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The Santiniketan ashram as Rabindranath Tagore’s politics

Banerjee, Ankita

Awarding institution: King's College London

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Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 THE SANTINIKETAN ashram As Rabindranath Tagore’s PoliTics

Ankita Banerjee King’s College London 2020

This thesis is submitted to King’s College London for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy List of Illustrations

Table 1: No of Essays written per year between 1892 and 1936...... 23 Table 1.1: No of essays published in each of the journals named on the right...... 24 Image 1: Facsimile of the Rakhi song composed by Tagore. Source: The Calcutta Municipal Gazette (September 13, 1941)...... 76 Image 2: Rabindranath Tagore, (Second from Right) sharing stage with his students, for the play; Dakghar at the Vichitra House, 1917. Source: On the Edges of Time (1958) ...... 133 Table 2: The daily routine of the staff and students at Santiniketan in 1929 (RBA)…………...139

Image 3: Open-air classes at the Santiniketan ashram, circa (1904) (Rabindra Bhavan Reprography Section, reproduced with permission)...... 139 Image 4: Bharat Mata painted by Abanindranath Tagore in 1905. Source: The Outlook Magazine online edition (February 2019)...... 166

1 Table of Contents List of Illustrations ...... 1 Abstract ...... 4 Acknowledgements ...... 5 Introduction ...... 7 Situating the study...... 9 The Problems ...... 11 a) Of treating Tagore as an educationist: ...... 11 b) Of addressing the ‘political’: ...... 13 c) Of bringing Visva Bharati within the ambit of analysis: ...... 17 Sources ...... 19 Method ...... 25 A note on concepts as discussed in the chapters ...... 27 a) Swadeshbhakti through dharmashiksha ...... 30 b) Mukti for humanity ...... 32 c) ‘Universal person’ versus identity ...... 34 Chapter I: Tagore’s ideas on education: The Santiniketan ashram in comparison with the Kanya Mahavidyalay and The Dawn Society ...... 37 Discontent with education in India ...... 37 Education as a socio-political category ...... 40 Movements to reform education in India ...... 42 The importance of the ashram in alternative education initiatives ...... 46 Locating ‘the ashram’ within the debate of the ‘social’ versus the ‘political’ ...... 50 The Kanya Mahavidyalaya (KMV) and The Dawn Society in comparison with Santiniketan .... 57 Tagore’s ideas on education...... 63 Conclusion ...... 68 Chapter II: Santiniketan ashram’s political context: Swadeshi Bengal of the early twentieth century ...... 70 Tagore’s political context ...... 70 a) Bankim’s influence on the Swadeshi movement vis-à-vis Tagore’s distance from him...... 71 b) Tagore and the Brahmo Samaj: Links and disagreements ...... 79

2 c) Tagore and the national movement: association and withdrawal ...... 81 The Nation versus the village: Tagorean Samaj ...... 84 Tagore and Boycott: Education’s association with politics ...... 87 Swaraj for the nation and Mukti for humanity: Tagore’s views ...... 90 The Santiniketan ashram and Swadeshi Bengal ...... 95 Conclusion ...... 98 Chapter III: Dharmashiksha and swadeshbhakti at the Santiniketan ashram ...... 100 ‘Dharma’, ‘Jivan Devata’ and the ‘guru’ at Santiniketan ...... 102 The practice of ‘spirituality’ in the ashram as distinguished from religious instruction ...... 107 Dharmashiksha and Tapovan ...... 110 Swadeshbhakti as Tagore’s alternative to nationalism ...... 114 Conclusion ...... 123 Chapter IV: Mukti versus swaraj: Freedom at the Santiniketan ashram ...... 125 Mukti as Tagore’s ideal ...... 126 Education and freedom ...... 130 Freedom through the pedagogical practices of the ashram ...... 134 Chhatraswaraj versus Chhatrashashantantra: Freedom versus obedience to discipline ...... 144 Compromises on freedom ...... 147 Conclusion ...... 154 Chapter V: From ‘identities’ to ‘persons’: Tagore’s notion of unique individuals at the Santiniketan ashram ...... 155 Tagore’s notion of ‘supreme person(s)’ ...... 156 Tagore’s opposition to ‘identity’ ...... 158 Tagore’s distance from his ‘bhadralok’ background ...... 161 Institutionalising ‘personality’ at the Santiniketan ashram ...... 165 Relational personality: Tagore as an exemplar ...... 170 Conclusion ...... 176 Concluding Remarks ...... 178 Bibliography: ...... 182

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Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the politics of Rabindranath Tagore through a critical examination of his educational pedagogy at Santiniketan ashram, arguing that the latter was the workshop of his political ideas. I develop the argument in two ways. Firstly, I contextualize the Santiniketan ashram within the network of initiatives which arose in early twentieth-century India as a result of the discontent with the colonial system of education and aimed to reform it. The distinctiveness of the Santiniketan ashram, as occupying the middle ground between social change and political agitation, is demonstrated by comparing and contrasting it with educational institutes that were either tied exclusively to the project of social reform, like the Kanya Mahavidyalay at Jalandhar, or inextricably linked to institutional politics such as The Dawn Society in Calcutta.

Secondly, using the post-partition politics of Bengal as a springboard, my study investigates Tagore’s political lexicon conveyed through his deployment of the keywords: ‘swadeshbhakti’, ‘mukti’ and ‘personality.’ I undertake a close textual analysis of the relevant primary and secondary sources, written in Bangla and English, to determine Tagore’s brand of politics. I argue that Tagore disagreed with the dominant strand of nationalist politics which placed the concerns of the nation-state, and its autonomy from colonial rule, at its core. Instead, Tagore used his fundamental opposition to the idea of a nation to chart out a societally engineered politics which placed the village at its heart. Tagore’s alternative politics was rooted in the virtuous relationships that individuals shared with one another within the framework of a deeply personal and interactive ‘samaj’ (society). In contrast to the scholarship that views the Santiniketan ashram primarily as an educational endeavour which signalled Tagore’s retreat from politics, I argue that the ashram which Tagore set up in 1901 was a platform for formulating and practising his political ideas.

4 Acknowledgements

The present study is a product of immense patience, perseverance, resilience, and hard work over the last few years. But it would be inaccurate to suggest that this was achieved singlehandedly. I, therefore, take this opportunity to extend my sincere gratitude to those without the support of whom this project would not have been possible. I thank the Tagore Centre at the King’s India Institute for sponsoring this PhD.

First of all, my sincere gratitude to my supervisors, Dr Anastasia Piliavsky and Dr John Stevens (School of Oriental and African Studies), for their support and guidance and for always encouraging me to think harder and write better, leaving no room for complacency. I’m obliged to Professor Sunil Khilnani and Dr Jon Wilson for their percipient comments in the initial years of this study. Dr Rosinka Chaudhuri at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, provided invaluable insights on linking the concept of space to Tagore’s educational thought. Kathleen M. O’Connell at the New College Toronto read and appreciated the linkages that the study draws between freedom and mukti. I am immensely grateful to her for that. My professors at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, who were instrumental in the formative stages of the research, also need special mention. I thank Professor Vidhu Verma and Dr Rinku Lamba at the Centre for Political Studies for teaching me the rigour of academia, the finesse of critical thinking, and the logic of constructing arguments.

I am grateful to the staff at The Asiatic Society, The Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, The Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive, and The National Library, Kolkata. At Santiniketan, the help and assistance I received was remarkable. Utpal Mitra, Shovan Ruj and Jyotsna Chatterjee at the Rabindra Bhavan Archive need special mention. Suthirtha Das, Sourav Chakraborty, and Saswati Karmakar at the Reprography Section of Visva Bharati, were extremely kind and helpful. At New Delhi, the staff of The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and National Archives of India were very generous with their support. In London, the librarians, as well as the subject and language experts at the British Library and the School of Oriental and African studies, offered extensive assistance in locating the relevant materials and documents often joining me in the arduous process of searching and sifting.

5 Most importantly I owe it completely to my friends and family without whom this project would not have attained fruition. They kept me grounded and sane and, at the same time, showed immense optimism and confidence in me, believing in my project at times when my faith stood on shaky grounds. I express my humble indebtedness to Sudarshana Ganguli, Sagar Solanki, Kasturi Chakravarty, Abin Thomas and Vipul Dutta for being there with me throughout this journey, especially through the toughest of times.

My parents have been the constants in the process: the sources of inspiration, strength and encouragement. Thanks to my husband for all things positive and for cracking me up on the darkest of days and lowest of moods.

Finally, I dedicate this piece of work to those lives that have crossed paths with Tagore’s writings and felt a deep sense of resonance somewhere with them.

September 2020

London

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Introduction

I remember the long and arduous path that led to this ashram. No one will ever know the intolerably woeful journey of the struggle against unrelenting adversity... In the present times, please do not deny that devoted endeavour its due, please accord it recognition. 1 - Rabindranath Tagore (1940)

In 1940, a year before his death, Rabindranath Tagore made the above statement by way of a farewell speech at Santiniketan.2 Looking back at his ashram, Tagore remembers it as a lonesome endeavour, which met with little support or appreciation, and implores posterity to grant it its due. Tagore ‘started a school in Bengal’ when he ‘was nearing forty’, a ‘certainly unexpected’ move, he wrote, as he ‘had spent the greater portion’ of his life in ‘writing, chiefly verses.’3 Yet he began his educational experiment with utmost enthusiasm and gusto, ardently stating:

It is also a surprise to me how I had the courage to start an educational institution for our children, for I had no expertise in this line at all. But I had confidence in myself… I felt that I could help them more than the ordinary teachers. … I selected a beautiful place, far away from the contamination of town life… There the mind could have its fearless freedom to create its own dreams, and the seasons could come with all their colours and movements and beauty into the very heart of the human dwelling. And there I got a few children around me and I taught them. I was their companion. I sang to them. I composed musical pieces, operas and plays, and they took part in the performances. I recited to them our epics, and this was the beginning of this school.4 With regard to Tagore’s educational experiment in Santiniketan, Charuchandra Bandopadhyay (1877-1938), a renowned Bengali story writer and novelist, notes: ‘This Brahmacharyasram is

1 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Visva Bharati’ (1940), in Rabindra Rachanabali Vol. IV (Visva Bharati, 1991), 290-291 2 Santiniketan was discovered as a lonely spot in the early 1860s by Rabindranath’s father Debendranath Tagore, while travelling in the area of Birbhum district in Southern Bengal. Moved by the quiet of the countryside dotted with some palm trees, Debendranath bought some land there and built a guest house on it in 1863. He named it Santiniketan, meaning ‘an abode of peace.’ The place then took the name from the house. See Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: An Illustrated Life (New Delhi: Oxford University Press {Henceforth OUP}, 2013), 63 3 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My School’ in Personality (London: Macmillan, 1917), 137 4 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Conversations in Russia’ in Sisir Kumar Das edited English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore Vol III (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), 932-34

7 unique as well as incredible. It stands at odds with the existing schools in Bengal.’5 Buddhadev Bose, an eminent Bengali poet, also opined about Rabindranath Tagore:

Here was a man who was always ready, always interested, never bored. He had combined endless toil with endless leisure. In one sense, each day of his life was a holiday, and in another there had never been a single ‘off’ hour in his mental workshop.6

Bose identifies the coexistence of opposites: ‘toil’ and ‘leisure’ in absolute harmony in Tagore’s pursuits, stressing the intensity of the drive behind the working logic of the man named Rabindranath.

In this study, I argue that the Santiniketan ashram was not only a school, but also a deeply political project—a laboratory where Tagore developed a distinctive political lexicon and conceptual framework, and put them to practical test. To make my case, I study Tagore’s educational experiment at Santiniketan, by situating it within the network of educational reform initiatives that emerged from the discontent with the colonial system of education. As a corrective to earlier scholarship claiming that Tagore was a global educator par excellence,7 I argue that the ashram model he designed was a product of its time, revivalist in nature, and a response to the debates around alternative education. This thesis contributes to the existing scholarship by using Tagore’s key concepts (as originally deployed at his ashram) to explore the complex political ideas that each of them embodied; and arguing that the educational project at Santiniketan spearheaded by Rabindranath Tagore was, in essence, political. Scholars have, hitherto, sidelined the Santiniketan ashram in discussions of Tagore’s politics. However, this thesis adopts a different route by demonstrating that the two were closely intertwined.

The thesis responds to the question of how best to understand Tagore’s turn to ashram education in later life, a move that was previously interpreted as a retreat from politics, but which I show to be his political epitome. Focusing on the key categories he deployed in his education—

5 Charuchandra Bandyopadhyay’s views about the Santiniketan Brahmacharyasram has been quoted by Nepal Chandra Roy who joined the ashram towards the end of June, 1910. This excerpt has been taken from an undated manuscript titled ‘Santiniketan er Smritikathar Pratilipi’ written by the latter. Source: Rabindra Bhavan Archives (Henceforth RBA). Translations mine. 6 Buddhadev Bose, ‘The Last Days of Rabindranath: Record of a visit to Santiniketan’ in Amal Home ed. The Calcutta Municipal Gazette (September 13, 1941), 7. Budhhadev Bose (1908-1974) was well known as a Bengali poet of the twentieth-century but had also composed novels, essays, short stories and plays. 7 For details see footnote 48.

8 swadeshbhakti (as his anti-nationalist stance), mukti (as an antidote to swaraj) and persons (as opposed to ethnic identities)—the thesis shows how they depart from the categories of ‘nation’, ‘swaraj’ and ‘identity’, which were at the time central to political debates in Bengal. I also demonstrate how Tagore used the Santiniketan ashram as a platform for responding critically to, and often rejecting, the political categories that were abroad in Bengali and broader national politics to formulate a distinctive political philosophy of his own. I unpack each term that was central to his ashram philosophy and practice to reveal their political significance and to show how they were developed in practice.

Situating the study

In 1861, when Tagore was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengal occupied an important position within the historiography of education and nationalism. Benjamin D. O’Dell observes that Bengal’s prominence in works of educational history is closely aligned with the story of the Bengal Renaissance, a cultural revolution that altered popular notions of history, religion, science, and art amongst the educated classes, making them embodiments of the liberal, Enlightenment values in the latter half of the nineteenth century.8

Studies have also identified the distinguishing factor of Bengal’s brand of nationalism from the predominant attitude of the Indian National Congress9 in the early years of the twentieth century and attributed it to the sympathy that a large number of middle-class Bengali nationalists had for armed resistance.10 Tagore lived and worked in such a milieu and responded to the socio-political changes by contributing to educational reforms through his writings, and more importantly, through his Santiniketan experiment. Additionally, he wrote extensively on the question of nationalism, foregrounding his critique of the nation through his vision of the samaj (society).

8 Benjamin D. O’Dell, ‘Beyond Bengal: Gender, Education and the Writing of Colonial Indian History’, Literature and Culture 42, (2014): 536. Also for details of the Bengal Renaissance see Susovan Sarkar, On the Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1979) where the author identifies five periods beginning from the year 1815 until 1919, coinciding with Ram Mohan Roy’s life and work and culminating in Gandhi’s leadership of the Non-Cooperation movement. 9 The Indian National Congress (INC) was founded in 1885 and held its first session in Bombay. It was the first political organisation of the nationalist movement to emerge against the British Empire. In its initial years, the INC was used as a platform for civil political dialogue with the British. By 1920s, under the leadership of M.K. Gandhi, the INC began to obtain mass support base. 10 Michael Sylvestri, ‘The “Sinn Fein of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Politics of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’ Journal of British Studies 39, No. 4(October 2000): 462

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Tagore’s contributions have resulted in scholarly works situating him within the historiography of either education, or nationalism, or both. Michael Collins, for instance, has observed that, despite Tagore’s vast cultural production covering poetry, prose, and plays; an astonishing volume of music, internationally acclaimed and exhibited paintings; social, political and philosophical essays; agrarian reform and pioneering environmentalism, it was his ‘philosophy of education’ that counted as ‘one of his most significant contributions.’11

In a subsequent work, Collins locates Tagore’s anti-imperial position as standing in ‘contradistinction to the straight-forward dialectic between nationalism and colonialism.’12 Like Collins, other scholars have also engaged at length with Tagore’s ideas on nationalism. For example, Amartya Sen highlights Tagore’s ‘dual attitude towards nationalism’, which made him laud the Japanese strategy of obtaining self-respect while loathing the uncritical inspiration of nationalism translating into blind patriotism.13 Scholars like Ashis Nandy, Sumit Sarkar and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya have done a lot of thinking about Tagore as a political philosopher. They engaged with Tagore’s ‘alternative nationalism’, his debates with Gandhi and his theory of postulating an ‘antinomy between state and society.’14

Just as in the historiography of nationalism, Tagore has also featured prominently in the literature on education. While studying the contributions of ‘educational philosophers’ in India who recognised the need for a new educational system that would enable the Indian youth to imbibe their own cultural heritage, S.C. Chaube accords a central position to Tagore’s vision.15 Mushirul Hasan’s work discusses Tagore’s Santiniketan ashram, as part of his exploration into the history of Indian educational institutions in order to understand the motivations behind their creation, a

11 Michael Collins, ‘Rabindranath Tagore at 150: Representations and Misrepresentations’ (September, 2011). Available at: https://www.academia.edu/913632/Rabindranath_Tagore_at_150_Representations_and_Misrepresentations. 12 Michael Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Post-colonial World Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on history, politics and society (Oxon: Routledge, 2012). 13 Amartya Sen, ‘Foreword’ in Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson eds. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 14 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of the Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames, Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ‘Rethinking Tagore on the Antinomies of Nationalism’ (IIAS: Shimla, 2017): 21. Available at: https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda.../9788132236955-c2.pdf. Accessed on 21.6.2018 15 See Sarayu Prasad Chaube, Recent Philosophies of Education in India (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 2005).

10 process in which knowledge, power, and politics had exerted a significant bearing.16 Additionally, we observe reference to Tagore’s educational work in the volume dedicated to a discussion of the fifty major thinkers on education, as well as in Springer’s series on key thinkers in world education.17 Besides analysing the nationalistic impulse of Tagore’s writings, scholars have gone on to identify the educational enterprise of Tagore at Santiniketan as ‘the major cosmopolitan project of his lifetime.’18 An institutional history of Tagore’s educational mission has been recently published in Bangla.19 Martha Nussbaum has proclaimed an ‘imminent demise of liberal education’, and through an analysis of Tagore’s and Dewey’s ideas on education, highlighted the challenges faced by modern educational practices.20

Distancing from this polemic of treating Tagore as either a nationalist or an educator, is the present study’s point of departure. This thesis is a critical engagement with the Santiniketan ashram as a political project, one that explores links between Tagore’s educational ideas and his political vision. Through a close analysis of Tagore’s pedagogy, its theory and its practice, the study reveals the Santiniketan ashram to be the central laboratory of his political ideas.

