them put up the bricks and make the thatched roof.  Next time we bought them books and boards.  There were teachers who were paid by the university or the government to teach these children, but we went and taught them too on a regular basis.  Once we bought musical instruments for village children who wanted to become Bauls and wander around the country singing Baul songs and their philosophy.  These children generally sing and beg in the train.  We selected those who had good voices and who were very enthusiastic about carrying on with their cult.  We spent the money to buy them ektara and dugdugi, special instruments that Bauls play while they sing.  This is what made me very interested in the development of poor regions and poor people of the world.

That I am doing a Ph.D. on this particular topic is because of my understanding and exposure to such a cause at a very young age.  My friends from urban India have absolutely no view on rural India.  There are people who have never visited a single village and see them only on a screen.  Yesterday, I was having a big argument with my husband, as he refused to believe that we still have the system of bonded labour in Asia!!!  My school has taught me to not only sympathize with the rural life of India but also to understand it and be a part of it.  This is a very special feature of Santiniketan.

The other aspect which is a very important feature of Santiniketan’s life is something which I would not be able to explain in words. It is called adda which literally means chatting.  It might sound funny, but chatting is almost institutionalized in Santiniketan, and this was started by Tagore himself.  Tagore used to call all his friends and students every evening at a different venue, and they all sat and chatted about everything in life and the world.  Still now, if you go to Santiniketan, you would find a rickety old tea shop called Kalor Dokan where you would see teachers and students sitting and chatting throughout the weekends and every evening. You would see people sitting in a group under trees, on walls, on cycles with their feet on the road . . . all chatting. You might think that they have nothing better to do, that they are gossipy and lazy.  But what I have learned about the world is all from such chatting.

There is no age bar in these groups. You can discuss politics, art, music, philosophy, or you can just marvel about your travelling experiences, joke, tease and mimic; you can sing aloud, debate, complain, and share your moments of personal sorrow or happiness, and people would, open-mouthed, listen to you keenly and contribute their views on the matter.  I have participated in such addas where my grandmother, my school principal, a renowned film actress of India, a Korean dancer, my nine year old cousin, and the tea shop owner Kalo ( a very old and simple rural man) have all sat together and chatted about everything on earth.  Kalo would sing out suddenly his folk tunes and then someone would show him a similar tune that Tagore had adopted; Mina Kang would narrate some Korean jokes, and Kalo would be rolling on the floor.  We have seen slides of Antarctica by a lady who went for an expedition, we have listened to pedro jokes for the first time, we have heard The Four Seasons, heard the name Fellini and Kurosawa, shared our views on commercial Hindi films where Amitabh Bachchan was the super angry hero like Clint Eastwood, and all this happened in the same adda.  We were exposed to these world ideas not in the classroom but in these addas.  These were introduced by Tagore as the most useful and interesting medium of exchanging information and ideas. These addas are still the life line of Santiniketan.

I would suggest that if you can highlight the last question then you would get the true answers on Santiniketan’s education. The other questions are very focused and anything too structured and focused would limit the scope of the answers.  I think I like the last question the most.

 

Nigel

1.         My classes were under a large pipal tree, with huge fins projecting out that look like an aeroplane. We sat on a cresentic concrete bench with a writing surface in front of us, and enjoyed the sunshine and free air. We were under the tree, but not on the ground like the kids in Patha-Bhavan.  The setting was close to the classrooms of the Bengali Dept., so it wasn’t totally rural, but it gave a relaxed setting.  As a “casual” student, the classes were very relaxed, and our teacher was marvelous, so it was altogether excellent.  I plan to institute classes in the Botanic Gardens here at UCR when the appropriate class appears.

The inside classrooms were not used in my course, but I was often in them rehearsing for musical functions, etc.  Students sat on the polished concrete floors.  They were generally open (no glass in the windows), and well ventilated, although the windows were quite small.  They had fans, but there was so much “load shedding” (power cuts) that you could get very hot in them.

It wasn’t the classroom that had the biggest environmental effect on me (I only had two 40 minute classes per week), but just the general setting of both the campus and the surrounding area.  Santiniketan campus is charming in a dilapidated kind of way, and there are many wonderful trees and flowering shrubs.  Every day I went cycling around four o’clock into the countryside.  It’s totally flat in the plains of Bengal, but there was something magnificent about the size of the sky—so huge above you (and I’ve always been a mountain person—hence my Himalayan work).

