The Visvabharati Ideal and Divine Humanity

by Archishman Raju

Visvabharati was officially founded as a university in 1921 just as the Western world order was emerging from a major crisis: the first world war and the Indian freedom struggle was taking a mass form.The objects of the university were declared in its founding constitution. The first four objectives were

(i) to study the mind of Man in its realisation of different aspects of truth from diverse points of
view;
(ii) to bring into more intimate relations with one another, through patient study and research, the different cultures of the East on the basis of their underlying unity;
(iii) to approach the West from the standpoint of such a unity of the life and thought of Asia
(iv) to seek to realise in a common fellowship of study the meeting of the East and the West, and
thus ultimately to strengthen the fundamental conditions of world peace through the establishment of free communication of ideas between the two hemispheres;

Visvabharati’s founding objective made it more than just a university, its significance is not confined to its institutional boundaries. Visvabharati is a school of thought, an ideal that requires continuing interpretation and striving. My aim here is to interpret the Visvabharati ideal in the context of our current world situation and Tagore’s philosophy. The third objective of Visvabharati, “to approach the West from the standpoint” of “unity of the life and thought of Asia” represents an epistemic break in social scientific work that carries immense relevance in our time. 

The first part of the Visvabharati Ideal was to study the mind of Man. How was Man to know Man? Tagore approached the question of knowledge of humanity not from a positivist perspective, but from the standpoint of the divinity of humanity. In his later lectures on The Religion of Man, he wrote “The idea of the humanity of our God, or the divinity of Man the Eternal, is the main subject of this book.” The divinity of humanity was visible in the songs of the Baul and poets like Dadu and Kabir, both of which traditions were studied in Visvabharati. Human beings had contradictions within their nature and goodness and truth were represented in those aspects that were divine. Therefore, when individual men realized a truth greater than themselves, they were reflecting Man the divine. Tagore believed that knowledge of this divine aspect of humanity required love.

As Tagore wrote in Sadhana, “Essentially man is not a slave either of himself or of the world; but he is a lover. His freedom and fulfilment is in love, which is another name for perfect comprehension”. The knowledge of humanity was not to be an impersonal knowledge, but a knowledge rooted in love. It would be a knowledge that did not seek freedom from humanity, but freedom in union with humanity. 

This freedom would not come from mere intellectual pursuit. As Tagore said, “It is the duty of every human being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of intellect, but also that personality which is the language of Art” Music and Art would play an important role in the education of and creation unity of humanity. Finally, such knowledge must be based in “the life-current of the people”. This was the reason that Tagore wanted to establish Visvabharati not in a major Indian city, but in a rural setting. 

The second part of the Visvabharati ideal was to bring together the different cultures of the East. To understand this ideal, one must understand Tagore’s philosophy of history, which drew from the Indian historical experience. As Uma Dasgupta writes, Tagore viewed India as a social civilization. Tagore argued in his essay on Indian history written in 1903

“What is the chief significance of Bharatavarsha? If a precise answer to this question is sought, the answer is available. And the history of Bharatavarsha upholds that answer. We find that a single objective has always been motivating Bharatavarsha. This objective has been to establish unity among diversity, to make various paths move towards one goal, to experience the One-in-many as the innermost reality, to pursue with total certitude that supreme principle of inner unity that runs through the differences. It has also been her endeavour to achieve these without destroying the distinctions that appear in the external world. The ability to perceive this oneness in diversity and to strive to extend unity are the native characteristics of Bharatavarsha.”

In this sense, the second ideal attempted to concretely pursue the historical legacy of our civilization. In the second issue of Visvabharati Quarterly, Tagore wrote on “The Way to Unity”. The modern world would require a reworking of this historical legacy of Indian civilization. Technological changes have made the world a much smaller place (more so today than a century ago when Tagore was writing). The challenge was, as Tagore put it, “the more the doors are opening and the walls breaking down outwardly, the greater is the force which the consciousness of individual distinction is gaining within” Tagore wrote that “Individuality is precious, because only through it we can realise the universal”. Rather than suppressing individual personality and subsuming it within a collective identity, the way to unity was for individual personality to expand outward and unite with humanity through sacrifice. This was the great objective of Indian civilization.

Kalidas Bhattacharya, writing on the construction of a systematic philosophy of history from the ideas of Gandhi and Tagore, wrote that such a philosophy would view History as “a study of the continuous process of re-creation of systematic unity through loving conquest of alienations”. This view of history is central to understanding the Visvabharati ideals. 

