Interview: Uma Dasgupta and Santiniketan

This is an edited excerpt from an interview conducted by Vishwabandhu of Prof. Uma Dasgupta based on her recent book “History of Santiniketan: Rabindranath Tagore and His Life’s Work, 1861-1941.” The full interview can be found on Youtube. 

Q: In trying to find studies of Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati, I was not able to find so many. You would think that given the enormity and the importance of the project there would be a lot of work done on it. It seems it has not been given enough attention, and I wanted to ask you if you agree with this? 

A: Yes, I do very much so. I mean, Tagore was obviously a great writer, a great poet, and that goes without saying, but he was also a very committed educator, that is hardly known. And there have been, so far as I saw from my research, and this is probably quite factual, no histories of Santiniketan. There have been contemporary tracts. When I was looking at the archives, I was asking the archivists and the librarians at Santiniketan, in the Rabindra Bhavana repository, which is the major repository of Tagore’s works. And they said there are teachers’ pamphlets. Teachers who taught at the time  wrote little pamphlets about their own experience, and that we do call contemporary tracts in historical research. So I could use them, but there were just a very few, not even a handful, but no connected history of either Santiniketan or Sriniketan or Visva-Bharati.

Q:  I know you’ve had a very long association with Santiniketan. Maybe you could just talk about that a little bit.

A: I had a strong family connection because my mother’s mother lived her widowed years in Santiniketan. She was a lady from Dhaka. When her husband died, who was a lawyer in Dhaka, she had four children who were still growing up, it was a family of sixteen children, but four were still in the age of ten to fifteen, sixteen. And Tagore used to go to Dhaka, of course, and as was the tradition in those times, he was obviously by then quite a celebrity by the time he was going to Dhaka. And the ladies would get together and cook a wonderful meal for him each day of his stay. And one of them was my grandmother, my father’s mother.

So there was a connection. There was also another connection which was my grandfather’s youngest sister was a child widow, like so many were at that time. And the two child widows, I mean two remarriages of child widows that Tagore actually was present for—one was his own son, I won’t go into that, but the second was a teacher of the Santiniketan school who was married to my pishima, my mother’s father’s sister, who grew up in their household—they were like one family.

And so Tagore wrote to my grandmother saying, “Why are you raising these little children in Dhaka all on your own? Just come to Santiniketan. We’ll have a house ready for you.” That was the kind of place Santiniketan was.

How did I come to this work? Because in 1973, when my husband was teaching at Presidency College and I was teaching at Jadavpur University, our son was born. And we were then in Oxford on two fellowships, each of us. And our son was born in Oxford. And my husband’s teacher, who was then the Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, an eminent historian called Pratul Chandra Gupta, wrote to my husband saying, “Why don’t you come to Santiniketan and help us improve the history department?”

Earlier vice-chancellors always did this because they knew what Santiniketan was about. And so my husband said to me, “If you agree, we can give up our Kolkata jobs and take our little boy, raise him there, and serve Santiniketan.” And that sort of answered something of a question that we all should have, which is how were we so indifferent to Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan?

Because I began by saying in response to your first question that he was hardly known as an educator. Everyone knew that Santiniketan was there. Everyone thought it must be a great institution. But Bengali intellectuals didn’t come forward to help. Bengali intellectuals, Bengali academics somehow treated it as a rural institution, which it was, but which it was meant to be as well. Not for the sake of it being rural, but he wanted a close connection between Santiniketan and the city. In other words, between the village and the city.

And so when I came I was looking for a post-doctoral research project because once you start research you don’t want to stop it. And nor did my husband want me to stop my research.

And that’s why he said, “Look, try and find something close by to Santiniketan to work on. Then we can all be together as a family without you having to go anywhere because the child is so small.” And I completely agreed with him.

And so we came, and I began to look at the Rabindra archives, which we always knew to be literary archives, which it is, but that it had so many letters—thousands of letters—from all over the world to Tagore. And he also answered letters. And that, I think, we never factored in.

And so when I found nothing written on Santiniketan as a history, and the archivist also didn’t know that there was anything, quite rightly, except those tracts, I said, “What about the letters?” They said, “Yes, the letters are there. They’re still being hand-listed. We don’t have a catalogue.” And I said, “Okay, never mind. Can you still let me read those letters and I’ll be very careful?” And I did.

And I just—I didn’t know who had come, who had gone, how Santiniketan had come up. So I just started from A because it was alphabetical. Their hand-listing was alphabetical, and although it was incomplete, I started from A and went through the files. And there was so much that he wrote on Santiniketan. There was so much that he wrote about what he wanted of Santiniketan as the years passed, and what were his disappointments, what were his hopes.