2.         I had a strong relationship with my teacher there, but not altogether an unambiguous one.  He liked to teach the foreign students because he believes strongly in Tagore’s ideals and also because he enjoyed the contact.  He was the perfect man for the job.  The old ashramic system makes a great deal of the pupil/teacher relationship, and Santikinetan certainly fosters that.  I came to love and greatly respect this teacher.  My classmate, who was half Iranian and half British, had a better sense of balance, but I swallowed the “Guru’shika” relationship ideal and idealized my teacher, feeling that I had a special relationship with him.  This lead to my feeling hurt on several occasions when he didn’t have time to see me or some such (not that I went as far as touching his feet, or whatever, as most Bengali students did to their teachers).  It’s very easy for an impressionable Westerner to go overboard on the India thing—I  think I have a better perspective now.

I don’t want to give an overly-dramatic impression here.  Santiniketan is very far from a modern day ashram where Westerners buy love from their money-hungry guru (not something I would ever have been attracted to), but the teacher/student relationship in India is generally different and deeper, and is built on a recognition of differences. Quite how one as a Westerner accommodates to this relationship can be a difficult matter.

3.         I have a hopelessly romantic view of the place.  I went to a single sex school in the UK, so, at age eighteen, I was terrified of women and had absolutely no idea of how to interact with young women.  I tried to treat women with great respect and suppressed my sexual feelings (it would have been impossible for me to even speak to a girl I found really attractive!).  At undergraduate school, I had several friends who were women, including one who fell in love with me.  I was so inexperienced that I failed to realize this, and we had a close but non-sexual relationship.  The coeducational aspect of Santiniketan had an incredible effect on me because it was there that I discovered flirting, that it was okay to be a boy (perhaps again I found that India celebrates difference between people, where my socialist/Quaker ideals had emphasized the similarities).  As soon as I got to Santiniketan,  I began to notice that women found me attractive.  Those young Indian girls in their saris, long braids, and coy smiles were just incredibly gorgeous!  All this was completely innocent, and I didn’t even kiss a girl my entire time there, but it changed me very markedly.  Seems funny, but for me, India was a sexually liberating experience!

All of this was deeply associated with the physicality of the place and Tagore’s art.  At the end of my time there, I was involved in the spring festival.  The whole place was a blaze of flowers, and I fell desperately in love with my lovely dance partner at this festival (who was shortly thereafter married to a boy she’d been engaged to for years).  Whether I was really in love with her or just the whole experience is debatable, but for the only time in my life, I had the literal experience of walking on air for about four days.

I had other friends who were girls.  Two lasses from the Bengali Dept. used to come to my room under the pretence of teaching me Tagore’s songs.  I’m still in touch with one of these girls who married an economics student and now has a young son.  Of all the friends I had there, she is among the most dear, as I’ve often visited her home, and her frequent letters have kept my Bengali alive.  She’s a regular middle-class Indian woman with no particular interest in Tagore or whatever—but that’s the great gift of Santiniketan to me because that kind of friendship is what the place is all about.  Compared to Britain, I found coeducational aspects of Santiniketan much more positive.  I worked in a university in Ireland for a year once, and I think that the Irish have a much better balance on the relationships between the sexes than the Brits do, and one that’s more akin to India.

Aside from my own experience, boys and girls hung out together all over Santikinetan.  Sometimes disasters happened.  I knew one couple who were so desperate to be together, despite their parent’s refusal, that they ran away.  In India, this almost certainly led to great financial hardship for them and possibly worse.  (A surprising aspect of India is the high suicide rate.  Santiniketan is no exception. One of my friends, a music major there, committed suicide after I left because he was so depressed he couldn’t get a job).  There were a lot of romances, and certainly some sex.  One girl had a huge fight to let her parents marry a boy, even though he was also Brahmin, but in the end they agreed, and then were most pleasantly surprised, as the boy’s parents didn’t accept a dowry.  This is a paradox about the place.  For example, the girl’s parents, who are lovely, actively encouraged my friendship with her.  But if we had developed really serious feelings for one another, as could easily have happened, there is absolutely no way we ever could have married.  There is a certain cruelty about letting boys and girls mix freely and then marrying them off to other people.  Many girls are sent to Santiniketan on arts “certificate” courses.  There is an old joke that these are actually marriage certificate courses.  Every parent looking for a match for their boy wants an artistic girl.  But I think things are changing;  I suspect that many parents now accept their child’s chosen partner.  At the same time, perhaps the fact that you’re not going to actually have to marry a person you meet at college takes the pressure off in a way and thus allows for more innocent friendships.

4.         It did a great deal, but this was in many ways informal.  I had Bengali friends who were interested in me as a foreigner and as a person, and vice versa, but there was no institutional aspect to this.  In this regard, Tagore’s vision of the place as a meeting of minds is long dead.  Santiniketan is an extremely Bengali place.  We had some foreign professors speaking, but I don’t think more so than in Calcutta.