The Problems a) Of treating Tagore as an educationist:

Of the many titles that Tagore earned during his lifetime, the two that were inseparable from one another were ‘the Poet educator’ and ‘Gurudev’, both conferred on him for his extensive engagement with, and commitment to, founding and running an educational institution. Scholars

16 Mushirul Hasan ed. Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational Institutions in India (New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1998). 17 Joy A. Palmer ed. Fifty Major Thinkers on Education from Confucius to Dewey (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Kumkum Bhattacharya, Rabindranath Tagore: Adventure of Ideas and Innovative Practices in Education (Springer International Publishing, 2013). Two other recent works are: Asoke Bhattacharya, ‘Tagore on the Right Education for India’ Asia-Pacific Journal of Social Sciences 1, No. 2 (June-December 2009): 22-47 and Sreeparna Bhattacharjee, ‘Relevance of Tagore’s philosophy of education in postmodern era- a conceptual analysis’ IOSR Journal of Humanities And Social Science 19, No.9 (September 2014): 34-40 18 Mark R. Frost, ‘Beyond the limits of nation and geography’: Rabindranath Tagore and the cosmopolitan moment, 1916–1920’ Cultural Dynamics 24, No.2-3 (2012): 145 19 Swati Ghosh and Ashok Sarkar, Kabir Pathshala Patha Bhaban o Shikshasatrer Itihas (Signet: Kolkata, 2015). Another comprehensive history of the ashram is found in the edited volume by Goutam Bhattacharjee, Ashramkatha Tattvabodhini Patrikay Brahmacharyasramer Suchonaparbo (Santiniketan: Visva Bharati, 2002). 20 Martha Nussbaum, ‘Tagore, Dewey and the Imminent Demise of Liberal Education’ In Harvey Seigal ed. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (October, 2009).

11 have adopted different approaches in their study of Tagore’s Santiniketan ashram. The earliest study, a 1911 monograph, was by Ajit Chakrabarty. This was followed by a 1916 account by W.W. Pearson. Both scholars lived and worked in the ashram at different points in time.21 Subsequent studies have systematically engaged with Tagore as an educationist as clearly demonstrated in the existing literature. For instance, Mohit Chakrabarty sees the educational mission of Tagore as a means of social change while Sabyasachi Bhattacharya traces the development of the institution between the years 1909-1919 in a bid to interpret Tagore’s ideas in general. Uma Dasgupta identifies the linkages between the ideas of nationalism and education and understands Tagore’s views on the latter as pitching for self-reliance. Himangshu Bhusan Mukherjee considers Tagore’s ideas on education as one for ‘fullness’ which pondered deeply on the aims of curriculum, the medium of instruction as well as the methods of teaching pupils.22 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson argue that Tagore’s educational institution was a ‘poetry not in the medium of words’ bringing to light the intricate connections between Tagore’s creativity and worldly pursuits. Poromesh Acharya undertakes a comparative study of the educational ideas of Gandhi and Tagore to conclude that Tagore’s scheme emphasised ‘the cult of play’ while Gandhi’s approach to education, focussed on the ‘cult of productive work.’23

Western scholars, on the other hand, adopt a different perspective. Kathleen M. O’Connell identified the themes creativity, mutuality and survival as characterising Tagore’s educational paradigm.24 L.K. Elmhirst was a philanthropist and agronomist who worked extensively in India

21 Ajit Kumar Chakrabarty (1886–1918) was a teacher at the Santiniketan school, in its early days 1904–1918. The monograph he wrote was titled ‘Brahmavidyalay’ (1911) later published by Visva Bharati in 1951. W.W. Pearson’s book on the ashram was called Shantiniketan: The Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore (London: Macmillan, 1916). William Winstanley Pearson was born in Manchester in 1881. A science graduate from Cambridge University, he met Rabindranath Tagore in London in 1907. He came to Santiniketan in 1914 as a teacher of English and Nature study but later went on to work for the upliftment of the Santals (a tribe inhabiting that region of Bengal) for whom he ran a night school. See Supriya Roy, Makers of a Mission 1901-1941 (Visva-Bharati: Santiniketan, 2001), 52. 22 Mohit Chakrabarti, Tagore and Education for Social Change (New Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1993), Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation (New Delhi, Penguin Books India, 2011), Uma Das Gupta, The Oxford India Tagore Selected Writings on Education and Nationalism (New Delhi: OUP, 2009), Himangshu Bhushan Mukherjee, Education for Fullness: A Study of the Educational Thought and Experiment of Rabindranath Tagore (Asia Publishing House, 1962). 23 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), Poromesh Acharya, ‘Educational Ideals of Tagore and Gandhi: A Comparative Study,’ Economic and Political Weekly 32, No. 12 (March, 22-28, 1997): 605 24 Kathleen M. O’Connell, ‘Tagore and Education: Creativity, Mutuality and Survival’ Asiatic 4, No.17 (June 2010): 65

12 and joined Tagore in 1921. Sharing a close association with him during the formative years of Visva Bharati, Elmhirst considers Tagore to be a pioneer in the field of education as he seamlessly combined performance arts in the educational curricula of the ashram.25 Having lived in Santiniketan for a number of years, Alex Aronson sees the experiment as Tagore’s attempt to ‘infuse new blood into Indian education.’26

From the works cited above, we observe that historians, biographers and educationists alike have taken interest in the institution and various aspects of the experiment. While some examined the aesthetics of Tagore’s scheme, others saw the coming together of cultures and peoples as unprecedented. Despite being informative and illustrative accounts of the Santiniketan ashram and of Tagore as an educator, these studies have not examined Tagore’s educational mission from the perspective of an expression of his political will. This is the gap that my study aims to fill. It makes an original contribution to the existing scholarship by treating Tagore’s pedagogy as his politics. b) Of addressing the ‘political’:

In the opening line of his essay ‘Nationalism in India’ (1917) Tagore writes: ‘Our real problem in India is not political. It is social. … I do not believe in an exclusive political interest.’27 Tagore denounces nationalism as ‘a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world of the present age, and eating into its moral vitality.’28 In these excerpts, he posits matters of national interest in the domain of social, as opposed to a discreetly political domain, and shows disinterest in ‘purely political’ matters. He also condemns the notion of nationalism.

For his contemporaries, however, matters concerning the nation-state constituted the ‘political’ sphere, which included negotiating with the colonial state machinery for rights, privileges and representation in the public sphere.29 This agenda of the Indian nationalist leadership was facilitated by the emancipatory influence of English education as it had enlightened Indians about the concepts of liberty and justice. At the same time, it had successfully (and paradoxically) spread

25 L.K. Elmhirst, Rabindranath Tagore Pioneer in Education (London: John Murray, 1961), i 26 Alex Aronson, ‘Tagore's Educational Ideals’ International Review of Education 7, No. 4 (1961): 386 27 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nationalism in India’ in Nationalism ( London: Macmillan, 1917), 97 28 Ibid., 16 29 For details, see Partha Chatterjee’s work, Nationalist Thought and Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).

13 the awareness of British rule as unjust, prompting anti-colonial sentiments among educated Indians.30 Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s31 1905 address to The Indian National Congress (INC) suggested clearly that ‘political rights were being sought, not for the whole population, but for such portion of it as has been qualified by education to discharge properly the responsibilities of such association.’32 Surendranath Banerjea33 similarly declared that ‘modified’ representative institutions were being sought for ‘the educated community who, because of their culture and enlightenment, their assimilation of English ideas and their familiarity with English methods of Government, might be presumed to be qualified for such a boon.’34 He clarified the status of those who were not so qualified—‘the ignorant peasantry of the country.’35

Gokhale and Banerjea are pertinent examples of Indian leaders who were English educated, sympathisers of the ideas of equality and justice, and aware of the unjust nature of British rule. Yet, the failure of their strategy to ‘secure any substantial concessions from the authorities, encouraged younger men within the INC to critique such modes of agitation and come up with newer techniques, marking ‘the rise of radical nationalism in India.’36 These leaders were inspired by Indian religions and the Indian way of life. They applied to the Indian situation, Western methods of mass agitation, and also resorted to revolutionary terrorism.37 Belonging to the brand of radical nationalist politics, Aurobindo Ghose38 advocated the boycott of British goods and

30 Gauri Vishvanathan, Masks of Conquest Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 17 31 Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915) was a political leader in British India. He was educated in English and founded The Servants of India Society in 1905 for promoting social development in India and for overthrowing the British. 32 See Shaheda Gurfan Zaidi, Encyclopaedia of the Indian National Congress Volume I (New Delhi: S Chand, 1979), 139 33 Born in 1848, Surendranath Banerjea was one of the earliest leaders of the Indian National Congress founded in 1885. He founded The Bengalee newspaper in 1879. 34 Surendranath Banerjea, ‘Presidential Address 1895’ in Zaidi (1979), 214-15 35 Ibid., See also Sanjay Seth, ‘Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of “Moderate Nationalism” in India, 1870- 1905’ The American Historical Review 104, No. 1 (February 1999): 108 36 S.R. Mehrotra, ‘The Early Organisation of the Indian National Congress, 1885-1920’ India Quarterly 22, No. 4 (October-December 1966): 345-46 37 Ibid., For a detailed discussion on the rise of terrorism in Bengal, see, Hiren Chakrabarti, Political Protest in Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism 1905-18 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1992). Shukla Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: the Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India (New Delhi: OUP, 2004). 38 Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) was a nationalist leader from the Bengal Presidency of British India. He was closely associated with revolutionary politics and advocated techniques of boycott and passive resistance to fight the British rule. He founded an ashram in Pondicherry in 1910.

14 passive resistance as means for attaining swaraj (self-rule, outside the British Empire). However, for Tagore, participation in politics meant distancing from its institutional forms. He said: ‘if there is strength, there will be no dearth of work; if there is love the avenues of service are not far away. One does not need to wait upon the passing of laws by the government, or to beg day and night in front of closed doors for obtaining one’s rights and privileges.’39 According to Tagore, it was futile to look for government aid and support, or wait for the passing of rules and regulations for obtaining what rightfully belongs to one.

Writing about third-world twentieth-century nationalisms, Partha Chatterjee argues that the idea of nation-ness had become inseparable from political consciousness and the nationalist discourse was primarily concerned with the replacement of the structure of colonial power with an alternative nationalist one.40 Chatterjee further claims that the most authentic achievements of anti-colonial nationalism in India were often won outside the political battlefield and was most apparent in the spiritual domain of national culture, asserting spiritualism’s claim to authority and establishing the spiritual superiority of indigenous culture as distinct from its Western counterpart.41 This argument rests on, and is sustained by, a thesis that defines Indian nationalism as operating within the distinction between the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’ as two operational domains of culture – where the former refers to the domain of state and modernity, enhancement in the fields of science and technology, and individual free will, and the latter pertains to the family, the role of women, religion, language, tradition, education, social mores and social and communal unanimity.42 In this line of argument, matters of ‘national concern’ were ‘political’ and those that were concerned with the welfare of society fell outside its purview. As Tagore locates the problem of India in the domain

39 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Chhatrader Prati Sambhashasan’ Baisakh, 1312.Bangla Shwon, (Henceforth B.S.) (1905) in Shiksha (1944), 30. Translations mine. 40 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). While this is one way of looking at the nation and nationalism, the other prominent works on the subject are: Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press, 1983), Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 1991), Winichakul Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), Manu Goswami, ‘From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy and Territory in South Asia, 1870-1907’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, No.4 (October, 1998): 609-636. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation Mapping Mother India. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 41 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 42 Ibid.,

15 of the social, Chatterjee’s framework, if applied on Tagore, would identify him as a social activist and not a political one.

Scholars who have studied events that characterised the political scene in Bengal, following its partition in 1905, have presented a wide range of arguments pertaining to Tagore’s association with swadeshi politics and his subsequent withdrawal from it.43 While for them the post-swadeshi period was primarily the stage of Tagore’s retreat from politics, I show it to be his most active political phase in which he offered an alternative to what he saw as a stalemated politics of his contemporaries. This alternative was both conceptually profound, original, and interesting, even when put into practice on a small scale, within the confines of the ashram, which Tagore saw as India writ small. As Tagore proclaims, ‘I have therefore decided to refrain from the excitement of the fireworks around but light my lamp and wait to offer my service. I do not profess to be a leader or mass influencer.’44 Distancing himself from leadership-based mass movements, Tagore gives an insight into what his ‘service’ entailed in the following words:

So in the midst of world-wide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Shantiniketan ... hoping that our efforts will touch the hearts of our village neighbours, and help them in re- asserting themselves in a new social order. If we can give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others—and my life work will have been done.45 Tagore did not only detest mass political movements but also abhorred nation-centric politics. Yet, the ashram as well as Tagore’s intellectual/spiritual ambitions for it, were inherently and intentionally ‘political’ insofar as the ashram focused on working out questions of how to arrange a community, and how to live well together. It did not subscribe to the limited view of ‘politics’ as the exercise of power or a way to pursue one’s interests or the affairs of the nation-state. He, therefore, devised dharmashiksha (spiritual education) as a tool to cultivate love for swadesh (one’s

43 See Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement 1876-1940 (New York, London: Columbia University Press, 1974), Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), Tanika Sarkar, ‘Many Faces of Love: Country, Woman and God in the Home and the World’ In Pradip K. Datta ed. Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World: A Critical Companion (London: Anthem, 2005): 27-44, Kamala Sarkar, Nationalism in Bengal: A Study of Cultural Conflict towards British Racial Impositions (Kolkata: Seribaan, 2012). 44Rabindranath Tagore to Ramendra Sundar Trivedi, Letter dated 25 Aghrayan 1312 B.S. (1905). Source: RBA Translations and emphasis mine. Ramendra Sundar Trivedi (1864-1919) was one of Bengal’s most renowned poet. His contributions to the functioning and development of The Bangiya Sahitya Parishad were remarkable. 45 Rabindranath Tagore, Letter to Elmhirst, (21st December 1937) in L.K. Elmhirtst ed. Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in Education (London: John Murray, 1961), 38

16 country, not nation), with the village at its core. In sum, Tagore’s was a politics of swadeshbhakti; a politics that was embodied in the pedagogy of his ashram, as opposed to nationalist politics. c) Of bringing Visva Bharati within the ambit of analysis:

Tagore’s Santiniketan project focused on ‘the village’ as the centre of his socio-political activities, and in 1921, the inauguration of Visva-Bharati46 with the motto Yatra Visvam Bhavatyekanidam (where the world makes a home in a single nest), made scholars celebrate Tagore and his experiment for ushering the spirit of internationalism. Amartya Sen, an ex-student of Santiniketan, proudly proclaims: ‘I am partial to seeing Tagore as an educator, having myself been educated at Santiniketan.’47 Mohit Chakrabarty in his book entitled Pioneers in Philosophy of Education, discusses Tagore alongside Rousseau, Froebel, Dewey, Gandhi and Vivekananda, claiming Tagore to be ‘the global educator par excellence.’48 These statements emerge from a full-fledged engagement with Visva Bharati (the college at Santiniketan).

The experimental school at Santiniketan was the start of a whole host of educational institutions and initiatives.49 The beginning of the Santiniketan ashram dates back to Debendranath Tagore’s Trust Deed in 1888.50 The brahmavidyalay (a school observing the principles of brahmacharya) under Rabindranath was officially launched in 1901, and expanded over the years. The Sriniketan project, an offshoot of the Santiniketan, aimed primarily at rural reconstruction, was established in 1924.51 Tagore was disillusioned with his ashram project in its later years and wrote:

I myself attach much more significance to the educational possibilities of the Shiksha-Satra than to the school and college at Shantiniketan, which are, every day, becoming more and more like so many schools and colleges elsewhere in the country: borrowed cages that treat the students’ mind as captive birds, whose sole

46 Visva Bharati, established on 23rd December 1921, was the college that grew out of the Santiniketan ashram’s expansion over the years since its foundation in 1901. 47 Amartya Sen’s views cited in Saranindranath Tagore’s, ‘Tagore, Education, Cosmopolitanism,’ Asian Interfaith Dialogue: Perspectives on Religion, Education and Social Cohesion World Bank (2003): 83. Also Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005): 115 48 Mohit Chakrabarty, Pioneers In Philosophy Of Education (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1995), 112 49 Rabindranath set up the experimental school in 1901 at Santiniketan and it was known as Brahmavidyalay. The ashram expanded over the coming years with the addition of the Sangeet Bhavan (Centre for Music) in 1919, the Kala Bhaban (Centre for Arts) in 1922, Cheena Bhaban (Centre for Sino-Indian studies) in 1937 so on and so forth. 50 The details of this Deed are discussed in Chapter III. Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905) was Rabindranath Tagore’s father. He was a devout Brahmo and was known as Maharshi Debendranath Tagore. 51 For details of the years in which the various departments were set up see, Satyendranath Roy ed. Rabindranath er Chintajagat: Shikshachinta (Kolkata: Granthalay Pvt. Ltd.,1982)

17

human value is judged according to mechanical repetition of lessons, prescribed by educational dispensation foreign to the soil.52

Yet, the war-ravaged world constituted the background for the warm reception of Visva Bharati in 1918 and its formal inauguration in 1921, which aimed at bringing the world into its enclosure. The years separating the two world wars are considered important by scholars who view Tagore as a major player in India’s decolonisation process and argue that it was during this time that much of his social philosophy was taking shape. Tagore’s lectures in Japan and The United States of America claimed that the martial effects of nationalism could be checked through the re- privileging of other forms of human identity—broadly cultural identity.53 Visva Bharati signalled the opening up of doors of the ashram to a wider world and the events of the next decade provided the impetus for the fulfilment of its vision. In 1934, Tagore wrote to Professor Murray:

Willingly therefore I harness myself, in my advanced age, to the arduous responsibility of creating in our educational Colony in Shantiniketan a spirit of genuine international collaboration based on a definite pursuit of knowledge, a pursuit carried on in an atmosphere of friendly community life, harmonized with Nature, and offering freedom of individual self-expression. This work which I have to continue in the face of desperately adverse circumstances, has yet struck root in the soil of India, and sent out its branches to a wider arena of humanity, and it carries, I believe, a very deep affinity with the activities of the League of Intellectual Cooperation with which I am already associated.54 Tagore’s idea of building bridges of intellectual cooperation rooted in his celebration of humanity’s freedom of self-expression facilitated the reception of his verses in the West and led to the acknowledgement of his educational mission. However, I argue in this thesis that, if Visva Bharati is regarded as the high point of the ashram’s collaborative achievement, a reconstruction of its early years brings out the fallacy of the statement. The expansion of Tagore’s educational institute beyond the narrow confines of Bengal, with the seeds of ‘internationalism’ sown in it

52 Rabindranath Tagore, Letter to L.K. Elmhirst dated 19th December, 1937. Cited in L.K. Elmhirst, Rabindranath Tagore Pioneer in Education (London: John Murray, 1961), 36-37 53 Saranindranath Tagore, ‘Tagore, education and Cosmopolitanism’ Asian Interfaith Dialogue: Perspectives on Education and Social Cohesion. World Bank (2003). 54 Rabindranath Tagore to Professor Gilbert Murray, 16th September 1934. In Somendranath Bose ed. Tagore Studies (Calcutta: Tagore Research Institute, 1970), 7 The except amply bears out the fact that Tagore’s correspondent was a British intellectual, who were exchanging letters after the great economic depression and Tagore had already gained recognition internationally as a poet. Visva Bharati as a university was in its thirteenth year.