So that’s how I actually wrote a history of Santiniketan and a history of Sriniketan. That was my research, which went on for years, because Tagore needs time to really understand.

Q: You use the term “the Santiniketan quest” in your book, and you connect it to Rabindranath’s philosophy, and what I found particularly striking was that you connected it to his approach to Indian history. And so I just wondered if you could expand on that a little bit—what the Santiniketan quest was and how it was connected to his philosophy.

A: Tagore wrote essays on India’s history, and Jadunath Sarkar, who was a grounded historian unlike Tagore, in fact, translated one of them into English because Tagore wrote all of those five, six essays on India’s history in Bangla. He thought this is a very important history. And yet, as you know, Tagore was not reading in the archives.

Now he did actually believe that we were not, in that sense, a nation because we were not a state. That’s one thing. And therefore that sense of nation hadn’t come because after all we were colonized earlier and, you know, close to Tagore’s life and in Tagore’s life a second time. We don’t always talk of the Mughal period as a colony, but it definitely was because there was a lot of merging of cultures, right?

But the British was a different issue because after all they were in all senses foreign, whereas, of course, in some senses the Mughals were also foreign, but that’s not how we treated it.

Because what Tagore believed—and what is, I think, historically proven—that India, not being for ages a nation-state as it is now, was a civilization, a social civilization, where many other streams of cultures were coming in. And this is why there has been a race problem, which he never denied. He said there is a race problem and there has been a race problem. It is a race problem to the end of his life. He said it hadn’t been resolved.

But what had happened—he completely believed in that and he documented it in his own way in his essays—was that there was a continuous attempt to bring the Hindus and Muslims together. But the conflict part was very—was obviously getting a bit sometimes out of hand for various reasons, for religious reasons.

However, what gave him so much hope was that although it hasn’t been resolved, there is a continuous attempt. This was because of two things. One was—where was the problem? The problem was they lived next to one another, Hindus and Muslims. Santiniketan was an ideal site for an alternative education because there were Hindus, Muslims and tribals living in the same area. 

So they were staying next to one another but they wouldn’t marry, they wouldn’t eat with one another. That was the basic thing, or if you call it race. They wouldn’t, you know, this thing of touch, which as you know is very endemic to orthodox Hinduism and also orthodox Islam.

So therefore how is it being resolved? At least, you know, they were staying next to one another physically, although there were these differences.

Secondly, he believed very much—he was actually devoted to the medieval saints whom he called the people’s saints. Nanak was one of them, his great hero. He wrote on the Sikh gurus. And then there was Chaitanya who brought this great movement of love and mingling with one another. And actually almost teaching the people that there is no other preacher greater than man.

So, you know, that whole thing of humanism, human—it’s all related to this. So man is the most—there is no other greater than man. So don’t fight as man and man. Come together.

Q: I’m very moved by what you’re saying, the emphasis on the human. And I mean you see it all over Santiniketan. You see it not only in his own writings but, for example, in Kala Bhavana and all of these great artists that come out of Kala Bhavana.

Because really, when I say emphasis on the human, I’m pointing to your comment that he didn’t think about inter-civilizational dialogue as something between governments but really between men, you know, people knowing each other. Basically the idea that man must know man, and woman must know woman, but man in the very general—mankind.

And I really see that kind of flowering in the experiment of Kala Bhavana. And to me it seems like the artwork and the Santiniketan school of art is something that is of historic importance for all of mankind. And it’s really—I see it as an achievement of human beings, but really again understudied, I feel.

So I was hoping you could say something about this: what made all this outburst of creativity possible.

A: Yes, because you know this entire experiment of forming a different education, a new education, which is what Santiniketan is about—I remember I started by saying bring the city and the village close—it had nothing to do with colonial education, which was the only other thing there was.

However, what did we want at that time? Even Nehru has written about this, leave alone Tagore. We wanted English education because we knew that the only way to get jobs from the government was—and indeed colonial education was aiming at that—they were creating clerks, doctors. And the middle-class Indians were lending themselves to this.

So this whole thing of being indifferent to Tagore’s institutions, which you asked in the beginning—why didn’t we serve more, why didn’t Bengali intellectuals serve Santiniketan, as of course some of them did, but a very few—he had more Western human support, I don’t mean money.