5.         I suspect that Tagore’s attitude on rote learning was a reaction to his bad experience as a child. This introductory Bengali reader “Shahaj pat” is styled to allow the teacher to use rote learning—particularly in the poems.  I have to say that I found rote learning of poems the best way for me to learn Bengali.  But my teacher never encouraged this, and so in that sense, I suspect that Tagore’s influence persists.  I think that the whole place is just so sensual that simply being there promotes the kinds of links that Tagore had in mind; this is a result of his deliberate planning, and something that does persist today.  As for exams, all students take them, and they are much like those in the UK educational system:  one set of exams at the end of the year with a series of papers.

6.         Discovering my sexuality, freedom to make music, and learning an instrument, a fundamental widening of my world view, an extremely close bunch of friends, both Bengali and foreign, the gift of another, a most beautiful language, and a love of poetry.

7.         I would have learned Bengali more diligently and taken private lessons in Hindi.  I would also have explored the geology of the area more thoroughly (I made some vague attempts in this regard).  I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I’d lived in a Bengali boys’ student hostel, but I suspect that would have been too much for me.

The most immediate gift was my playing of an instrument, writing songs, and the courage to perform them.  I went through a phase on ending my talks at meetings and universities by pulling out my ukulele and playing a song about trilobites.  It did my career a wonderful amount of good.  Sadly, I don’t play it much now, but maybe with my daughter I’ll start playing more again.

I certainly think the educational experience will influence me as a teacher, although I’ve yet to work out how.  I want to design a broad non-majors course on Time that incorporates scientific, philosophical, and literal views on time. Tagore is the inspiration for this, and this is my strongest meeting point with him in terms of my work life.  He had such a strong sense of the transcendence of the moment, and  that’s what I seek in my work life.

I am part of that list you found, but I am not involved with any other formal alumni association.  As far as I understand it one does exist, but what it does and getting on the list is likely impossible!  It’s a shame, because I think experts would be willing to help the university very strongly.  Maybe that will happen in time.

8.         no response

 

Sugata

1.         Notably life and physical sciences, geography, art, and history lessons used to be held inside buildings and laboratories, and math and literature outside in the groves.  There were blackboards mounted on wooden stands, or some permanently built on concrete posts.  There would be a tree to give the shade.  The teacher would sit on a small concrete platform (bedi) at the foot of the tree.  A semi-circular, one-brick-high wall surrounded the tree,  and the floor of this enclosure was spread with red laterite gravel;  this enclosure would make up the classroom.  Students would carry a piece of cloth called asan on which to sit.  Typically one teacher would be assigned to a particular bedi, so when  the big bell at the top of Sinha-Sadana would ring to signal the end of a period,  the various adjacent  gardens—Amrakunja (mango grove), Bakul bithi (road with bakul trees lined up on the sides), Saal bithi (road with tall Saal trees lined up on the sides)—would all fill up with clatter from dragged bookcases, sporadic loud cheers, and incessant female conversations, drowning the ever present chirping coming from the tree tops.

Well, exams were held all so often that people rarely needed to set aside any time to study for them.  On an average, three hours a day were more than enough to supplement the work done in the class.  During class, paying attention was a must.  However, it wasn’t unusual, for example, that during an English class a guy would show up to say hello and pay his respects to our English teacher, and our teacher would interrupt the regular stuff to introduce this guy, Bimal Dey, the first Indian to travel around the world on a bike.  So he would go on to tell us a little of his story.  And the next day (English, Bengali, and math classes were on every week day), we would be asked to come prepared to write a short essay regarding our encounter with this curious man and what we remembered of the stories he told us.  This kind of environment was a great relief on the process of education for sure.  At the end of the day, that’s what counts a lot.

2.         Well, teachers were remarkably varied in their own ways that did not necessarily conform to any preset standards.  We used to learn by examples.  Every student, in whatever way he/she could, had to do something in a way of participating with the class.  The teachers had to make this important thing happen, so their involvement was pretty obvious.

3.         no response

4.         This was a great component of my experience in Santiniketan.  The ones I knew from the West or East were most probably not the greatest minds, yet there indeed was a professor from Canada, from Japan, and a host of others I got to know.  But the thing is, they came to learn about Tagore, not to share their ideas.  So, while Tagore’s dream of Visva-Bharati being the meeting ground for the East and the West has remained but a poet’s dream, Tagore’s works and ideas themselves keep attracting folks from the West.

5.         I’d say it was more like learning by examples that kept us going.  But cruel exams were there, no matter how much Tagore, or for that matter, each and every student wanted to do away with exams.

Nature study was an integral part when we were kids.  We’d go out in hoards, collect samples of plants and tiny bugs, draw sketches to an extent whatever we’d be able to after looking at the real thing, and only then would our life science teacher let us open the relevant part of the book to see how to look at and draw the various sections of the plants conforming to the standards of textbook biology,  etc.

6-8.  No response.