18 early on, is borne out by the fact that Shitoku Horisan was the first Japanese student at Tagore’s Santiniketan in the year 1903.55 My analysis of the ashram in this thesis, keeping close to Tagore’s own words, suggests that a reasonable way of looking at the element of ‘internationalism’ at Santiniketan is to identify it as a doorway to Tagore’s commitment to universalism, a significant aspect of his Brahmo heritage. Tagore was attracted to Keshub Chandra Sen’s56 universalism, about which later wrote: ‘I was fortunate enough to receive his [Keshub’s] affectionate caresses at the moment when he was cherishing his dream of a great future spiritual illumination.’57 Tagore’s admiration of Sen’s universalism, and opposition to the cultural nationalism endorsed by his family members (most notably his elder brothers Dwijendranath and Jyotirindranath), is an important insight into Tagore’s intellectual context which facilitates the understanding of his political leanings. What distinguished Tagore was not his birth in an ‘exceptionally enriched cultural and erudite family in Calcutta’58 but his creative response as a Brahmo to ‘the stresses and strains of Hindu modernism on the one hand and universalism on the other.’59 Hence, the crucial task that I undertake in this thesis is to build Tagore’s working context as a vital factor that influenced the functioning of the Santiniketan ashram in its early days. This serves two purposes. First, it enables the clearing away of ‘much of the incense-saturated air surrounding the usual iconic approach to the poet’60 and, second, it warrants a realistic assessment of both the man and his educational mission in tune with Patrick Hogan’s observation that, ‘Tagore, like everyone else, was a complex bundle of faulty thoughts and wrong acts, sometimes mean, muddled, ill-informed, rash, foolish in words and deeds, fickle…But he was a flawed man “with heart.”’61

Sources

55 See Visva Bharati Quarterly Vol 7. (Visva-Bharati, 1998): 86-89. Hori had come to Santiniketan primarily to study Sanskrit in the year 1903. 56Keshub Chandra Sen (1838-84) was a social reformer who became a member of the Brahmo Samaj in 1857. He later broke away from the older generation of Brahmos and founded the New Dispensation. For a recent biography of Keshub, see John A. Stevens, Keshub: The Forgotten Prophet of Bengal (London: Hurst & Co., 2018). 57 David Kopf, ‘Rabindranath Tagore as Reformer: Hindu Brahmoism and Universal Humanism’ in The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 289 58 Mohit Chakrabarty (1995), 112 59 See Kopf (1979), 287-88 60 Ibid., 290 61 Patrick Colm Hogan, in Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit eds. Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition (USA, Associated University Press, 2003), 12

19

It is worth highlighting, at the outset, the challenges of writing a thesis on Tagore and critically examining his work. Firstly, there is the challenge of carefully scrutinising and sifting through the enormous volumes of his written work in the form of poetry, essays, novels, plays, songs, political tracts, letters, lectures, and addresses. The second challenge is to tease out the connections between his educational and political philosophy, which he does not make explicit. My imperative, therefore, was a robust and critical engagement with available primary sources alongside a rigorous engagement with secondary literature.

Much of Tagore’s life was documented by the poet himself in accounts that span his lifetime– Jibansmriti (1912) and Chhelebela (1940). But, as Tagore himself points out, writing a memoir is one thing and writing a historical account of one’s life is another. In the former type of account, an artist paints a picture capturing a moment in partial omission and giving commission to things that suit his frame. In a memoir, the forward and backward arrangement of events become essential to give the picture its meaning, but it does not necessarily capture events as history.62 Similarly, Tagore’s recollections about the ashram and his thought experiments with education are contained in various essays written at different points in time, resembling the pattern of an artist painting a picture. It is frequently noticed that Tagore writes about the ashram experiences, expectations, disappointments, and dreams as a way of recollecting past events. Undoubtedly, these reflections are important, yet they are liable and likely to be substantially moderated by memory and tempered by the state of mind that Tagore was writing in, rather than being governed by the immediate impulses and raw set of emotions that followed the actual events. Therefore, for the purpose of constructing a historically contingent account of the Santiniketan ashram, and to avoid uncritical reliance on memory, it becomes essential to put Tagore’s views in conversation with those of others at the ashram, their memoirs, comments, evaluations and observations, to obtain a richer and more nuanced understanding of what was going on in Santiniketan while Calcutta witnessed the unfolding of tumultuous political events.

Much of the ashram’s early history can be retrieved from accounts of its residents—students, teachers and those who had been directly involved with its work in various capacities. This material exists in both Bangla and English, much like Tagore’s own reflections on education and politics. The analysis in this thesis is aided by my proficiency in Bangla, which enables a thorough

62 Rabindranath Tagore, Jibansmriti (1912), 1. Translations mine.

20 engagement with primary and secondary sources in the original language. Tagore’s tracts on education, published in the volume entitled Shiksha (written in Bangla), reveal some consistency in Tagore’s commitment to writing about education between the years 1892 and 1936.63 He covered a range of issues, starting from problems with the prevalent education system in the 1906 ‘Shikshya Samasya’ (Problems of Education), to formulating an ashram model as an alternative in his ‘Ashramer Shiksha’ (Education at the Ashram) in 1936. He spoke about the means and methods of women’s education in ‘Stree Shiksha’ (Women’s education) 1915 and addressed students through lectures entitled ‘Chhatrader Prati Sambhasan’ in 1905 and ‘Chhatro Sambhasan’ in 1936. Graphically plotting Tagore’s essays by the years of publication and the journals they appeared in, indicates his ideological leanings with reference to historically significant political events.

No. Of Titles Written/Year 5

4

3

2

1

0

No. Of Titles

Table 1: No of Essays written per year between 1892 and 1936.

63 The first edition of Shiksha was published in 1315 B.S., (1908) a newer edition came out in 1342 B.S. (1935) with an addition of more titles on the theme of education. The enlarged version and the latest in terms of publication date is 1351 B.S. (1944). This is the version that I have referred to in this study and is the most comprehensive collection of Tagore’s educational writings. Reflections on education are also contained in travel writings most notably Russiar Chithi (1388 B.S.) (1931), which documents the influence and appreciation of Soviet education system.

21

No. of essays/journal Sadhana 1 1 1 Bangadarshan 3 4 Bhandar 2 Prabasi 3 Tattvabodhini Patrika 3 3 Sabuj Patro 2 Santiniketan Pustika Bichitra

Table 1.1: No of essays published in each of the journals named on the right.

The publication of Tagore’s educational tracts in particular journals and his choice of using Bangla to write these essays hint at his ideological leanings as well as his political vision. Tagore wrote most essays in 1906, the year following the partition of Bengal, publishing the maximum number in the journal Bagadarshan. The significance of the year 1906 can be gleaned from the fact that Bengal experienced a flurry of political activities since the autumn of 1905, ranging from political agitations to public boycotts of government institutions, to mass demonstrations, and processions that challenged the partition. The main concern for us, however, is the method Tagore chose to articulate his political ideology. The journals that Tagore widely published with were edited either by him or by the associates and members of the Tagore family. For instance, Sadhana (1891-1896) began under the editorship of Sudhindranath Tagore and was passed onto Rabindranath in its third year. Bangadarshan, originally founded by Bankimchandra Chatterjee in 1892, was revived under the editorship of Rabindranath Tagore in 1901. Tattvabodhini Patrika (1843-1932) was the journal of the Tattvabodhini Sabha, established by Rabindranath’s father, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore. By 1919, the Santiniketan Patrika was founded as a journal of his educational endeavour at Santiniketan, and Tagore penned his educational ideas therein. What is striking to note here is that Tagore did not contribute to popular and important Bangla journals that represented conservatism in their views on society and religion and expressed extremist political views. These were the

22 journal Sandhya (1906), which was founded by Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, the monthly periodical Narayan (1870-1925), edited by Chitta Ranjan Das, and Sahitya (1890-1923) an important Bangla literary journal of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the editorship of Suresh Chandra Samajpati, a renowned literary critic of Tagore.64 In the course of this research, I have carefully studied the relevant materials contained in the named journals as Tagore’s publications therein arguably demonstrate his political leanings which, in turn, had a significant bearing on the education of pupils at his ashram. The key terms that Tagore employed at his ashram are in Bangla which he adjudged more appropriate for conveying his ideas. The fact that Tagore chose to write in Bangla, despite being capable of expressing his ideas in fluent English, conveys his intentional use of language. Investigating a conceptual and distinctive scheme like that of Tagore requires native fluency of Bangla, the language of the primary texts. My fluency in Bangla has therefore facilitated the study and analysis of the relevant texts and sidestepped the need of resorting solely to translated texts which, by their very nature, run the risk of certain peculiar and nuanced ideas getting lost in translation.

For this study, I analysed Tagore’s explicitly political texts, in Bangla as well as English, which explored the political concepts examined in the thesis. I engaged critically with Tagore’s views on the concepts of samaj, nation, and nationalism, which are contained in the essays: ‘Nation ki’, ‘Swadeshi Samaj’, and ‘Nationalism.’ Texts that are central to Tagore’s educational philosophy, and have been referred to in this study include: ‘Dharmashiksha’, ‘Tapovan’, and ‘Ashramer Roop o Bikash.’ Other essays, crucial to my study were: ‘The Schoolmaster’, ‘My School’, and ‘Creative Unity’, which gave insight into the relation between Tagore’s pedagogy and his political vision. In addition to these, my study explored the memoirs and reminiscences of ashram students who documented the experience of their life there.

I depart from the more common tendency of scholars to examine Tagore’s political views in contrast with Gandhi’s.65 Instead, I identify the writings of Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) as a

64 Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861-1907), was born to a Hindu Brahmin family as Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, and became a member of the Brahmo Samaj under the influence of Keshub Chanda Sen. He joined Tagore’s ashram as a teacher in 1901. Born in 1870, Chitta Ranjan Das (C.R. Das, henceforth), was a lawyer and political activist who founded the journal Narayan and was actively involved in the activities of the Anusilan Samiti. Suresh Chandra Samajpati (1870-1921) was a renowned Bengali writer who was the editor of the journal Sahitya, and a well-known literary critic. 65 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was a lawyer and an anti-colonial nationalist who advocated methods of non-violent resistance during India’s struggle for independence. He assumed the leadership of the

23 more viable comparator to Tagore and a crucial source for locating Tagore’s politics as a response to the wider political currents in Bengal following its partition in 1905, long before Gandhi ventured into politics and became a mass leader. Ghose is an important actor within Tagore’s frame of reference as he was a political leader who wrote on similar themes as Tagore – education, spiritualism, freedom and identities, and himself founded an ashram in Pondicherry 1910, and yet differed substantially from Tagore on these questions. Comapring Ghose and Tagore is a crucial exercise for understanding the brand of politics that each of them endorsed and the fault line between the two approaches. This distinction enables a critical enquiry into Tagore’s vision of politics which was different from the one that dominated the political scene of Bengal in the years following its partition. However, the thesis does refer to Gandhi occasionally, without the intent of pitting him and Tagore in opposition to one another.

I have obtained the details of Tagore’s life events from his biographers, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhay and Prasanta Kumar Pal, who wrote in Bangla, and from his more recent English language biographers, Uma Dasgupta and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. I also draw on other classic and equally relevant works by E.J. Thompson and Krishna Kripalani.66 In addition, letters written by Tagore, particularly to his family and friends, besides being a treasure trove for scholars and biographers, are of utmost importance to my study as they provide a crucial window into his inner life. Tagore’s correspondence with teachers at the ashram, and their responses, are another important source for reconstructing the history of the ashram’s earliest years. I have accessed in the original manuscript files located at the Rabindra Bhavan Archives (RBA) and cited them in

Indian National Congress in 1921. Scholars who have done comparative studies on Tagore and Gandhi include: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915- 1941(New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997), Ashis Nandy, ‘Nationalism, Genuine and Spurious: Mourning Two Early Post-Nationalist Strains,’ Economic and Political Weekly 41, No.32 (August, 2006): 3500-3504, Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London, Allen Lane, 2005), Dennis Dalton, has compared Tagore with Aurobindo Ghose and others. See, Indian Idea of Freedom Political thought of Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore (Haryana: The Academic Press, 1982). 66 Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani o Rabindrasahitya Prabesika (Calcutta: Visva Bharati Grantha Vibhaga, 1970) and Prasanta Kumar Pal, Rabijibani Vol. 1-8 (Calcutta: Bhurjapatra, 1982), Krishna Kripalani, Life of Tagore (New Delhi: Malancha, 1961), Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore His life and Work (London: OUP, 1928), Uma Dasgupta ed. My Life in My Words (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2006), Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: OUP, 2004), Rabindranath Tagore: An Illustrious Life (New Delhi: OUP, 2013), Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2009).

24 translation where necessary.67 Here, I must also note that, while referring to Santiniketan in his English writings, Tagore writes ‘Shantiniketan’ to transliterate the Bangla ‘Sh’ as opposed to ‘Sa’ which is conventional in English translations. I have used the generic ‘Sa’ throughout, other than where I have quoted from Tagore’s English writings. To avoid typological complications and errors, I refrained from using diacritics for Indian words and wrote them instead in italics (mukti, swadesh, swaraj).

Method

As I mentioned earlier, constructing a narrative of the Santiniketan as a political project is a difficult task because Tagore does not pen a systematic philosophy highlighting the political agenda of his educational project. The existing approaches to studying Tagore have informed the choice of method for the present study.68 I combine the contextualising of Tagore’s ashram within other educational experiments of the time with a close textual analysis of Tagore’s writings on education and politics in order to reveal their interconnection. For addressing the question ‘what is the politics of the Santiniketan ashram?’ my study takes inspiration from historians of European concepts and important ‘keyword’ projects, such as Koselleck and Williams.69 I build my analysis around Tagore’s ‘keywords’—words that have special significance and force, and those that come up frequently as crucial to argument. Through these, I glean broader concepts and conceptual structures within Tagore’s thought.

Tagore employs terms like dharmashiksha, swadesh, samaj, adhyatmik, chhatra shashantantra, swadeshbhakti, mukti, and ‘supreme person’—terms that are distinct to his writings and difficult to translate. They are multivalent concepts with a wider frame of reference to terms such as

67 While the translations were undertaken every attempt was made to stay true to the original meaning and essence of the Bangla prose. 68 I am referring here to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s approach of working out a simplistic division of labour between the different genres of Tagore’s writings arguing that his prose was more ‘realistic’ while his poems were ‘romantic’. See Dipesh Chakrabarty. ‘Nation and Imagination: The Training of the Eye in Bengali Modernity’ Topoi 18 (1999). Rosinka Chaudhuri in her work, entitled, ‘Historicality in Literature: Subalternist Misrepresentations’ Economic and Political Weekly 39, No 42 (October, 2004): 4658-463 has shown the inadequacy of Chakrabarty’s framework arguing that scholars ought to engage with the prosaic as well as the poetic writings of Tagore as both these genres posed and answered the question of the two ways of seeing in Bengali nationalism. 69 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), Raymond Williams, Keywords: A vocabulary of society and culture (London: Fontana, 1975).

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‘spiritual’, ‘secular’, ‘religious’ and ‘nationalist’ which were produced simultaneously and in mutual interaction.70 Peter Van Der Veer suggests that, although these terms were universalised in the age of imperialism, they underwent transformation in the context of a history of interaction with already-existing concepts.71 This line of argument has been particularly useful for my thesis’ investigation of Tagore’s political lexicon. Adhering to Quentin Skinner’s caution on the dangers involved in treating keywords as equivalent to concepts, I employ Tagore’s key terms as entry points to a discussion of multifaceted concepts, tracing their range of referents through the historical context explored.72 Tagore’s use of Bangla as the language of choice for writing his political ideas is significant. He was careful of not imposing Western frameworks onto the Indian context, and instead, engineered an alternative political language that resonated with the Indian experience.

It must be pointed out that despite drawing inspiration from Koselleck’s begriffsgeschichte project for identifying key terms, my study does not allude to the latter’s overall framework of conceptual history. This is because such an approach, with broad periodisation and treatment of concepts as more or less stable, if changeable over time, is not well suited to a study of an individual’s ideas, such as this.73 The concepts I study here, do not have widely accepted meanings, but are, on the contrary, idiosyncratic, malleable, in constant (and often self-conscious) flux. In fact, as these concepts are subject to a variety of interpretations, based on the usage by the author invoking them, Skinner’s method, which emphasises context and a range of reference, instead of steady meanings, is more suitable.74 It gives me room for testing Tagore’s usage of a particular concept by juxtaposing it with the ways in which his contemporaries have or have not used it. That said, it is not a theoretical study that I undertake. Instead, I deploy methodological ideas only insofar as they help to further clarify Tagore’s ideas.

Historians have warned that attempts to interpret an author’s intention are usually subject to the danger of the researcher imposing their subjective interpretation on the original idea. In order to

70 Peter Van Der Veer, ‘Spirituality in Modern Society’ Social Research: An International Quarterly 76, Number 4 (Winter 2009): 1097-1120 71 Ibid., 72 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of Cultural Lexicon’ Essays in Criticism 29, No.3 (July, 1979): 205-224 73 Reinhart Koselleck’s work The Practice of Conceptual History Timing History Spacing Concepts (2002) explains his overall framework of conceptual history. 74 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ History and Theory 8, No.1 (1969).

26 avoid this, I have carefully considered Pocock’s suggestion of gathering evidence that may be ‘unreliable and treacherous but still usable, from the author’s other writings or his private correspondence…which can then be applied to or tested against the text itself.’75 For example, in instances where Tagore attributes the origin of the Santiniketan ashram to the unpleasant memories of his schooldays,76 I employed evidence from other sources to moderate the danger of relying on a single text in tracing the origins of the mission.

The material and argument are divided into two parts: contextual and conceptual. The first half of the thesis reconstructs the context for understanding the establishment of the Santiniketan ashram in 1901. It situates Tagore within debates on education reforms in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also contrasts Tagore’s ashram with educational initiatives that had an exclusive socio-religious intent and those that had an overtly political tone. Furthermore, the Swadeshi movement is analysed as a crucial moment offering the political concepts which Tagore employed at his ashram, albeit by using a different vocabulary altogether. The second half of the thesis discusses each of Tagore’s key terms – swadeshbhakti, mukti, and personality, how they were used in his ashram, and the ways in which they differed from the political ideas of the time. Tagore’s interpretation of the concepts, and their difference with the ambient notions of the time, is a crucial task, undertaken in this thesis, for tracing Tagore’s politics through the experimental ashram at Santiniketan.