Writing on the concept of an “Eastern University”, Tagore wrote “in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the co-ordinate study of all these different cultures,--the Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islam, the Sikh and the Zoroastrian. The Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan will also have to be added” Tagore believed that assimilating the civilizational inheritance of Asia would be a necessary step to understanding the West. 

Tagore was a pioneer of a new kind of Pan-Asian movement. He was foresighted in opening the Cheena Bhavan along with Tan Yun Shan as he understood that India and China would need sources of communication and understanding. When Kalidas Nag, who also accompanied Tagore on his trip to China in 1924, attended the inter-Asian relations conference organized in 1947, he wrote that Tagore was acknowledged not only as a literary giant but also acknowledged as a “pioneer in reviving inter-Asian relations in modern times”. 

The third ideal was radical and harder to understand. Writing on modernity, the Japanese intellectual Takeuchi Yoshimi interpreted the concept of an Asian view as a method for Asia’s self-formation. Yoshimi asked why Japanese modernization had always been compared to Western modernization, rather than with Chinese or Indian modernization. Further, he argued that Japan and China were representative of different types of modernization. Interestingly, Yoshimi relied on Tagore to bring out this difference. Yoshimi wrote “Tagore was regarded in Japan as a poet of a ruined nation…But in China he was seen as a champion for the cause of national emancipation. These different readings pose a problem for us.” The resolution was for Asia to consider its own experiences and, for Tagore, it could only begin to assimilate the Western contribution to humanity after it had done so.

The Visvabharati ideal suggested not only that Asian cultures should study each other, but furthermore that they should not evaluate themselves vis-a-vis the West, but rather evaluate the West vis-a-vis themselves. This first required a synthesis of the core values of Asian civilizations and Tagore believed such a synthesis has its basis in a shared historical and civilizational experience. Indian modernity, for example, is usually often discussed in its distinction from Western modernity, but almost never in comparison to Chinese modernity. This intercivilizational dialogue in Asia is an essential part of understanding Asian modernity, and more broadly, colored modernity so Asia’s rise can be self-conscious rather than imitative. It is only then that the fourth Visvabharati ideal, that of world peace, can be realized. 

The conversation on the rise of Asia in our time is primarily dominated by the economic rise of Asia. Whereas Asia contributed a mere 15% share of the world GDP in 1970 (with Europe and North America having about 76%), its share now has risen to more than 38% with the number even higher when taken in terms of PPP. World economic growth is primarily driven by the rise of Asia. Within Asia, the rise of China has been most spectacular and China, an Asian country, is nowadays referred to as “a great power” because of its economic, military and geopolitical strength. Currently, India has some of the highest economic growth rates in Asia and India is expected to become a leading economic power in the next two decades. There is also the geopolitical rise of Asia or the growth in the relative strength of Asian nation states and their ability to change global institutions. 

However, more important than this is the human rise of Asia. Life expectancy in China has risen from 61 to 79 in the past 50 years and from 51 to 71 in India in the same period. There has been a fall in poverty led by China’s elimination of extreme poverty and a fall in infant mortality all over Asia. In general, there are many more people in Asia who now have a chance at life and potentiality to contribute to the world. 

As humanity in Asia rises, its consciousness will seek to shape the world. Unfortunately, the intellectual discourse in India does not reflect this. It continues to talk about the changing world order primarily through narrow strategic objectives. These objectives are understood now in realist and pragmatic terms, decrying the supposed idealism of the past. They attempt to imitate and modify Western institutions rather than breaking from them. Yet, for all its boasts on the supposed superiority of a Western style pragmatic nation state, India’s recent foreign policy has been a visible failure. It has ignored India’s history and its civilizational legacy. At the dawn of independence, India led colored modernity through the inter-Asian relations conference, the Bandung conference, the Panchsheel principles, institutes of Asian and African relations and movements for world peace. Today, our misleadership stands stand mute in the face of genocide and oppression. The people must turn back to our civilizational legacy to shape our relationship to humanity. 

Rather than imitating Western style think tanks which offer the cold logic of imperialism, the Visvabharati ideal asks us to consider institutes of peace and intercivilizational dialogue, to be able to truly construct a society where divine humanity has its rightful place.

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Archishman Raju is an editor of Vishwabandhu Journal.