 

Ujjwal

1.         The open-air classroom is really a unique idea of Tagore’s.  The concept behind the idea was that students should be closely associated with nature, open-minded, and not be bored while learning any serious matters.  In fact, the teachers also taught us the complicated subjects in a simple way by gossiping and joking during classes.  The environment was really a pleasant one, and the open-air classes were very helpful in boosting our ideas and enriching our knowledge.

2.         The teachers were as friend, philosopher, and guide for the students.  We could ask questions on any matter, even on holidays.  We visited the teachers quite frequently for suggestions and guidance on any problem in our lives.

3.         The major difference between coeducation in other schools in India and Santiniketan was the feeling of all classmates being a member of the same family.  The unity of the students was really admirable.

4.         I think Tagore is quite successful in uniting the world in a small nest.  I think there is no institution in India which provides for various cultures to gather in such a small place as Santiniketan.  We had a chance to learn about the respective cultures of various countries including the U.S., Japan, Germany, Russia, France, China, Korea, etc.

5.         The students at Visva-Bharati are rich in culture, and I learned many extra activities beyond the routine subjects.  I was a science student, yet I learned leather craft and languages such as German and Russian.

6.         After finishing my education at Santiniketan, the biggest impact it has had on my life is that I can see everyone as a good friend.  Although I have been a fool on some occasions, for the most part I have enjoyed the friendship, both male and female, of many people.  I am yet to be a teacher, but if I have the chance to teach, I shall definitely adopt the education system of Visva-Bharati.  I believe that only education through nature and friendly relationships with students can improve the knowledge of students and help develop our society.  I can face all the difficulties in my life boldly and overcome those quite smoothly, and this is essentially due to my close association with teachers, discussions on real life problems and their valuable suggestions.

7.         Unfortunately, I am not involved with any official organizations of Visva-Bharati.  However, I still have some communication with Santiniketan, specifically with some of my respected teachers.

8.         In general my experience at Santiniketan was excellent, and I have many reflections and memories of the place.  Others may have had those experiences also.  However, in very recent times, the environment of Visva-Bharati has changed a bit due to the appearance of some political parties.  It is worth mentioning that most of the Indian Universities are influenced and guided by the bureaucrats and corrupted political leaders, and Visva-Bharati cannot remain an exception.  Political leaders are now trying to impose their opinions on Visva-Bharati, and this will affect and damage the real and unique ideas of Tagore.  I feel very bad about this.

References

Ali, T.  (1985).  An Indian dynasty:  The story of the Nehru-Gandhi family.  New York:  G.P. Putman and Sons.

Bhattacharya, V. R. (1987).   Tagore’s vision of a global family.  New Delhi:  Enkay Publishers.

Chakrabarti, M.  (1988).  Philosophy of education of Rabindranath Tagore:  A critical evaluation.  New Delhi:  Atlantic Publishers.

Elmhirst, L.K., & Tagore, R.  (1961).  Rabindranath Tagore:  Pioneer in Education.  London:  John Murray.

Kripalani, K.  (1962).  Rabindranath Tagore:  A biography.  New York:  Grove Press.

Lago, M. M.  (1972).  Imperfect encounter:  Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Ministry of Education and Social Welfare.  (1975).  Report of the committee on Visva-Bharti.  New Delhi.

Mukherjee, H. B.  (1962).  Education for fulness:  A study of the educational thought and experiment of Rabindranath Tagore.  Bombay:  Asia Publishing House.

Pearson, W.W.  (1916).  Shantiniketan:  The Bolpur school of Rabindranath Tagore.  New York:  Macmillan.

Ramaswami Sastri, K.S.  (1988).  Sir Rabindranath Tagore:  His life, personality and genius.  New Delhi:  Akashdeep Pub. House.

Robinson, A.  (1989).  Satyajit Ray:  The inner eye.  Berkeley:  Univ. of California Press.

Sakar, B. N.  (1974).  Tagore, the educator.  Calcutta:  Academic Publishers.

Tagore, R. (1922).  Creative unity.  London:  Macmillan.

Tagore, R.  (1917).  My reminiscences.  New York:  Macmillan.

Tagore, R. (1997a).  A parrot’s training.  In K. Dutta & A. Robinson (Eds.), Rabindranath Tagore:  An anthology.  London:  Picador.  pp. 327-330.

Tagore, R. (1997b).  A poet’s school.  In K. Dutta & A. Robinson (Eds.), Rabindranath Tagore:  An anthology.  London:  Picador.  pp. 248-261.

Tengshe, L.H.  (1961).  Tagore and his view of art.  Bombay:  Vora & Co. Publishers.

Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan—Santiniketan, West Bengal alumni registry; available at http://www.infophil.com/India/Alumni/VB; Internet; accessed 5 May 1998.