A note on concepts as discussed in the chapters

It is important to provide a background to the major concepts that I use to formulate the arguments in the thesis. The first concept that I engage with is ‘education.’ I highlight the precise sense in which education was considered ‘political’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Krishna Kumar argues that in colonial India, British officers and missionaries were developing an educational system to cultivate ‘enlightened others.’77 The colonial rule viewed India’s ‘material poverty’ as ‘proof’ of her ‘deficient culture’, which it intended to fix by excluding indigenous knowledge and cultural forms in government-run schools.78 English-medium educated Indians saw

75 J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4 76 Tagore’s views about his schooling experiences have been recorded in My Reminiscences and in the essay ‘My School’ 77 Krishna Kumar, Politics of Education in Colonial India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014). 78 Ibid.,

27 themselves as legitimate candidates to share the colonial state’s power and the privileges that it afforded. In Bengal, the English-educated middle classes, the bhadralok, by virtue of their close association with the British and their institutions, sought to work out an adjustment with the dominant ‘material culture’ by claiming the spiritual superiority of the Indian counterpart.79 The adjustments between the citadel of tradition and tendencies towards greater Anglicisation constituted ‘the story of nineteenth-century reform movements, leading to cultural and political nationalisms.’80 Nationalist leaders like Tilak argued that social reform should not interfere with the world of the Indian ‘home’ or ‘private sphere,’81 and were hostile towards making education accessible to women, the lower castes, and the peasantry. According to Bagchi, ‘educational actors’ like Gandhi and Tagore attempted to ‘synthesise aspects of pre-colonial education with modern elements’ by ‘renovating the Sanskritic concepts of the ashram.’82 This material suggests that, for the nationalist leadership spearheading India’s struggle for freedom, English education became a tool of political resistance.

The next crucial analytical category that I employ is the term ashram. Bagchi has defined the ashram as ‘a secluded community where human self-cultivation took place.’83 Traditionally, the ashram meant the organisation of Hindu life in four stages (ashrams) with specific duties and responsibilities to be performed at each stage. Originating from the Sanskrit word sram, meaning toil, the ashram was imbued with a new meaning in the context of late-nineteenth-century colonial India. In the search for modernising initiatives, vacillating between religious and social reconstruction on one hand, and overt political agitation on the other, Indians since the 1870s began

79 See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (New Jersey, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 80 Mario Prayer, ‘The Gandhian’s of Bengal Nationalism, Social Reconstruction and Cultural Orientation 1920-1942’ Revista delistudi Orientali 74, No.1-2 (2001): 37-41 81 See Parimala V. Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism: Discrimination, Education and Hindutva (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010), Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 233–53. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) was an Indian nationalist year who championed the cause of swaraj. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1890 and was one of the founding members of the Indian Home Rule League. 82 Barnita Bagchi, ‘Connected and entangled histories: writing histories of education in the Indian context’ Paedagogica Historica 50, No. 6 (2014): 813-821 83 Ibid.,

28 reinventing the ashram as an institution for imparting education.84 Emerging from of the quest for establishing ‘national education,’ numerous ashrams sprung up and ‘endeavoured to combine’ the best of ‘East and West’ to ensure that students were endowed with an ‘independent mind and a feeling of national pride.’85 I discuss these ashrams in some detail later (Chapter I), but at this point, it is important to mention that a significant part of the ashram initiatives was to combine ‘moral improvement’ alongside ‘physical development’ as the perfect way of combating ‘idleness and unruliness’ and of developing ‘physical prowess and a sense of discipline.’86

Drawing from the Victorian idea of manliness, which inspired British public schools to teach sports, some ashram initiatives sought to reform India on the basis of her old values contained in Vedic scriptures.87 A Vedic ashram was one where the students were taught by a guru (teacher) who imparted knowledge and wisdom to his pupils at no cost. The students lived at the residence of the guru (gurugriha) where they had to pass their ‘student-hood’ under the direct ‘personal supervision’ of the guru which ‘facilitated studies’, ‘toned down personal idiosyncrasies’ and prepared the students to be ‘self-reliant’ while getting acquainted with the ways of the world.88 The Gurukul at Kangri founded in 1902 is an excellent illustration of the ashram model described above.

In Chapter I, I bring together, the concepts of education and the ashram, by situating the Santiniketan ashram within the debates around the discontent with colonial education and the network of initiatives that it was a part of. I compare the Santiniketan ashram with the Kanya Mahavidyalay of Jalandhar, which symbolised education’s exclusive concern with social reform, and with The Dawn Society in Calcutta, which reflected education’s intricate association with politics. This exercise is crucial in determining the distinctiveness of Tagore’s Santiniketan ashram which drew inspiration from the Vedic prototype, and yet, was a model experiment with the village society that reflected his socio-political vision. As ashrams were institutes fostering a collective life through foregrounding the imagination of a social community, they could be compared with

84 Harald Fischer Tine, ‘National Education, Pulp Fiction and the Contradictions of Colonialism: Perceptions of an Educational Experiment in Early-Twentieth Century India’ in H.F.Tine and Michael Mann eds. Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 20 85 Ibid., 86 Ibid., 87 Ibid., 88 See A.S. Altekar, Education in Ancient India (Delhi, 1934), 94

29 civic social bodies, such as coffee houses which foster social interactions within communities.89 The peculiarity of Tagore’s ashram stems from its inclusive and broad definition of the community as samaj, as opposed to a narrowly demarcated territory i.e. a nation.

Chapter II of the thesis uses the Swadeshi movement as the backdrop to Tagore’s brand of politics, articulated through his distinctive terms, which were instrumental in differentiating him from the Bengali nationalist leadership and their ‘nation-state’ centric politics. Tagore’s alternative politics can be gleaned from the differences between his vision of swadeshbhakti and that of nationalism, his endorsement of the samaj as a self-sufficient village unit rather than an abstract idea of ‘a nation’, his allegiance to humanity’s freedom as opposed to the narrowly defined self-rule (swaraj), and his reliance on spiritual practices that did not amount to sacred text-based social reform. By laying a conceptual road map of the thesis, this chapter takes a different view from that of scholars who have not tended to treat the ashram as a political project and, instead, considered it as part of Tagore’s retreat from politics. In this chapter, the core claim of the thesis, i.e., that the Santiniketan ashram was the testing ground for Tagore’s political concepts, is posited. The thesis then progresses to a discussion of Tagore’s keywords, dedicating a chapter to each of the terms, to build the argument.

a) Swadeshbhakti through dharmashiksha

Interpreting Tagore’s political ideas, expressed through his educational mission, by using the key terms he employs as windows to larger concepts, makes it imperative to have a theoretical foregrounding of those categories. I investigate Tagore’s concept of swadeshbhakti,that was engendered by the ashram’s dharmashiksha, as a ‘remedy’ to nationalism. Tagore wrote to Andrews in 1912, that his object of setting up the educational mission at Santiniketan was at first patriotic, and later became ‘spiritual’, for which he designed dharmashiksha as the means to attain swadeshbhakti.90

89 See Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, ‘The Coffee House and the Ashram: Gandhi, Civil Society and Public Spheres’ Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics (June, 2003): 1-14 90 Rabindranath Tagore’s letter to C.F. Andrews, written in 1912. See Letters to a Friend (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1928), 28-29. Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940) was a Christian missionary who was a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore in his ashram project.

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In Chapter III, I unpack these terms and address the following questions: What was swadeshbhakti if not nationalism? How did Tagore’s opposition to the idea of a nation inform his politics of swadeshbhakti? And how was dharmashiksha to contribute to this project?

These questions become critical as Tagore expressed his discomfort with the idea of a ‘nation’ and proposed the organisation of people into a ‘self-sufficient’ unit called samaj. His samaj was an alternative to what is understood as the nation—a territorially demarcated space of land mapped out for a statistically enumerated population, which, as recent scholarship has widely discussed, is ‘a product of modernity and inevitably rooted in the political ideology of the modern state.’91 For the purpose of textual analysis, it is important to reckon with the fact of the absence of a Bangla term for ‘nation.’ While samaj was the means for negotiating complex loyalties and forging a wider unity among people belonging to different castes, regions, localities with diverse religious affiliations,92 the closest approximation to ‘nation’ in Bangla is the term ‘jati’ (normally translated into English as ‘caste’). It implied village communities or jatiya samajes (caste societies) constructed through ‘familial ties’ and ‘faith in common religion’, glossing over other fragmentations that caused discord and threatened samajik (societal) unity.93 ‘Swajatiya’ would be the nation defined in cultural terms from which emanated a sense of cultural nationalism as seen in the writings of nationalist leaders like C.R Das in Bengal and Tilak in Maharashtra. Swajatiya embodied a sense of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’ where ‘sentiments of oneness rooted in the past were reinterpreted to envision a new samaj.’94 However, Tagore’s ‘swadesh’, rooted in his notion of samaj as a self-sufficient village unit, was the creative endeavour of formulating a social collective. It was founded on the notion of swadeshbhakti (devotion to one’s country) as the antidote to ‘nationalism’, which he considered ‘organised selfishness’ as ‘its religion’, and sacrificed the ‘higher ideals of humanity.’95 For Tagore, swadeshbhakti, or the relation one shared with one’s country, was imagined as paralleling the parent-child bond. This relationality was

91 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 1983) and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in a Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986). 92 Swarupa Gupta, ‘Samaj and Unity: The Bengali Literati’s Discourse on Nationhood 1867-1905’ Doctoral thesis (London: SOAS, 2004), 114 93 Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s position was articulated in his essay ‘Jatiyata Bhab’ In Intermediate Bengali Selections (Calcutta, 1925), 40. The Nabya Bharat’s article was published in its annals of 1883 Volume 1, No.10. See. Ibid., 94 Swarupa Gupta (2004), 115 95 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan,1917), 39

31 universal in appeal and not directed at serving a territorially bound entity, understood in the West as ‘the nation.’

Tagore’s dharmashiksha was instrumental to cultivating swadeshbhakti among pupils at the ashram. This was different from the agenda of social reforms and cultural nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, which focussed on establishing India’s ‘spiritual predisposition’ as her ‘privilege.’96 The Brahmo Samaj was pioneering in their endeavour of mediating the individual’s relationship with God as part of their social reform initiative. They aimed to restore to the individuals their capacity to seek direct knowledge of the Absolute while enjoying the worldly privileges of belonging to a civil society.97 Since the time of Maharshi Debendranath, the Tagore family shared connections with the Brahmo Samaj, whose social philosophy rested on a relentless criticism of idolatry and Brahminical priestcraft that were more inclined to the cosmopolitan, rather than national, side of reform. Rabindranath was drawn towards Keshub’s universal religion the influence of which was observable in the ritual practices of meditation and chanting of hymns at the Santiniketan ashram where students congregated to dwell upon the universal creator, the supreme person, the Father with whom the pupils shared an adhyatmik (spiritual bond). The essence of the spiritual practices at Santiniketan cannot be grasped by simply being familiar with the scholarship that deals with the subject of spirituality. In Euro- American understanding, spirituality and spiritual practices revolve around personal and private experiences of faith as the most valuable means of furthering the spiritual growth of individuals. It is defined in distinction with religiosity i.e. people’s affiliation to organised religion.98 This conceptual framework is unhelpful for the purpose of investigating dharmashiksha as it was conducted in the public space of the ashram and intended to promote swadeshbhakti at Santiniketan. Both these ideas reflected the notion of relatedness that permeated Tagore’s political vision and his ashram’s pedagogy, abstaining from religious inclinations and countering the pride of nationalism.

b) Mukti for humanity

96 Andrew Sartori, ‘The Categorical Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal, 1904-1908’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East 23, No. 1&2 (2003): 271-285 97 Ibid., 98 Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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The next key term that I explore is mukti which for Tagore meant freedom attained through the perfection of human relationships. Understanding mukti involves addressing the questions that it raises. Firstly, how did the pedagogical practices of the ashram accommodate the guru-pupil relations within the framework of mukti? Secondly, was mukti synonymous to or different from the autonomy conveyed by the Eurocentric notions of freedom? I devote Chapter IV to discussing these questions.

The idea of mukti postulated by Tagore informed the pedagogical practices of his ashram and also revealed Tagore’s views on the links between education and freedom. These were worked out at the ashram through a strict adherence to rules and regulations and were shouldered by the ashramites within a framework of individual responsibility. As obedience and subservience to their gurus were quintessential elements of ashram life, mukti offered a different interpretation of freedom from the way it is commonly theorised by Western scholars. In the works of scholars like Isiah Berlin, John Locke, Hannah Arendt and J.S. Mill, freedom is replete with assumptions about the human conditions of agency and autonomy and its conflation with the idea of sovereignty.99 Adhering to these formulations of freedom hinders the process of capturing the essence of mukti which moved away from assumptions of autonomy and thrived within the framework of hierarchical guru-pupil bonds. Speculations of autonomy or agency did not appear in Tagore’s vision or version of freedom. Instead, he focused on promoting virtuous and righteous relations among people at the ashram that was experienced by his students at Santiniketan as chhatraswaraj.

Swaraj became a popular category during the nationalist struggle. C.A. Bayly argues that India, from the beginning, was more concerned with the fate of society than of the individual, and more hospitable to the idea of state intervention in the economy. The nationalists’ attempts to attain freedom of self-government found expression in the demands for a free press, freedom of assembly, and in an individual leader’s capacity to serve the collective—for the nation to attain swaraj.100 Ananya Vajpeyi argues that swaraj is a modern political category, which cannot be

99 See Isiah Berlin’s lecture titled ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ delivered at the University of Oxford in 1958, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’ In Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1961). 100 C.A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

33 traced back to the political thought of Indic pre-modernity.101 The various interpretations of swaraj reveal a common strand namely a clamour for political and social freedom to be attained for the nation which would be available to individuals by extension. Ideas of freedom—grounded in notions of autonomy, absence/limited restraints on human actions, or independence—form the springboard for Tagore’s conception of mukti, as it eliminates the distinction between individual and community, and accommodates both social and political aspects of personal and social life. The discussion on the actuation of mukti through the daily practices at Santiniketan, in Chapter IV, reveals not only its distinctiveness but also shows that the element of relatedness was at the core of Tagore’s understanding of freedom and its role at the ashram.

c) ‘Universal person’ versus identity

Tagore ardently wrote about an exclusive concept of ‘supreme person’ which he articulated through various terms such as ‘personality’, ‘the personal man’, and ‘great souls.’ They were aimed at forming distinctive individuals at his ashram rather than merely students whose lives were ‘pressed between the leaves of books.’102 This prompts a number of relevant questions such as: What did Tagore mean by ‘person’? What was distinctive about this notion? What does it tell us about Tagore’s politics? I critically examine these questions in Chapter V.

When the charge of effeminacy, levelled against Bengalis by the colonisers, were challenged by the nationalist leaders who relied on the reinvention of Hindu icons, Tagore became the exemplifier of the concept of person that he espoused. He resented the privileged status that his refined upbringing had conferred on him, distancing himself from his bhadralok background. In doing so, Tagore charted his rejection of class identity as well as the tribalism of identities by which groups of people relate to one another on the basis of shared characteristics of language, region, race, or territory.

A fundamental trait of identity as an analytical category is that it operates on the binary of the ‘self’ versus the ‘other.’ The construction of the Bengali bhadralok identity is a prominent example of this. In colonial Bengal the ‘English educated bhadralok’ distinguished themselves from the

101 Ananya Vajpeyi, ‘Notes on Swaraj’, Available at: https://www.indiaseminar.com/2009/601/601_ananya_vajpeyi.htm 102 For details, see Chapter V

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‘uncultured chhotolok’ on the basis of their access to English education and office employment.103 I discuss Tagore’s idea of universal person in contrast to the narrowly defined ‘identity’ rooted in the parochialism which sat at odds with Tagore’s endorsement of universal humanism. Although these are difficult to define categories, a logical distinction between the terms is crucial as it opens the avenue to investigate how an association with either of them inspired a particular kind of politics. Affiliation to group identities fuelled a certain kind of politics which did not appeal to Tagore. For instance, Bankim’s literary contributions aimed at formulating a new Bengali identity by reinventing Krishna as an iconic Hindu figure who, as an agent of self-control and action, challenges the accusations of effeminacy levelled against the Bengalis by the colonial masters. The political leadership in Bengal ascribed importance to the figure of the Bharat Mata—the mother Goddess who had to be rescued from the clutches of the alien rule. Reliance on cultural idioms as the means of launching political battles was generated by the affiliation of Bengali leaders to the symbols, figures, images, idioms, and icons which were the markers of their ‘Bengali’ identity.

Tagore endorsed the brand of politics which emanated from an affiliation to his concept of a distinct person as opposed to a narrow conception of ‘identity’ that is limited to membership of a particular group, caste, linguistic region, or class. The Bengali bhadraloks, as worshippers of Bharat Mata—the iconic representation of their nation, reflect the nationalist concerns with the question of identity and the tribalism it provoked. Tagore distanced himself from such icons and focused instead on reconstructing the village as a self-sufficient entity. He urged the students of his ashram too, to not be deluded by the abstractions of such imagery and, instead, harness their energies to become aware of their immediate socio-political realities and act according to contingencies.

Tagore’s notion of ‘persons’ combined the elements of the social and the spiritual man, placing him simultaneously within the macrocosm of the village and the macrocosm of the universe. The distinctiveness of Tagore’s conception of persons/personality and its institutionalisation is determined by Tagore’s self-identification as a poet which enabled him to gloss over particular characteristics associated with identity, to embrace and ‘enjoy in human products’ irrespective of

103 See, S. N. Mukherjee, ‘Daladali in Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century’ Modern Asian Studies, 9, No. 1 (1975): 62- 63. Also, Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga’, ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti’: Ramakrishna and His Times’ Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) 27, No. 29 (July 18, 1992): 1550

35 where ‘they might have originated.’104 Tagore embodied his notion of personality through meaningful relations that he shared with his pupils and colleagues at Santiniketan, anchoring it on the element of relatedness which is central to the other concepts that governed his political philosophy which he practised at the ashram. Tagore’s concept of ‘personality’ or its actuation were not free of ambiguities or contradictions but these were essential in creating ‘unique people’ at the ashram as he had envisaged. The tenet of universalism which attracted Tagore to the Brahmo faith, coupled with his poetic self that was fundamentally creative and could embrace inventiveness irrespective of its point of origin, formed the essence of his political commitment and his world views.