Artists came from the West. They loved Santiniketan. Tagore announced, “Anyone who likes my idea, come to Santiniketan.” Kshitimohan Sen said to him—one of the core people there—Amartya Sen’s grandfather, incidentally, “You are inviting all these people. How will we look after them?”

And Tagore said, “Look, I can only play the flute at the gate and invite people. You will have to do the looking after. Don’t worry. You have only to give them your love. They will be happy.” So therefore, yes, one other element in this whole experiment was that he did not of course join the Pan-Asian movement of Okakura, but Okakura was one of his closest friends, although Okakura died young.

If anything could be put up as a contrast between Western colonialism and our larger identity, not just as Indian identity, was our Asian identity. So Asian unity meant a lot to him. And indeed Visva-Bharati’s early name, the early name that he thought of for a larger university, was an Eastern University. In fact, there is a whole long essay that he wrote which is called “An Eastern University.” And then there is this very moving and historically important correspondence with C. F. Andrews, saying, “You know, Charlie, you thought I belong only to Asia, but I’ve been now to the world.” He said, “I can’t just call it an Eastern University. It must be an international university. So that’s how Visva-Bharati got its name. No, Charlie, please understand, I belong to the world. The world has accepted me.” So all these things were coming together. It was becoming larger and larger, I think, and the concept was growing.

Kala Bhavana actually started before Visva-Bharati was institutionalized, in 1919. Kala Bhavana meant so much to Tagore. For Kala Bhavan, Tagore was writing to Abanindranath, who was a swadeshi and remained a swadeshi for a very long time. Tagore leapt out of it, but not Abanindranath. And the Bengal School of Art, which Abanindranath founded, of course a very remarkable school of art and has been recognized to be so, was entirely a swadeshi based art movement. Tagore said, “Please, uncle and nephew, please go to Japan. Look at their art. It’s very important for us to know Japan’s art.”

A (continuing): I just want to say one thing about the—because it was so important to your intellectual—about your question why Bengali intellectuals, which you started with—why was Tagore’s experiment marginalized, why wasn’t it taken up.

Because I think of what I was saying then, that middle-class education was very important to the Bengali psyche and to the Indian psyche. I think it was also the Punjabi psyche, if one reads Tandon’s book.

In other words, they wanted to be professionals. And one can’t quite blame them for it because new ideas were coming into it. But then one has to understand therefore they had no time for an alternative education, which was the Santiniketan/Sriniketan/Viswabharati experiment. In one phrase, one must say this: that it was an alternative education where no degrees were ever given. And the students came to Tagore in his time and said, “Look, where will we go? You are not giving us any degrees.” He understood. He was not at all an unsympathetic man. This is important for us to understand this.

He said, “However, I cannot have Visva-Bharati give degrees, but I will arrange for you. I understand your need for it.” He tied up with the University of Calcutta that their syllabus would be taught as a parallel course to the Visva-Bharati course in Santiniketan for those students who wanted it. And some students did, and they took their exams at the University of Calcutta and their degrees from the University of Calcutta. And Ashutosh Mukherjee, who was also a great intellectual and greatly understood Tagore at his core, said, “Yes, of course, let that be done.”

And this is why Visva-Bharati also actually had graduates who were Visva-Bharati graduates not by degree but Calcutta University graduates by degree, because they did two parallel courses. So in other words, what I’m trying to say was that it was alternative education absolutely from A to Z, because Tagore did not give degrees.

That has all changed. You said very beautifully that it is a futuristic thing, and I hope, and it must be, philosophically it is, but I don’t see any hope for it as something that will completely reverse itself.

He didn’t think Visva-Bharati would survive. And that was why he said to Gandhi—his last letter to Gandhi was this—“Will you take it as a trust? Will you be its trustee if you believe this is an institution of national importance, if you believe it is an institution of international importance, then I hope my country will believe the same and preserve it. And I leave it to you.” I won’t go into Gandhi’s answer. But why did he say this? He was anxious that this institution would not survive.

So I think you have to connect all this in your understanding of the experiment, why in a sense it failed. You could call it a failure. How many people are following this? It’s a central government university. The University Grants Commission has to follow their syllabus, has to follow their degree, absolutely from bottom up and up down all the way. So it can’t survive as it was conceptualized.

Q: Maybe in the future, you know. I mean, you’re right, Umadi, that, you know, in one sense it has been a failure, but I hope that in the future it can be taken up.

A: Indeed, so do I. I join you in that hope.

Professor Uma Das Gupta is a historian and a renowned Tagore biographer. She is the author of many books and articles on Tagore.