To conclude, this thesis is an exploration of Tagore’s Santiniketan ashram as his political mission. The experiment with educational pedagogy undertaken by Tagore at Santiniketan was rooted in the discontent with the colonial system of education and was a part of the network of initiatives for reforming education that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century India. The distinctiveness of Tagore’s ashram becomes apparent when compared to the educational institutes which were either tied to social reforms or inextricably linked to institutional politics. The political landscape of post-partition Bengal offers a platform for investigating Tagore’s political ideas that were conveyed through his systematic deployment of keywords. The textual analysis of Tagore’s writings conducted in this project is vital for negating the tendencies of viewing Tagore’s ashram activities as a phase of his retreat from politics. This study formulates its argument on Tagore’s vision of politics which was ingrained in societal relations. The deeply relational nature of all of Tagore’s key political terms is what distinguishes each from its structural opposite. He deemed virtuous relations among people in the samaj, and between the guru and people at the ashram, as the alternative to the dangers of falling prey to the affiliation of a particular nation or group. Tagore cleaved from the confined view of politics characterised by an incessant power-struggle for gaining autonomy from the coloniser with the nation-state at its centre. Rather, he placed the village at the heart of his political project and focused on building a community of individuals who lived together within the framework of an interactive and deeply personal samaj.

104 Rabindranath Tagore, Letters to a Friend (New Delhi: Rupa, 2002), 111

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Chapter I: Tagore’s ideas on education: The Santiniketan ashram in comparison with the Kanya Mahavidyalay and The Dawn Society

In this chapter, I examine Tagore’s views on education by placing him in his contemporary debates on the subject. I analyse Tagore’s writings on education by situating them within the widespread discontent with the colonial system of education in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. I compare the Santiniketan ashram with two other reform initiatives of its time, namely the Dawn Society and the Kanya Mahavidyalay (KMV) Jalandhar as they represent two opposite trends. The KMV’s aim to rectify the ills in the Indian society which the colonial masters considered as the reasons for its weakness and backwardness, suggests that their educational mission was tied closely to the project of social reform.105 The second instance reveals education’s close association with politics and is seen in The Dawn Society, founded in Bengal in 1902. The Society had at its forefront the spiritual regeneration of the nation as a political agenda and considered that reforming university education was a prerequisite as the latter had hitherto ‘failed to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the nation.’106 Tagore was closely associated with the Dawn Society, as the following analysis will reveal, and his Santiniketan experiment was intellectually informed by Arya Samaj educational reform initiatives like the Kanya Mahavidyalay. That Santiniketan ashram occupies a middle ground between these two extremes can be deduced by comparing these missions with one another. Their curricula and methods of teaching offer important contrasts to Tagore’s vision. They are united, however, in the late-nineteenth century discontent with colonial education, to which they were a response.

Discontent with education in India

Scholarship on the subject has shown the ways in which education became a crucial topic in public discourse—in matters of policy as well as in anti-colonial sentiments. In the early years of the twentieth century, the most common way of perceiving the utility of education was through its relationship with employment. In the words of Viceroy Lord Irwin, ‘education was not only regarded as a sole means to employment but more narrowly still that it was treated as a “turnstile

105 For a detailed study see, Madhu Kishwar, ‘Arya Samaj and Women’s Education Kanya Mahavidyalay Jalandhar’ Economic and Political Weekly 21, No.17(April, 1986): WS9-24 106 See Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee ed. The Origins of the National Movement for Education (1957), 196

37 leading into the arena of Government service.”’107 The unavailability of suitable job opportunities in the public services had compelled educated Indians to emerge as independent professionals in the fields of law, teaching, medicine, and journalism, so that by the late 1870s and early 1880s most important towns in India had a reasonable number of such independent professionals. Out of the 1589 students, who obtained Arts degrees in the University of Calcutta between 1857 and 1882, 526 entered public services upon graduation, 527 went into the legal profession, 12 became doctors and the remaining 470 found employment as teachers in colleges and high schools.108

The problem was not with unemployment as such, but with obtaining employment in the government and judiciary, that were much coveted among the Bengali middle class. A university degree was an essential prerequisite for securing such employment. In fact, the value of a university education was such that those who failed to receive a degree proudly proclaimed themselves as ‘B.A. fail.’109 In 1877, Sir Richard Temple, the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal observed that, ‘it was melancholy to see men, who once appeared to receive their Honours in the university convocation now applying, for some lowly-paid appointment, almost begging from office to office, from department to department, or struggling for the practice of petty practitioner.’110 In 1899, Curzon111 observed that the system of higher education in India was a failure and that it had sacrificed the formation of character upon the altar of cram. He was of the view that the Indian University turned out only a discontented horde of office-seekers who were educated for places which were not there for them to fill.112

The issue of underemployment in government services had a two-layered effect. It led to widespread disappointment among the Indians with the employment policies of the British Raj, a disappointment that in turn fuelled nationalist sentiments. United in their grievances, the new educated class began to write in the English dailies and meet in associations that advocated the

107 Address at convocation of Delhi University, 1927, Indian Problems: Speeches by Lord Irwin, 184. Cited in Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons (New Delhi, 2007), 18 108 Surja Datta, A History of the Indian University System: Emerging from the Shadows of the Past (Oxford, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 50 109 Ibid., 51 110 Sir Richard Temple, ‘Minute of 5th January 1877’, cited in Suresh C. Ghosh, History of Education in India (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007), 380 111 Lord Curzon (1859-1925) served as the Viceroy of British India from 1899 to 1905. As the Governor General of Bengal Presidency, he drafted the plan of partitioning the province which came into effect in 1905. 112 See Krishna Kumar, Politics of Education in Colonial India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014).

38 rights of Indians, especially to employment and representation.113 In Curzon’s view, English education, which was identified with higher education in India, had given birth to a tone of mind and to a type of character that was ‘ill-regulated, averse to discipline, discontented, and in some cases actually disloyal.’ Meant to raise ‘an innocuous hen’, the English education in fact produced ‘a fighting cock.’114 Another view on English education was that it was an instrument rooted in the knowledge and culture of the coloniser. Access to English education was not simply a conveyor belt for office-going clerks but also a tool used by the nationalist leadership to counter the coloniser throughout the nationalist struggle.115

Further discontent with colonial education stemmed from its policy of providing generous grants and political support to missionaries to launch their own educational institutions. As these missionaries functioned with adequate financial and political clout, they were seen as the part of the efforts to subvert the sanctity and stability of the Indian family through their denationalising influence.116 Particularly alarming was the fact that the female missionaries visited Indian homes, tutoring upper-caste women while the men were at work. This encouraged social reformers to take up the cause of reforming education for women. They were, however, of the view that women were naturally destined for motherhood and ‘therefore need not be educated for a living or profession’, which would mean a compromise on the vitality of the race.117 They ruled out women’s participation in the public life since women were not expected to become politicians or administrators, but were to cultivate, instead, the virtues of orderliness, thrift, cleanliness, and personal sense of responsibility. Women were to be free from superstitions and ritualism, which hampered the progress of men and were detrimental to the functioning of the household within the physical and economic conditions set by the outside world.118 In other words, the nationalist agenda of sovereign nationhood subordinated women by binding them to the ‘honour of new social responsibilities’ of running the household and maintaining the ‘racial purity’ of Indians.119 There was much anxiety about society losing its vitality as a result of its uneducated women curbing the

113 Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The History of Education in Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1995). 114 Ibid., 104 115 See K. Kumar, Politics of Education in Colonial India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014). 116 Madhu Kishwar (1986): WS9 117 Editorial in the Special Ladies Number of The Vedic Magazine Vol. XI, No.8 (January 1918): 299 118 See Kishwar (1986) and Partha Chatterjee, ‘Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India’ American Ethnologist 16, No.4 (November, 1989): 629 119See Partha Chatterjee (1989) Ibid.,

39 progress of men and of society. The project of educating women was integral to the reformers’ social concerns. But, as we shall see in the next section, education had social as well as political stakes.

Education as a socio-political category

Bellenoit notes that, ‘[E]ducation was more importantly, a formative social and intellectual factor in the emergence of modern India.’120 Since ‘the imperatives of assimilating colonial subjects to a mission of management were better served by cooperation rather than conflict, education gained an exalted position in the hierarchy of interests claiming British administrators’ attention.’121 The numerous policy interventions that the colonial government made with respect to education amply bears out the point. The evolution of the government policies on education, from the Education Dispatch of 1854, to the University Bill of 1904, alongside others, such as the Hunter Commission (1882), have been studied in detail by scholars.122 Vishvanathan argues that the institutionalisation of English in India, and the process of curricular selection reflected the colonial government’s impulse to dominate and control the subjects. Education was a tool to exercise social and political control and the curriculum was a mechanism through which knowledge was socially distributed and culturally validated.123 The colonial state made attempts, however inappropriate, to impose educational strategies including school inspections and the like through the use of bureaucratic structures. Tim Allender concludes, from his survey of education in the years spanning 1870-1882, that Government servants who seldom knew the local languages tested rote English learning to gauge the success of students in the schools that they visited.124

120 Hayden J. Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860-1920 (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1 121 Gauri Vishvanathan, ‘Preface’ In, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York, Columbia University Press, 2015), xvii 122 See Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The History of Education in Modern India 1757-1998 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1995), Aparna Basu, Essays in the History of Indian Education (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1982). These studies take a historical overview of the development and implications of colonial educational policies and the analysis is used to offer an understanding of the post-independence scenario as well. 123 Visvanathan (2015), 3 124 Tim Allender, ‘Learning Abroad: the colonial educational experiment in India, 1813-1919’, Paedagogica Historica 45, No. 6 (2009): 737. More recently, Ankur Kakkar’s work, ‘Education, empire and the heterogeneity of investigative modalities: a reassessment of colonial surveys on indigenous education’, Paedagogica Historica 53, No. 4 (2017): 381-93, has also furnished evidence of a Government official named William Adam who was appointed to conduct an enquiry into the native institutions of Bengal and Bihar.

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The relationship of the spread and institutionalisation of English education with Indian nationalism has been studied extensively. Anil Seal, for example, has written about Indian ‘nationalism’ as the work of a tiny elite reared in the British educational institutions set up in India.125 This line of thought has come under serious criticism from subsequent scholars like Bipan Chandra who claimed that ‘the conflict of interest and ideology between the colonisers and the “Indian people” was the most important conflict of British India.’126 Contrary to Seal’s position, Chandra viewed nationalism ‘as a regenerative force, as the antithesis of colonialism, something that united and produced an ‘Indian people’ by mobilising them for struggle against the British.’127 Years later, Ranajit Guha dismissed both the approaches claiming that there was no unitary nation to ‘speak for’ and questioned the practices through which an official nationalism emerged that claimed to represent such a unitary nation.128 From the very beginning, the subaltern’s stance on nationalism was critical of the official or statist nationalism and its attendant historiography.129 The relationship between education and nationalism has remained unchallenged, even if its effects within undemocratic structures of domination and subordination are still open to debate.

The growth of Indian nationalism was stimulated by a formal training of Indians in the liberal doctrines of Western thought, which made British rule appear unjust.130 This line of argument is demonstrated by David Kopf’s analysis of Bengal which suggests that if a heightened sense of national consciousness emerged among the Bengali elite, it was primarily to be attributed to the introduction of Western ideas and institutions.131 David Washbrook, conversely, suggests that in cultural terms British rule may well have caused Indian society to become more traditional. The caste system became more rigid, penetrating domains of Indian society and religion where it hardly had any influence before. It also fuelled revivalist Hindu and Muslim movements, as reactions to the threat of Christian proselytising, ‘making Indian society more overtly religious and sectarian

125 Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 126 See Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1984). 127 Ibid., 128 Ranajit Guha ed. Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 5-6 129 Dipesh Chakrabarty ‘Subaltern studies and Postcolonial Historiography’ Nepantla: Views from the South 1, No.1 (2000). 130 Vishvanathan (2015), 17 131 David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).

41 than prior to British rule.’132 This position is contrary to the widespread assumption of British observers that Indian culture was responsible for her society’s backwardness and that British rule was the only hope for enlightenment and advancement.133

Washbrook presents a strong counternarrative to the use of Indian society’s weakness as a justification for the civilising British rule that enjoyed support from liberal sympathizers of the empire, as he claimed that British rule probably ‘created, exacerbated or entrenched aspects of Indian society that the British considered as backward.’134 Partha Chatterjee’s account of Ram Mohan Roy’s135 life and rise to prominence points out the limitation of considering English education as the harbinger of progress in India that gave birth to leaders of socio-political reforms. In fact, he argues that Ram Mohan’s critique of religion and his own unorthodox doctrines could have emerged from within ‘a discursive space of scholarly debate that was available in India at the turn of the nineteenth century and was not shaped by the forces of colonial education.’136

More recently, scholars have understood liberal imperialism as a ‘historical constellation’ in which conceptualisations of moral universalism and cultural diversity ought to be seen as evolving in response to a changing set of imperial dilemmas.’137 A discussion of the existing literature shows that the subject of education at the level of debate produced conflicting points of view, to which there was no easy solution. However, the need for reforming education was felt even in those quarters which benefitted from the spread of English education. The introduction of educational reforms found expression in the numerous endeavours that began in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Movements to reform education in India

132 David Washbrook, ‘India 1818-1860’ in Andrew Porter ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 397 133 See Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 19 134 Ibid., 135 Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833) was the founder of the Brahmo Sabha, a precursor of the Brahmo Samaj which was a Hindu religious reform movement professing the worship of a formless God. 136 Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire History of a Global Practice of Power (Oxford and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 140 137 See Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2010), 8

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Most educational initiatives that came as a response to the government-sponsored ones were aimed at reforming society and realigning it with the liberal idea of progress. They spanned across India and emphasised the strengthening of indigenous systems of education with vernaculars to be used as the mode of instruction. Important among them were the initiatives taken by Jotirao Phule138 in Maharashtra to promote mass education of the lower classes. Phule founded a school for girls in 1848 followed by a school for ‘untouchable’ boys. The Prarthana Samaj, established in 1870, in Poona, offered night classes for lower-caste workers and women. M.G. Ranade,139 a prominent leader of the national movement was an important member of the Prarthana Samaj, and participated in its educational activities. Although it was modelled on the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj never detached itself from the older norms, social customs, and the Hindu elements of Brahmoism.140 It is interesting to note that both Prarthana Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, have ‘samaj’141 as their core aim, suggesting that their endeavours to reform education were ultimately tied to a certain vision of society that they were working towards.

Some initiatives propounded a certain ideal of Arya or Hindu life as the end-goal of their educational mission. Mrs Annie Besant’s142 efforts at educational reforms took shape with her arrival in Madras in 1882 and culminated in the founding of the Central Hindu College at Benaras. Modelled on Aryan virtues, the goal of her educational philosophy was to ‘make the Man a good Citizen of a free and spiritual Commonwealth of Humanity.’143 This method embraced the practices of self-reliance, reverence, freedom, justice and courtesy, moderation, calmness and gentleness.144 At the same time, the gurukul education found a foothold in rural Punjab. From 1897

138 Jyotirao Govindrao Phule (1827-1890) was a social reformer from Maharashtra. His worked for the upliftment of women and backward castes by educating them and founded the Satyasodhak Samaj (Society of Truth Seekers) in 1873. 139 Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901) was an Indian scholar and social reformer hailing from the Bombay Presidency of British India. He was one of the founding members of the Indian National Congress that was established in 1885. 140 See J.N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (Macmillan, 1915). 141 The term samaj translates into society. 142 Annie Besant was a British socialist and theosophist who came to India in 1882. She was involved with the Indian National Congress and a strong supporter of India’s self-rule. 143 Annie Besant, India: Bond or Free?, 129. Cited in Catherine Wessinger, Annie Besant and Progressive Messianism (Lewiston: New York, Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 223 144 For details see Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

43 onwards Shraddhanand145 declared that it was only through a re-establishment of the ideal stages of life enunciated in the Vedas that the caste society could be formed, and that the gurukul was the sole catalyst for creating an ideal Arya society that would turn young students into ‘good citizens’ and ‘religious men’ on the basis of pure Vedic instruction.’146 Years before Tagore had set up the Santiniketan ashram, the Arya Samaj, a reformist Hindu group in Punjab, founded the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) High School in (1886) and the DAV College in Lahore (1889) and the Kanya Mahavidyaya was founded by Lala Devraj in Jalandhar (1890). The purpose of these institutions was to provide education that would combine ‘modern’ knowledge with that of Sanskrit and train students in the ‘true’ Vedic origins of Hinduism.147

In Bengal, the seeds of the movement for national education were sown in the contributions of the Ramakrishna Mathh and Mission that preached the Vedantic approach since its inception. The prominent figures associated with this initiative were Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita, two of his noted disciples. The Vedantic educational philosophy focused on the atman (a person’s inner soul), emphasising the importance of mass education and the relationship between the guru and his disciple. As Vivekananda considered India’s ruin to be rooted in ‘the monopolising of the whole education and intelligence of the land… among a handful of men,’ the remedy he proposed was ‘spreading education among the masses.’148 The process included the training of sanyasis (celibate renunciants) from among the educated classes at mathhs (institutions established for such purposes) who would then carry on the work in the villages. An Irish educator, Margaret Nobel149 who came to India in 1896, became a prominent disciple of Swami Vivekananda, started her own school for girls and was actively involved in the movement for national education, and at the same

145 Swami Shraddhanand (1856-1926) was an Arya Samaj missionary who founded the Gurukul at Kangri in 1902. The Gurukul adopted Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s idea of Brahmacharya (celibacy) and his advocacy of Vedic education. It was also used as a platform to promote fervent anti-colonial and anti-western views. 146 Nonica Dutta, ‘The ‘Subalternity’ of Education: Gurukuls in Rural South-East Punjab’ in Mushirul Hasan ed. Knowledge, Power and Politics Educational Institutions in India (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1998), 28-29 147 Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons The Western Education of Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2007), 163 148 Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) was the principal disciple of Sri Ramakrishna. He was an ardent supporter of Hindu revivalism and nationalism. From Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works Vol. IV (1966), 482. Cited in S.S. Mittal, The Social and Political Ideas of Swami Vivekananda (New Delhi: Metropolitan Book Co. Ltd., 1979), 153 149 Margaret Nobel was an Irish educator who became popularly known as Sister Nivedita, one of Swami Vivekananda’s noted disciples. She becomes an important reference in the context of the study as she had developed close ties with Rabindranath Tagore who had requested Sister Nivedita to instruct his daughters. Her works on education include: ‘The Educational Problem in India’ (February, 1904), ‘Educational Organisations conducted along Orthodox Lines: The Modern Brahmacharyasrama Movement’ (June- July, 1910), The Problem of Primary Education in India: Its Twofold Character (September, 1912).

44 time, imparted knowledge on Western educational philosophy. This constituted the backdrop to the publication of Rabindranath Tagore’s first essay on education in Bangla entitled Shikshar Herpher (Vicissitudes of Education) in 1892 which was read at a public meeting at Rajsahi, and stressed the importance of using vernacular languages as mediums of instruction in elementary education.150

The clamour for vernacular as a medium for instruction was not new. Debendranath Tagore’s Tattvabodhini Pathshala in 1840 aimed at ‘the education of the rising youths in the vernacular languages of the country.’151 Bankimchandra, as the founder and editor of Bangadarshan,152 repeatedly raised alarm over the growing gulf between the English-educated babu and the masses, but did not condemn the policy of increasing grants for primary education at the cost of fund cuts for some colleges in Bengal.153 In the 1890s, the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, Gooroo Dass Bandopadhyay, rallied for the cause of implementing mother tongue for instructing students in educational institutions and was supported by Prafullachandra Roy, Ramendrasundar Trivedi, and Rabindranath Tagore.154 It was also common for educational institutions to be financed by the contributions from wealthy landlords, industrialists, and academics. The Bengal National College, established by the National Council which had Aurobindo Ghose as its principal, is a case in point.155 Rabindranath too, in face of financial

150 The crux of the argument put forth in the essay by Tagore was that the colonial system of education which was based on mindless memorisation and non-assimilation did not facilitate the personality development of pupils. The cramming of information deprived the students of ‘joy’ which was central to the process of acquiring knowledge according to Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Shikshar Herpher’ (1299 B.S.) (1892). The essay was originally published in the Bengali Journal Sadhana edited by Sudhindranath Tagore. It was later published in the volume on education called Shiksha (Kolkata: Visva Bharati Grantha Bibhag, 1944), 7-20. Translations mine. The other essays referred to in the present chapter are taken from this volume. 151 Calcutta Courier (3 June, 1840). Quoted in Debendranath Tagore, Atmajivani (4th edition, 1962), 299 152 Bangadarshan was a Bengali literary magazine founded by Bankimchandra Chatterjee in 1872. It was published monthly. It was in circulation between 1872 and 1880 and later revived in 1901 with Rabindranath Tagore as its editor. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (also written as Chatterjee) (1838-1894) was an Indian poet, novelist, and journalist. He composed the song Bande Mataram which became the war-cry of the Swadeshi leaders of Bengal. 153 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, “Bangadarshaner Prothom Suchana” (1872) cited in Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 152 154 Ibid. 155 Cited in Krishna Kumar Political Agenda of Education (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 126. V.K. Rao observes that under the twenty men Executive Committee constituted for the National Council of Education for the years 1906-1908, many members subscribed Rupees 100 each a month for supporting the cause of National School and donations of about 10,000 Rupees were raised from local and other sources. See V.K. Rao, Higher Education (New Delhi: A.P.H Publishing Corporation, 2004), 160

45 difficulties, accepted an annual donation of a thousand Rupees for his ashram from Maharaja Radhakishore Manikya of Tripura.156

The Santiniketan ashram was, thus, not the first institute of its kind to propose and implement reforms in education, rooted as it was in the very sentiments of discontent with the colonial education that had fuelled other reform initiatives of the time. What makes Santiniketan stand out is Tagore’s insistence on it being an ashram. The ashram becomes an important analytical category as a concept invoked both by Tagore’s contemporaries and predecessors for different purposes at different points in time. For understanding the ideas and ideals that shaped the struggles and successes of Tagore’s ashram in its formative years, it is crucial to situate Santiniketan within the framework of the different conceptualisations of the ashram space.

The importance of the ashram in alternative education initiatives

Ajay Skaria points out the two conventional senses in which an ashram has been understood. In the first, it is regarded as a place where Hindu religious austerities are performed, and in the second, as a Hindu philosophy that organises individual life as a series of four stages or ashrams—those of the student (brahmacharya), the householder (grahastya), the renouncer (vanaprasthaya), and hermit (sanyas).157 According to Patrick Olivelle, the term Asrama is relatively new in Sanskrit vocabulary and derives its etymological origin from the word sram (toil), coined for expressing a novel idea or indicating an exceptional institution/phenomenon.158 He argues that the lack of evidence makes it difficult to ascertain whose residence or way of life was first characterised as ‘the ashram’ but more generally one can conclude that ashram did not refer to ascetic habitats or modes of life. On the contrary, it is a fundamentally Brahaminical concept that refers to the habitats and lifestyles dedicated to the principal obligations of a Brahmin householder.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan ashram was conceived of as an alternative to a ‘school’ under the colonial educational system. Tagore considered the school as a machine unfit for educating the

156 See Ajit K. Neogy, Twin Dreams of Rabindranath Tagore (2010), 16. In his work Rabindra Sannidhye Tripura (p.51) Bikash Chaudhuri claims that the Maharaja of Tripura had given an initial donation of 5000 Rupees for the ashram at the very beginning. This fact however could not be cross checked from Tagore’s biographies or historical accounts of the ashram. Radha Kishore Manikya ruled as the king of Tripura from 1896-1909. 157 See Ajay Skaria, ‘Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram’ South Atlantic Quarterly 101 No.4(Fall 2002): 956 158 Patrick Olivelle, The Asrama System The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8

46 human mind and proposed ashram education as a solution in which life plays a living role.159 The Santiniketan ashram originally established by Debendranath Tagore in 1863, was intended to be a place for spiritual retreat and contemplative solitude. Rabindranath later revived the ashram by initiating an educational institution at Santiniketan with a group of boys.160 During the early 1900s, the modern ashram schools, inspired by the ashram or hermitage schools of ancient India, reappeared outside the mainstream educational system introduced by the British. The earlier schools had once functioned as great intellectual and spiritual centres while serving as the accepted mode of education for many centuries. Their modern counterparts were founded to encourage a renewed appreciation for the Indian heritage and world view.161 The most illustrious example of the trend that signified the reappearance of the ashram were the Arya Samaj gurukuls that aimed to re-establish the ideal stages of life enunciated in the Vedas. As mentioned above, the Gurukul was the sole catalyst for creating an ideal Arya society that would turn young students into ‘good citizens’ and ‘religious men’ on the basis of pure Vedic instruction.’162 However, most ashrams in modern India were a spontaneous community of seekers or disciples gathered around a spiritual leader called ‘guru’ who pointed the way to salvation.163

In Bengal, the contemporary ashrams appeared as a part of the neo-Hindu reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and most of these movements were associated with charismatic leaders or gurus who wielded considerable authority over their followers.164 Among the spiritual leaders of the time were Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), his disciple Swami

159 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Ashramer Shiksha’ (1936) in Shiksha (1944), 245. Translations mine. 160 Rathindranath Tagore (Rabindranath’s son), Gourgobinda Gupta, Premkumar Gupta, Ashok Kumar Gupta and Sudhir Chandra Nun to be the first batch of students at Santiniketan. The names of the students appear in Alokenath Sensarma’s piece entitled, ‘Unfulfilled Dream: Tagore’s Model for School Education still Relevant?’ in The Statesman (New Delhi, September 2001). These names also appear in Prasanta Kumar Pal, Rabijibani vol 5.(Kolkata; Ananda Publishers, 1988), 43 161 See Gita Wijesinghe, ‘Indian Philosophy as a Means for Understanding Modern Ashram Schools,’ Comparative Education 23, No. 2 (1987): 237. Other scholars endorsing this view are Bhagwan Dayal, The Development of Modern Indian Education (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1955), Humayun Kabir, Education in New India (New York: Harper, 1955) and Susan Rudolph and Lloyd Rudolph, (Cambridge, Massachusets, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1972) 162 Nonica Dutta, ‘The ‘Subalternity’ of Education: Gurukuls in Rural South-East Punjab’ in Mushirul Hasan ed. Knowledge, Power and Politics Educational Institutions in India (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1998), 28-29 163 Helen Ralston, ‘The Conception of Authority in Christian Ashram Movement’ Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religion 67, No. 1(1989): 54. Emphasis mine. This conception of ashram draws from the asrama theory of Sanskrit writers referring to a way of life characterized by meditation asceticism and strenuous spiritual endeavour in all its stages. 164 See Helen Ralston, (1989): 57

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Vivekananda (1862-1902), Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), Vinoba Bhave (1895-1981), and Father Bere Griffiths (1907-1993).165

Pandya observes that, within the Hindu inspired faith movements, the ashrams are typically headed by teachers or gurus whose goal is to fulfil the earthly missions through the setting up of institutional organisations. Inspired by a charismatic leader, the ashram’s focal point is the ‘persuasion of the perfectibility of the human nature in the here and now.’166 The issue of according subordinate positions to members at the Aurobindo ashram did not produce much friction as sadhaks (disciples) felt a personal connection with the gurus and accepted the principles of subordination and cooperation for learning and continuing the ashram’s work.167 Gandhi, however, refused to accept the title of ‘guru’ when he founded his first ashram at Ahmedabad in 1915 which was subsequently moved to Sabarmati, and years later, in 1932, Satyagraha ashram at Sevagram. Rabindranath Tagore was referred to as Gurudev, primarily for his work at Santiniketan. He placed the guru at the very heart of ashram life. In the ashram’s constitution, he proclaimed the establishment of a spiritual relationship between the guru and the disciple to be the ashram’s prime objective.168 At the Santiniketan ashram, the guru was not an instrument for transmitting knowledge mechanically but a creative human whose own life’s purpose was tied to the process of activating the minds of pupils. Only when the guru was in tune with the childish inquisitiveness of his pupil, could the latter fearlessly approach him.169 In Tagore’s view, the schoolmaster ‘has his own purpose. He wants to mould the child’s mind according to the ready-made doctrines and

165 See H. Ralston (1989): 58 Kraig Klaudt mentions that Father Bere Griffith had founded numerous Christian ashrams in India. See Kraig Klaudt, ‘The Ashram as a model for Theological Education’ Theological Education 34 No. 1 (1997): 26 166 See Samta Pandya (2013): 389-412. Other important studies on the topic are David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), R.C. Majumdar, Swami Vivekananda: A Historical Review (Calcutta: General Printers and Publishers, 1965), P. Parameswaran, Karma yoga as discussed by Swami Dayananda Saraswati (Chennai: Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan Trust, 2004). 167 Peter Heehs, ‘Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram, 1910–2010: An Unfinished History’, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, No. 1 (August, 2015): 65-86 168 Rabindranath Tagore’s letter to Kunjalal Ghosh in Chhithipatra Vol. 13(Kolkata: Visva Bharati Grantha Bibhag, 1992), 164. Translations mine. 169 Rabindranath Tagore, Ashramer Roop o Bikash (1936), Translations mine.

48 remove from the child’s world everything that he thinks will go against his purpose.’170 Hence, the gurus at Tagore’s ashram were the antidotes to the schoolmasters in government schools.

The gurus associated with Hindu-informed faith movements were leaders whose charismatic influence were generally hinged on three principles: protégé identification, apostolic endeavours and sect formation, and the foundation of sacred geographies and charisma concretization through historicity. These teachers whose charisma is ‘located’ and ‘established’ in the ashram premises act as the fulcrum through which the migration and transportation of charisma take place.171 For instance, the Vivekanada Kendra172 used the popularity of Swami Vivekananda as a spiritual leader to unapologetically embrace the stance of Hindu Nationalism. The gurus that Tagore envisaged as teaching in his ashram, stood in contrast to the gurus discussed above as they did not claim to be repositories of any prodigal or scriptural authority. Since Tagore’s conception of a guru was distinct, and as he played the role of Gurudev at Santiniketan, a key question that emerges is: how did the guru–pupil relations at Tagore’s ashram inform its day to day working. I discuss this in detail in Chapters III and IV.

The ashrams discussed so far represent an effort to revive the ethical and religious life of the Indian people under the aegis of leaders known as gurus (in most cases), to provide an alternative to the colonial system of education. Yet, the different purposes for which ‘the ashram’ was invoked at different times made it an adaptable, as well as a popular category during the nationalist struggle. The popularity of the ashram as a concept makes it imperative to understand the role it played in nationalist politics, especially its implications for the politics of nation-building. According to Sati Kumar Chatterji, Keshub Chandra Sen’s Bharat Ashram built in 1872, was the ‘first nation building endeavour in India’ where the norms of family life of modern India were formed along lines of the Brahmo faith. While the British rule had united India politically under one government, Keshub sought to integrate India socially and morally. To infuse a sense of one nationality in the

170 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Schoolmaster’ (1924) in Sisir Kumar Das ed. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore Volume III:A Miscellany (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), 505 171 See Samta Pandya (2013): 394 172 The Vivekananda Kendra was founded in January, 1972 by Eknath Ranade to preach the teachings of Swami Vivekananda. Studies on the Kendra are: G. Beckerlegge, ‘Saffron and Seva: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s Appropriation of Swami Vivekananda’. In A. Copley ed. Hinduism in Public and Private (Oxford University Press, 2004), 31–65. Samta Pandya, ‘The Vivekananda Kendra in India: Its ideological translations and a critique of its social service’ Critical Research on Religion 2, No. 2(2014): 116–133

49 people of India, he organised relief work, female emancipation, mass uplift, and educational reforms.173 The new community of Keshub’s ashram symbolised the future Indian society where men and women learnt to live together freely in a dignified and ethical manner.174 The political relevance of the ashram can be gauged through a two-pronged strategy. Firstly, by understanding how the aspect of the ‘social’ versus the ‘political’ played out in the nationalist imagination, and secondly, by studying in detail some of the important ashrams and locating their activities in relation to this division between the social and political.

Locating ‘the ashram’ within the debate of the ‘social’ versus the ‘political’

The most pressing question faced by the Indian nationalist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was whether social reforms should precede political reforms or vice versa. The moderate founders of the Indian National Congress (INC) resolved the issue by assigning political reform to the national arena for public discussion and recommendation and social reform to the local arena for private action.175 This mechanism equates the political with the national and public while connecting the social with the local and private. The shared public space was neutral and politically salient whereas the private was insular and particular in its orientation with no political relevance.176 In this scheme, the private consisted of the home, with its ritual and family traditions, maintained especially by women living within the walls and courtyards of mansions; and the public world consisted of the world outside which continued its march towards modernisation.177 This demarcation had a psychological dimension too, where the contrast between the public and private manifested in the minds of reformers and found articulation in the ranks of political leadership that accorded primacy to political reforms over social issues. For instance, Tilak supported Aurobindo Ghose who maintained that ‘the political movement could not afford to cut itself off from the great mass of the nation or split itself up into warring factions by a premature association of the social reform question with politics.’178

173 See Sati Kumar Chatterji, The Bharat Ashram First Nation Building Endeavour in India (Calcutta: Nava Vidhan Trust, 1979). 174 Ibid. 175 See Charles H. Heimsath, ‘Social versus Political Reform’ in Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 205-6 176 Skaria (2002): 956 177 Mario Prayer, ‘The Gandhians of Bengal Nationalism, Social Reconstruction and Cultural Orientations 1920- 1942’ Rivista Degli Studi Orientali 74, No. 1-2(2001): 37 178 Ghose’s “Appreciation” in Tilak: His Writings and Speeches, 14-15. Cited in Heimsath (1964), 207

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The political critique of the social reform movement was that the social reformers made themselves abettors of British interests. The latter favoured the involvement of the nationalists in social reform endeavours in which Indians would vent their dissatisfaction against the social order rather than criticising the government’s political abuses.179 Politics, for many reformers, meant the seeking of gifts from the rulers, whereas social reform meant that Indians were assuming responsibility for their own advancement.180 The ‘political gifts’ sought by Indian liberals who wanted representation in government service, on grand juries, and on elective bodies as identified by C. A. Bayly were the following: demand for a free press, freedom of assembly, and public comment accepting broadly the principle of individual property rights subject to various degrees of protection from the masses from economic exploitation.181

Writing about third world twentieth-century nationalisms, Chatterjee argues that the idea of nation- ness had become inseparable from political consciousness and the nationalist discourse was primarily concerned with the replacement of the structure of colonial power with an alternative nationalist one.182 The social reform movements highlighted issues pertaining to reforms in marriage expenditures, the prohibition of polygamy, using liquor only for medicinal purposes, promoting female education, and a rise in the ages of marriage for both girls and boys.183

The fluidity of the distinctions between social and political, public and private, become apparent as major public figures who were engaged in the search for just and meaningful social practices

179 Ibid., 206 180 Heimsath (1964), 219 181 C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1 182 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). While this is one way of looking at the nation and nationalism, the other prominent works on the subject are: Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press, 1983), Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 1991), Winichakul Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), Manu Goswami, ‘From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy and Territory in South Asia, 1870-1907’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, No.4 (October, 1998): 609-636. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation Mapping Mother India. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 183 Charles Heimsath’s study on the local reform movements in Madras, Bombay and Bengal has shown that there was a pattern to be noted in ways in which the question of social reform was addressed. They concentrated on questions relating to marriage, female education, changes in personal behavior and the like. They were either voluntary or caste based organizations or religious reform bodies known as Samajes. See ‘The Local Social Reform Movements In Bombay, Madras, And Bengal’ in Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964)

51 often affected the public sphere most profoundly by privately performing some acts of deviation like marrying a widow, crossing the ocean, and ignoring the family’s conventional rules. The social reformers alluded to the feminist position ‘the personal is political.’184 The distinction becomes improbable while analysing the working of the various ashrams. For one, these ashrams were rooted in the logic of social reform as seen in the cases of the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj in the Northern Provinces, and the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal. Also, they used education as a major vehicle for bringing about social change such as education for women, and labouring classes as well as for those excluded from the English education system. However, these ashrams were also avenues for forging some sort of ‘collective’, or ‘nation’, necessitating gravitation towards the political terrain. It is also worth reiterating that Keshub’s Bharat Ashram was considered a nation- building endeavour. Aurobindo Ghose, conceived of the prison as an ashram which was a befitting place for the birth of a radically free political subject. For Ghose, the prison—primarily a space for meting out punishment—became a realm of spiritual sovereignty for the individual revolutionary to redeem the collective.185 The Aurobindo ashram was eponymous of the ashram that was at the heart of Bankim’s Anandamath (1882), concealed in the depths of a dense forest. It is in this womb-like space that the sanyasis (ascetics) worship the goddess-as-Motherland, plan their resistance and discipline themselves in preparation for battle. Within the ashram, the ascetic insurgent prepares to launch a rebellion against tyrannical foreign misrule combining the spiritual and the political in a fantasy—a way that the ‘effeminate Bengali’ gets magically converted into an ascetic warrior, proudly obsessed with displaying his masculinity. Bankim’s ‘warriors’ had renounced all contact with their wife and children until the ‘glory day of national independence.’ To ‘exorcise their shameful legacy of servile impotence,’ they ‘devoted themselves to the abstract symbol of the motherland, which they invented through their deeds of derring-do.’186 The Aurobindo ashram founded in 1910 at Pondicherry was devoted to the practice of yoga and spiritual life, which Aurobindo regarded as a ‘laboratory’ for creating such ‘men for the new

184 See Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, ‘The Coffee House and the Ashram: Gandhi, Civil Society and Public Spheres’ Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics (June 2003): 8 ‘The Personal is Political’ is the title of an article by Carol Hanisch, first published in 1970 in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation. 185 See Alex Wolfers, ‘Born like Krishna in the Prison-House: Revolutionary Asceticism in the Political Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose’ Journal of South Asian Studies 39, Issue 3(2016): 525-45 186 Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 284

52 age.’187 Aurobindo did not play the role of a disciplinary guru at the ashram and maintained that the practice of yoga was primarily an individual endeavour which also had a community dimension. The ashram was to be a place where new forms of individual and collective life could be tried and perfected.188

The ashram set up by Gandhi in 1917, has been interpreted by scholars in two different ways. Skaria argues that, for Gandhi, the ashram became the ground to voice his criticism against liberal modernity and launch his alternative politics, dedicated to eliminating what he thought were defects in the national life.189 The Rudolphs claim that Gandhi used the ashram as a political vehicle to bring together uneducated village folk in a public space of an ashram to contend with the likes of other public spaces, such as the coffee houses which emerged as an arena for the English educated urban gentlemen to discuss political concerns. While English became the official language and printed word the means of communication for the literate elite, Gandhi’s ashram inculcated in its inhabitants, a notion of the nation through the performative modes of enacting boycotts, marches, spinning etc. This defined a commitment to political goals and the agenda for its realisation.190 Gandhi’s ashram dedicated itself to self-sufficiency and a partial withdrawal from society in preparation for a more complete performance in which the members of the ashram publicly enact a ‘standard for society.’191

The Ramakrishna Mathh and Mission used the concept of an ashram to popularise the idea of seva, a devotional service to humanity. Belonging to the Hindu reformist movements of the time, the Mission embodied a strand of renunciation and activism. The purpose of the mission was carried forward by Swami Vivekananda, following the teachings of his guru, Sri Ramakrishna192. Gwilym Beckerlegge observes:

187 From the Autobiographical Notes of Aurobindo, cited in Peter Heehs, ‘Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram, 1910– 2010: An Unfinished History’ Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, No. 1 (August, 2015): 69 188 Ibid. 189 See Ajay Skaria, ‘Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram’ South Atlantic Quarterly 101 No.4(Fall 2002): 955-986 190 For a detailed discussion see Sussane H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph ‘The Coffee House and the Ashram Gandhi, Civil Society and Public Spheres’ in Carolyn M. Elliot ed. Civil Society and Democracy A Reader (New Delhi: OUP, 2003) 191 Ibid. 192 Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) was a religious leader of nineteenth century Bengal. He was known for his devotion to goddess Kali and practiced tantric traditions.

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Drawing upon certain utterances of his guru, Sri Ramakrishna (c. 1836–1886), Vivekananda anchored this discipline in a new interpretation of Hindu ethical responsibility and widened the range of its practical expressions. The assignment of responsibility for philanthropic activity to all sectors of Hindu society, including sannyasis, suggested a considerable re-formulation of ideas about the nature and place of renunciation within the religious life.193 A tenet of the Hindu tradition, popular among the sanyasis in general, was asceticism which meant abandoning family life in order to concentrate on religious responsibilities. There was an inherent necessity of withdrawal from active social involvement and from the pursuit of sensual and materialistic pleasures for the pursuit of one’s religious calling. This ideal has exerted considerable influence even upon those who have not adopted such practices.194

Before the Santiniketan Brahmacharyasram of 1901, Debendranath Tagore had established an ashram at Santiniketan, outlining its purpose in the Trust Deed of 1888. The Deed declared that the ashram was primarily to be a place of worshipping the formless God and a platform for the discussion of religious ideas and practices. However, any mode of idol worship was to be refrained from. To cultivate the ethos of religiosity an annual mela was to be planned for and organised by the trustees. Inappropriate indulgence in amusement was also strictly forbidden.195 Rabindranath’s conception of the ashram is contained in the essay ‘Dharmashiksha’ which suggests that the ashram was similar to a ‘public arena’ with its ‘door open for everyone,’ even the ‘unpleasant entities’ who could present their ‘unmasked selves,’ the ‘pressures of life,’ the ‘exuberance of business,’ the ‘excesses of desires’, and the ‘pride of achievements.’ This is what constituted its essence.196 He further adds:

Where the beauty of the world of nature in its simplicity attains a yogic harmony with the purity of the efforts of the human mind, where nature and human soul lives in a selfless union—that is a true ashram.197

193 Gwilym Beckerlegge, ‘Iconographic representations of renunciation and activism in the Ramakrishna mathh and mission and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’ Journal of Contemporary Religion 19 No. 1(2004): 48 Although the reformist strand of Hinduism under Ramakrishna was not institutionally known as ‘the ashram’ so to speak, (it was termed as Mathh) but its reference here becomes important as it adheres to the tenet of practicing brahmacharya as a part of its spiritual programme. Moreover, we shall see later in the chapter how Tagore differentiates himself from the ritual practices of such monistic traditions. 194 See Ibid,. 195 Cited in Sri Yogesh Chandra Bagal, Debendranath Tagore 1817-1905 (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 1350 B.S.), 77. Translations mine. 196 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Dharmashiksha’ (1911) published in Shiksha (Visva Bharati: 1944), 71. Translations mine. 197 Ibid.,

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Rabindranath and Debendranath conceptualised the ashram differently. Hirendranath Dutta, who was closely associated with Santiniketan, observes that under the aegis of Rabindranath, the ashram that was set up by Debendranath was converted from an arena of spiritual retreat and seclusion to an educational initiative where the ashram life metamorphosed into a social one.198 The social characteristic of the ashram that Dutta identified implies an enterprise meant for a wider group—a collective.

What emerges from the discussion of ‘the ashram’ in its various forms (as an institution or space) and different appropriations is that it was an arena of mediating a relationship between the individual and the collective. This applies from Keshub’s individual initiative to integrate India socially and morally to Aurobindo Ghose’s ashram located in the site of a prison where the individual revolutionary could exercise spiritual sovereignty to redeem the collective. Even as Ramakrishna Mission proposed the idea of retreat from active social and family life, their idea of seva as a devotional service to humanity anticipated a collective. The Vivekananda Kendra uses the philosophy of spiritualism (or Hindu spiritualism) and search for man’s forgotten soul as a metaphor for discovering Bharat Mata or motherland (spirit of collective self or nation described as an extension of the individual self).199 Gandhi’s Satyagraha ashram also emerged as a realm for mobilising the rural folks through the performative practices of day to day life facilitating the emergence of a collective—a nation.

Vinoba Bhave joined Gandhi’s initiative and carried on the work along similar lines with the hope of redeeming the village (gram swaraj).200 Sartori notes that the Hindu social institutions, as well as the hierarchies of the guru-disciple relationship, were instances of the concrete realisation of the abstract—the mediating institutional forms that tied the individual to the nation’s collective history of objectification.201

198 Hirendranath Dutta, Santiniketan er Ek Yug (Kolkata: Visva Bharati Grantha Bibhag, 1387 B.S. {1980}), 2 Translations mine. The Visva Bharati Bulletin No 1. Part 1(May 1924), records that Hirendranath Dutta was the Treasurer at Santiniketan. The tenure of his service is however, not known. 199 Samta Pandya, ‘Charisma, Routinisation, and Institution Building: Hindu-Inspired Faith Movements in Contemporary India’ Sociological Bulletin 62, No. 3 (September – December 2013): 389-412 200 See Ishwar C. Harris, ‘Sarvodaya in Crisis: The Gandhian Movement in India Today’ Asian Survey 27, No. 9 (September, 1987): 1036-1052 201 Andrew Sartori records his observation in the article titled ‘The Categorical Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal, 1904-1908’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle-East 23, No. 1&2(2003):

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Civil society organisations, such as coffee houses, which emerged separate from the sphere of house and home, were marked by the opposition between private and public. They considered the private realm of personal interests as disruptive to the public interest and skewed toward the intelligentsia, who were literate and grounded in rationalist forms of deliberation. These organisations implicitly excluded the plebeians and the forces of residual inherited identities such as ethnicity and religion which were seen to dwell in the arena of private interest. The ashram transgressed almost all of these requirements to include illiterate plebeians as well as literate public intellectuals. It also assumed and accepted not only the relevance but co-existence of inherited identities—such as ethnicity and religion—both in public and private spaces, and merged the home and the private with the political or public.202

Tagore’s ashram occupies a curious position within this framework. Emerging out of a wider movement of reforming education, reviving the traditional tol (Sanskrit school) model as an alternative suited to the need of the present times, it represented the trend of active social reform. However, despite anticipating a certain community life, Tagore’s conception of the collective was not commensurate with the idea of ‘a nation.’ Being an experimental mechanism of implementing a system of education where ‘the individual’s uniqueness’ could be ‘harmonised with the universality of knowledge,’203 Tagore’s ashram poses these pertinent questions: what were the tenets of the collective that Tagore envisaged? How was it related to the politics of the time? These questions are critical for the present study and I address them in Chapters II and III.

What emerges from the discussion in the above section is that the English-educated Indians spearheading the social reform movements or leading political agitations, used education as a means to their end. Since education’s role in formulating the broader rejection of colonial rule is critical, it is useful to understand the educational reforms which reinforce the otherwise fluid (as mentioned above) distance of the social from the political. As the KMV and The Dawn Society broadly typify education’s close association with social reform and politics and constitute a crucial

282. The author’s observation was made in lieu of a reading of Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal’s verses as they appeared in Bande Mataram (pp.536-37) and Character Sketches (pp.67-76) respectively. 202 Rudolph and Rudolph (2003), 5 203 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Sister Nivedita’ translated by Kshitis Roy and Krishna Kripalani. Sister Nivedita passed away on 13th October, 1911. Tagore’s tribute to her was published in Prabasi a month later.

56 network of initiatives that Santiniketan was a part of, it becomes necessary to discuss each of them in some detail.

The Kanya Mahavidyalaya (KMV) and The Dawn Society in comparison with Santiniketan

As the prototypes of reform initiatives which symbolised aspects of differences between the social and political, I discuss the curriculum, the intent, and functioning of The Kanya Mahavidyay, Jalandhar, and the Dawn Society in Bengal as examples occupying each end of the spectrum. This exercise serves as the effective springboard for positioning Tagore’s ashram and analysing the Santiniketan experiment to understand its distinctiveness.

The Kanya Mahavidyalay was established in Jalandhar in 1890 under the aegis of Lala Devraj.204 The curriculum was devised by him in a way that suited the requirements of everyday life of girls. He composed textbooks for this purpose and Arya Bhasha (purified Hindi which was the language of Aryas) was the medium of instruction at the KMV. Lala Devraj was awarded a sum of two hundred Rupees for his contribution to children’s literature and in 1897 the Mahavidyalay also began publishing a magazine called Panchal Pandita, disseminating the message of women’s education throughout Punjab. Its title page described it as ‘A monthly magazine of sixteen pages Hindi and four pages English . . . solely devoted to the interests of Indian women.’ It served ‘as a handy periodical for educated ladies and young students.’205 The Panchal Pandita (June, 1900) reported that the Mahavidyalay was fairly successful in fulfilling its original objectives: ‘[O]f furnishing good reading matter to our sisters, cultivating their mental faculties by... widening their interests by giving them a view of the world outside the closed zenanas, and of infusing in them liberal sympathies and elevating ideas.’206 However, the curricula of the KMV reveals its myopic vision as a vehicle to educate women when its goal ultimately was the betterment of the lives of men and removing the social ills that uneducated women were apparently responsible for. It assumed that if daughters began to be educated, there would be no child widows and hence no need for women to stray and ‘corrupt men.’ If women married young, before they were fit to be

204 Lala Devraj was born on the 3rd of March in 1860 to the well-known Sindhi family of Jalandhar. As an Arya Samajist, he was the prime architect behind the Kanya Mahavidyalay. 205 See ‘Lala Devraj’ in Satyadev Vidyalankar Kanya Mahavidyalay Prabandh Kritra Sabha (Jalandhar City, 1937), 111-12. Kiswar (1986): WS12, informs that the Panchal Pandita was in the later years known as Jalvid Sakha meaning friend of the Jalandhar school. 206 Panchal Pandita, June (1900), 22. Cited in Kishwar (1986): WS-12

57 mothers, they were likely to ruin their own health as well as that of succeeding generations.207 The texts by Devraj, ‘Pathshala ki Kanya’ (Girls of the school) and other books by him had several chapters on household duties, punctuality, cleanliness, and women’s dress. For example, Stri Darpan (Mirror of women) served as a housewife’s guide focusing on household management. Stri Dharma Niti (women’s duties) intended to equip girls with the Arya Samaj ideology regarding their ‘special’ role as women in family and society. In fact, considerable attention was paid to moral instruction and hymns and bhajans (chants) were specially prepared by Devraj and others, for the girls who were expected to be well versed in the ‘principles of Arya Samaj’ and ‘to be familiar with Manusmriti, the Gita, and a smattering of the Vedas by the time they reached class ten.’208 The practice of rituals was incorporated in the curriculum where girls were taught the performance of havan (purification ritual) from class four and upwards. The intention behind this was to treat women as potential Ved Pracharikas (propagating the knowledge of the Vedas) of the future, surpassing the goal of training them to become good mothers.

The Dawn Society (1902) which evolved into the National Council of Education (1906) in Bengal, had its roots in a much earlier experiment i.e. the Bhagwat Chatushpathi set up by Satish Chandra Mukherjee in 1895. The Dawn Society was a response to the inadequacy of the University education which had failed to equip students with industrial and technical training needed for India’s economic development.209 The founder articulated his ideas in the pages of The Dawn, an English journal which operated as the mouthpiece of the Chatushpathi, in the phase following its inception.210 Housed in South Calcutta, the educational ideals of the Society were modelled along the ancient Indian tols with the difference that while the tols specialised in imparting spiritual knowledge, the chatushpathi (traditional village school) also emphasised the learning of Western sciences and philosophy and conducted activities that were suited for the modern industrial age. However, these activities were subordinated to the spiritual and religious training aimed primarily, at two kinds of students. Firstly, those who wanted to become teachers in Hindu religion and

207 Ibid., WS-15 208 Ibid., 209 A history of the evolution of The Dawn and its various stages have been studied in great detail by Haridas and Uma Mukherjee in their work, The Origins of The National Education Movement 1905-1910 (Calcutta: Jadavpur University, 1957). 210 The Dawn was a journal under the editorship of Satish Chandra Mukherjee. It was in circulation since 1897 and initially operated as the mouthpiece of the Chatushpathi. See ibid., 198. With the foundation of the Dawn Society the journal came to be renamed as The Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine since 1904 and remained in circulation till 1913.

58 secondly for those who studied for their own spiritual culture. It was conceived as a residential institute, where education would be free of charge and the guru (teacher) would reside with his pupils, monitoring their daily lives through discipline and regulation.

Before the close of the nineteenth century, the Bhagwat Chatushpathi became a residential academy with Pandit Durgacharan as the Acharya.211 The Dawn Society was founded by Satish Chandra Mukherjee and held its first meeting at the Metropolitan Institution under the chairmanship of Gooroo Dass Banerjee.212 The December 1902 issue of The Dawn reported Nagendranath Ghosh as its President and Satish Chandra Mukherjee as the General Secretary. The teaching curricula of the Society comprised two weekly classes—a General Training Class and a Moral and Religious Training Class. The former was held on every Sunday between 4.30 and 5.30 PM, in which Satish Chandra delivered lectures in English on various subjects including Indian religion, philosophy, literature and history, emphasising the importance of moral and spiritual values as the basis of a good creative life. The moral and religious training classes were conducted on Fridays between 5.30 PM and 6.30 PM in Bangla by Pandit Nilkantha Goswami who lectured on the Gita (sacred book of Hindus).213 Contrary to the KMV which catered to the education of female students, the students affiliated to Dawn and contributors to its magazine were men. Among the recognised members were Ganapati Roy, Girija Prasanna Sanyal, Jatindra Narayan Ghose, Sirish Chandra De, Rabindra Narayan Ghose, and Benoy Kumar Sarkar. Upendranath Ghosal was an ordinary member.214

The curriculum of The Dawn Society was designed to ‘impart religious and moral instruction to the college students’ an approach that was uncommon at the time. The Society took upon itself ‘this responsibility’, which had ‘character-building as the most important ideology.’215 The Dawn Society’s education focused on the training of students as patriots and workers for the cause of the country, intense nationalism being the basis of its foundation. An illustration from the magazine’s

211 Ibid., 197 212 Cited in Benoy Sarkarer Baithake 2nd Edition, Vol.1 (1944), 261 213 Evidences of these can be found in The Dawn (September, 1903), 63. Benoy Sarkar, also records the experiences of classes under Pandit Goswami. See Benoy Sarkarer Baithake (Calcutta: 1942), 262 214 The number of ‘Recognised Members’ in 1905 was twenty and there were sixteen ‘Ordinary Members.’ Members were classified as ‘Recognised’ and ‘Ordinary’ depending upon their regularity of attendance as well as the amount and quality of work done by them in the Society. See Mukherjee (1957), 276-300 215 Ibid., 255

59 opening page shows The Society’s vision about teaching students to love their country. The first page of the January 1907 edition of the Dawn Magazine read:

QUESTION How can Indian students increase their love for their country? ANSWER a) By increasing their stock of knowledge of India and Indians. b) By learning to act together for some common purposes useful to the country. c) By helping their countrymen in creating demand for their manufactures. d) By helping the cause of education on national lines.216 When this was the curriculum of the Dawn Society, its magazine had emerged as a ‘mighty mouthpiece of the Swadeshi movement in general and the movement for National Education in particular. About the Dawn’s significance in arousing national consciousness, The Madras Mail observed: ‘A man who knows nothing about India, and cares still less about her is sure to become a zealous patriot if he is an Indian, or an ardent admiring lover, if he is a foreigner, even after perusing one issue of this ably conducted magazine.’217 Through its curriculum and magazine which contained the ideas of education attuned to the programme of national regeneration the Dawn marked out its contribution to education reforms. As opposed to the Arya Samaj’s initiative that was moulded to suit the specific purpose of educating women, the Dawn remained committed to building a band of patriots who would serve the country.

Upon the introduction of English as an optional subject at the KMV, the Panchal Pandita reported that ‘Devraj was despoiling the Dharma of Stri Shiksha,’ by ‘again and again raising the question of trying to make men and women alike’ when as a matter of fact the essence of stri-dharma was to keep women sanitised from taking ‘part in political agitation.’218 The implicit suggestion in this excerpt is that the role of political agitation was a prerogative of men, an idea to which The Dawn catered to, (and from which the KMV carefully distanced itself), putting into sharp focus the apparent divide between social versus political reform within the nationalist leadership in India. Thus, one observes a difference between educational reform and the issue of reforming education for women. While on the one hand it was recognised that women’s education needed reform and

216 See The Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine (Calcutta: January 1907), 1 217 See, The Madras Mail (Madras: August 9, 1909). 218 Pandit Brij Nath, Sadharan Pracharak ‘Panchal Pandita and English’ (April 26, 1907).

60 had to be different from the colonial system, on the other hand, every attempt was made to keep women’s education distinct from the reform agenda of men’s education.

The similarity of these initiatives can be discerned from the fact that both Tagore and Satish Chandra were in favour of propagating an ideal Hindu life similar to the Arya Samaj’s educational initiative that focused on bringing into being an ideal Arya life. Satish Chandra was a believer in orthodox Hinduism and it is understandable that under his aegis The Dawn proclaimed thus: ‘as Hindus we propose to make a special study of Hindu life, thought, and faith in spirit and appreciation.’219 Similarly, Tagore wrote to Jagadish Chandra Bose in 1901in the following words: ‘I have been working hard to open a school at Santiniketan. The whole system will be just like that of the ancient resident guru-schools… If brahmacharya is not undertaken from childhood, we will never become ideal Hindus.’220 Sumit Sarkar notes that the Bolpur ashram of Tagore, as well as the Bhagwat Chatushpathi and a few other experiments in Bengal, were rooted in conserving the Indian educational values. He writes:

Debendranath’s Tattwabodhini Pathshala for Upanishadic training, the Hindu Hitarthi Vidyalaya set up in 1845 at his initiative to fight the Christian proselytizers, the National School of Nabagoplal Mitra in 1870, the City College and numerous schools established by the Brahmos in Calcutta and the mufassil during 1870s and 1880s, the first schools of the Ramakrishna Mission, Satish Chandra Mukherjee’s Bhagvat Chatushpathi (1895) giving some twenty scholars “a thorough training in Hindu thought, life and manners,”221 Rabindranath’s asrama near Bolpur (1901) – all these in varying ways had sought to preserve indigenous values in education.222 Another similarity observed in these experiments was the fact that they proposed to have residential educational institutes as an alternative for students who attended government schools. The Dawn Society, under the joint efforts of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay and Satish Chandra, started a mess (residential hostel) with three students: Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Radha Kumud Mukherjee, and Rabindranarayan Ghose at 16 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta.223 About the proposed foundation of the school at Santiniketan in 1901, the mouthpiece of the Nava Bidhan Samaj reported: ‘[A] boarding house will be opened and there shall be accommodation of 12 students

219 Dawn, March-May 1897. Cited in Sumit Sarkar (1973), 156 220 See ‘The Poet and his School’ in Santiniketan Vidyalaya 1901-2000 Centenary Keepsake (Patha Bhavan: Visva- Bharati, 2000), 42 221 ‘Third Report of the Bhagvad Chatushpathi’ Dawn, June 1899. Cited in Sumit Sarkar (1973). 222 Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 155 223 See Mukherjee (1957), 270

61 who would learn Sanskrit and Brahmacharya according to Vedic idea.’224 As far as the KMV was concerned, a hostel for girls and a home for widows were proposed to be founded in 1893 which were to be added to the existing primary school, and was in turn to be expanded into a high school (Kanya Mahavidyalay). These facts reveal that boarding facilities were a common feature in all the experiments discussed. Some form of religious instruction and ritualistic practices were also common in all the three experiments, but their intent, content, and purposes were different.

The primary difference of Tagore’s ashram from the Dawn Society and the KMV is that while the latter ones concentrated on text-based religious learning (predominantly from the Gita), Tagore proposed the idea of dharmashiksha, which combined meditative practices, sitting in silence, recitation of hymns, and prayers from the Upanishads. The second point of difference between these initiatives was their curriculum. The KMV’s curriculum was structured as a mechanism to train girls for their household duties and those of motherhood and The Dawn Society’s educational programme focused on making India economically and industrially developed and saw their students as the instruments, bringing about this change. While the former was designed to keep women away from the arena of politics, the latter concentrated on preparing and training men as patriots who would be intimately involved in the political unrest of the time. The curricular design of both these initiatives offered very limited scope of freedom to their students as they were bound by specific lessons and instructions. Contrary to these, Tagore’s educational mission aimed at ‘freedom’ for children where they found respite from conventions and specialisations. His educational philosophy rested on his resentment of having children confined to the structural sitting arrangements dictated by the desks and chairs. He did not favour lessons being arranged in rooms similar to cages and coffins fit for the dead, unconducive for the growth and development of young minds. As he puts it, ‘the cage is complex and costly, it is too much itself, excommunicating whatever lies outside.’225 Tagore made his differences with the Dawn Society quite clear in one of his speeches, where he urged the students and members of the Society not to

224 See Ajit K. Neogy, The Twin Dreams (2010), 1. The Nava Bidhan Samaj was the faction of the Brahmo Samaj and headed by Keshub Chandra Sen. The Unity and Minister was a mouthpiece of this body, from which the excerpt is taken (13 October, 1901). 225 C.F. Andrews citing Rabindranath Tagore in his ‘Old Memories of the Ashram’ Visva Bharati News (VBN), 7 No. 11 (May 1939).

62 spend their patriotic zeal and energy in exciting utterances but conserve them for more constructive enterprises.226

These differences provide the background to understanding the way in which Tagore’s educational philosophy accommodated questions of women’s education, worked out the differences between the social and political, addressed the notion of the collective and catered to the ideal of freedom. Tagore’s ideas on education, discussed next, deals with these aspects at some length.

Tagore’s ideas on education

It would be pertinent to recall here, what I highlighted in the Introduction, that Tagore’s ideas on education are not contained in a single piece of writing. Rather, they are scattered across essays, letters, lectures and travelogues spanning Tagore’s active years of writing and travel. It becomes the historian’s imperative, therefore, to analyse these texts closely to understand Tagore’s ideas on education. For the purpose of this section, I refer to those pieces which speak directly to the themes mentioned above. In his essay ‘Shikshasamasya’ (Problem of Education) Tagore says:

What we understand as a school is in fact a machine for imparting knowledge. The master (teacher) is a part of this machine. Work commences at the factory at ten thirty every morning with the ringing of a bell. The master too starts to use his speaking faculties and only ceases when the factory closes at four. The students get home with a few pages of factory produced knowledge which is tested during an examination and the students get branded for life with the marks they obtain.227 He adds further: The factory is a convenient place to seek desired products. There is hardly any difference in the goods produced by two different factories. But human beings are different from one another... What man is capable of giving himself, the factory cannot. The factory can produce the oil, but fails to light the lamp.228 Tagore draws a parallel between the present system of education and the working of a factory which begins functioning at a particular hour each day and produces uniform goods in a mechanical process. The teacher, despite being human, is reduced to a lever upon which the functioning machinery of education rests. But, as Tagore suggests that human beings are different

226 Rabindranath Tagore’s speech at The Dawn Society (25th February, 1906) reprinted in Ananda Bazar Patrika (Nov 1, 1953), which is a Bengali daily first published in March 1922. Also Itihas Quarterly (Nov, 1953). Cited in Mukherjee (1957). 227 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Shikshyasamasya’ (1906), in Shiksha (Visva Bharati, 1944), 39.Translations mine. 228 Ibid., 39-40. Translations mine.

63 from one another, one might assume that he would propose a system of women’s education different from that of men. Instead, Tagore suggests that:

Whatever is worth knowing, needs to be known by both men and women equally. This is not for putting that knowledge to practical use, but just for the sake of knowing. Humans are by nature curious. For them the world of information, irrespective of its utilitarian value constitutes knowledge. If humans are discouraged from the pursuit of knowledge or made to abstain from such pursuit, then it weakens the human character.229 Tagore does not see the prospect of educating women alongside men as a threat to the performance of Stree Dharma, like the Arya Samaj reformers. Instead, he sees the denial of knowledge to a group of humans as detrimental to the flourishing of human character. On this premise, he opined that ‘women who read Hegel and Kant do not automatically become incapable of loving their children, and begin disregarding men.’230 Dismissing the need to design a separate educational curriculum for men and women, Tagore criticised the colonial education system as being an imposition on the Indian samaj. He wrote, ‘In Europe, the school (vidyalay) is entwined with the society. It is nourished by the society and gives back to society.’ In India however, he observes that:

The school (vidyalay) is not an integral part of the samaj. It is an imposition and is therefore dry and lifeless. Whatever is procured from it is a painful acquisition and has minimal practical use. What we learn by rote between ten to four each day has no semblance with our home, with the people around us or life in general. Whatever is taught in the vidyalay is quite different from and is often contradictory to what is discussed at home as well as among friends. In such a situation, the vidyalay becomes an engine which only supplies products not life.231 As a remedy to the lifeless knowledge-dispensing machine known as the school (vidyalay), Tagore proposed the idea of an ashram ‘as a site for educating pupils where they would follow the tenets of Brahmacharya life and live in communion with the guru (gurugriha).’232 Santiniketan ashram’s

229 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Streeshiksha’ in Shiksha (Visva Bharati, 1944), 138. Translations mine. 230 Ibid., 139. Translations mine. 231 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Shikshasamasya’ (1906), in Shiksha (1944), 40. Translations mine. 232Ibid., 43. Translations mine. Brahmacharya refers to the first stage of an individual’s life where he focuses on education and practices celibacy. This roughly coincides with the first twenty-five years of his life. Tagore however was a non-believer in forms of extreme austerity and celibacy that would lead to a neglect of the physical wellbeing of young children as we shall see in Chapter IV.

64 distinctiveness was its rootedness in the samaj. A close look at what samaj meant becomes crucial as it shaped the imagination of the nationalist leadership in Bengal.

Satyanarayan Das suggests, ‘[S]amaj is an institution created for the good of the individual. Individuals cannot be subordinated to something that they have themselves created.’233 When samaj was a collective designed by people as a basis for their unity, the term jati was employed to convey the meaning of a nation. In the early twentieth century, many nationalist leaders expressed their primary loyalties to their linguistically and culturally defined regions. Tilak, for instance, expressed his nationalist feelings in terms that were particularly suitable to Maharashtra. Participating in the nationalist movement, C. R. Das, the Congress leader in Bengal, wrote that, ‘our idea of nationalism was centred in Bengal. We never looked beyond Bengal.’ Das’ writings were replete with references to the ‘Bengalee nation,’ as he urged nationalists to support ‘provincial individuality’ first and Indian nationality later.234 As both these leaders were writing in English their reference to the terms Maratha nation or Bengali nation, were closest approximations to Bengali jati or Maratha jati implying a race rather than a territorially-bounded entity encompassing fragmentations of linguistic, regional, and cultural markers. Raj Narain Bose’s Jatiya Gaurav Sampadini Sabha, founded in Bengal in the 1860s, aimed its program towards the stimulation of ‘national feeling,’ which meant the sense of community among Bengali Hindus.235 Cultural nationalism thus became a site where jati and samaj converged with a view to attaining samajik (societal) progress.

It is important to understand whether Tagore’s ashram relied on similar ideas of samaj, which forged a wider unity among people cutting across variations of caste, region, locality, and sectarian identities while maintaining an ambivalent position vis-à-vis the Raj’s employment patterns and opportunities. Tagore saw the relationship between society and his educational mission in these terms:

I refuse to believe that the human society has reached its limit of moral possibility... This faith has been my only asset in the educational mission which I have made my life’s work, and almost unaided and alone I struggle along my path. I try to assert in

233 See Satyanarayan Das, Bangadarshan o Bangalir Manan Sadhana (Calcutta, 1974), 48 234 See Charles Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 142. For C.R.Das’ views on nationalism see also, Sugata Bose and Ira Pandey, ‘Tagorean Universalism and Cosmopolitanism’ India International Centre Quarterly 33, No.1 (2011): 7-8 235 Charles Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton University Press: 1964), 136

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my words and works that education has its only meaning and object in freedom – freedom from the ignorance about the laws of the universe, and freedom from passion and prejudice in our communication with the human world. In my institution, I have attempted to create an atmosphere of naturalness in our relationship with the strangers, and the spirit of hospitality which is the first virtue in man that made civilization possible.236 Tagore speaks in favour of society’s moral possibility which is achievable through education. His society (samaj) is not only an association of individuals with visible commonalities, or ability relate to each other through their loyalties towards a certain caste, region, religion, or language. Instead, the focus was on communicating with the human world, with the laws of the universe as well as with complete strangers by being human and hospitable. These attributes were not only central to people living in the samaj but also constituted the core elements of ‘the Supreme Person’ that Tagore envisaged as the product of his ashram’s education (see Chapter V).

The centrality of samaj in Tagore’s educational mission has been outlined here. However, what remains to be investigated are the questions as to how the ideas of building a society were institutionalised in the ashram’s pedagogy. What kind of training did the students receive to become hospitable human beings? I explore these questions in Chapters III and IV.

The next important point of discussion is the ashram’s relation to ‘politics.’ About the National Council of Education that was set up in 1906 and was closely associated with political protests and agitations, Tagore wrote:

After a long time the Bengalis have achieved something meaningful. This is not comparable to a practical gain, it is our strength... it is not a plaything that the handiwork of few men have erected with sticks and stones. It is an instance of wellbeing descending upon our Bangamata (Mother Bengal) which needs to be celebrated with pomp and gusto throughout the desh (country).237 Tagore viewed the establishment of the National Council of Education as the strength of the Bengalis and a sign of their wellbeing that was not instrumented through mechanisation but a creative endeavour of individuals. Tagore said to the students of Bengal:

Today you are about to enter the vidyamandir (temple of knowledge) of your swadesh (one’s own country), with your hearts filled with enormous pride. You should experience this moment as the strength of the Bengali jati beckoning you to

236 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Ideals of Education’ (1929) in Sisir Kumar Das ed. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore Volume II (New Delhi: Sahitya Akedemi, 1996), 612 237 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Jatiya Vidyalay’ in Shiksha (Visva Bharati, 1944), 57. Translations mine.

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occupy its throne. It will draw its spark from your mettle... A huge structure erected on a massive piece of land run by elaborate arrangements is not the pride of this institution, its pride lies in your dedication and devotion as well the as self-surrender of the Bengalis... 238 Tagore invokes the notion of the jati here, only to let it be subsumed within the framework of his swadesh. The active engagement of students, their involvement with and devotion to the new educational institution, played a prominent role in this process. Even though Tagore saw the National Council of Education as an endeavour of the Bengali jati, for him jati did not denote the nation, as his proposed ‘swadesh’ which replaced ‘jati’ in the imagination of one’s country.

With regard to education’s role in political agitation Tagore drew from the experiences of the Swadeshi movement and wrote that ‘the partition of Bengal had unleashed a sentiment of revolt where a good section of people promised that, unless the partition was revoked, they would abstain from using foreign goods.’239 Rabindranath saw this as an expression of anger harboured against the colonial ruler and suggested that ‘being annoyed with the perceived opponent can never be the longstanding resort for a country that wants to achieve something incredible. Exasperation fuels the excitement of a venture but such lustre lacks permanence. A balloon that is bound to descend to the ground once deflated, cannot be the foundation for anything permanent.’240 He adds, ‘associations are a great place for expressing audacity, newspapers too are very helpful for this agenda, but the National Council of education had to be sanitized from such acts at all costs.’241 He maintained further that ‘it could not be ascertained whether or not the National Council of education will stand the test of time, but if we were making arrangements for building something with a purpose that was completely different, then our efforts and imaginations were bound to be ruined.’242 From these excerpts, one observes Tagore making a case for keeping educational initiatives separate from the fiery political agitations. He proposes instead that any effort at educational reform that would endure and have permanence would be those that were not subsumed under the frenzy of hatred and opposition but prepared to make sacrifices for the need of doing constructive work.

238 Ibid., 239 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Shikshay Andoloner Bhumika’ (1905), 2 Manuscript files RBA. Translations mine. 240 Ibid., 4. Translations mine. 241 Ibid., 7 Translations mine. 242 Ibid., Translations mine.

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Tagore maintained a close association with the Dawn Society, even though it differed considerably from his ashram at Santiniketan. He was also intellectually informed by the social reform agenda of the Arya Samaj endeavours and distanced himself from their overarching commitment to rectify Hinduism and bring into being an ideal form of Arya life. The fact that the Dawn Society slipped into oblivion with the death of its founder Satish Chandra, reflects the narrowness of its vision which had no life outside its visionary. The very scanty literature available on the KMV testifies to its influence being limited to a certain point of time and its relevance restricted to the wider agenda of social reform undertaken by the Arya Samaj. In contrast, Tagore’s Santiniketan stood the test of time and sustained as a school inspired by the traditional ashram model. It occupied a neutral territory between the extremes of radical social reform and violent political agitation exemplified by KMV and the Dawn society respectively.

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the ways in which English education became a cause of discontent among the educated Indians who struggled to find government jobs. The resultant disappointment saw the spread of anti-colonial sentiments among educated Indians and led to numerous initiatives which attempted to reform the existing system of education. English education had enlightened the Indians about the unjust nature of British rule and became an instrument in the hands of the nationalist leaders to articulate their ambitions of political autonomy from the alien rule. From the late nineteenth century, ashrams began emerging as alternative educational institutes to counter the ill-effects of government-run schools. Many of these ashrams, however, were not limited to being educational endeavours alone as they had the imagination of a collective—in most cases a nation, at their core. The prominent examples being Keshub’s Bharat Ashram, Gandhi’s Satyagraha ashram, and the Vivekananda Kendra. Tagore’s Santiniketan ashram was a part of this network of initiatives but imagined the collective in terms of a samaj as opposed to a nation. The distinctiveness of his vision and an understanding of his educational philosophy is obtained by contrasting Tagore’s ashram with the KMV at Jalandhar and The Dawn Society in Calcutta. These institutes are relevant in so far as they exemplify education’s role in social reform on the one hand and its close association with politics on the other. The Dawn Society represents an educational initiative that was close to the political movements of the time. The KMV symbolised Arya Samaj’s initiative to create a modern Hinduism that was monotheistic and text-based and which

68 could be the basis for morality in the secular world. I argue that Tagore’s educational endeavour was distinct as it occupied a middle ground between these two extremes and combined the ashram’s political ambitions with those of social welfare. His ashram was stashed from the whirlwind of protests and agitations with the negative agenda of opposing the foreign government, yet was committed to the political project of creatively engineering a swadesh.

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Chapter II: Santiniketan ashram’s political context: Swadeshi Bengal of the early twentieth century

This chapter discusses the three movements into which Tagore was, in his words, ‘born’: ‘I was born and brought up in an atmosphere of the confluence of three movements, all of which were revolutionary.’243 Rabindranath Tagore identified these movements as the ‘religious movement’ of Hindu reformism started by Ram Mohan Roy, the ‘literary’ movement pioneered by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, and the ‘third’ which was national in scope and manifested in attempts by ‘our people who were trying to assert their own personality.’244 These movements constituted, in Tagore’s view, the broader political context of Bengal into which he was born, and continued to shape Bengal’s politics in years to follow. However, the politics unleashed in Bengal, following its partition in 1905, provides the crucial backdrop for analysing the functioning of the Santiniketan ashram as the Swadeshi movement puts into sharp focus the concepts of spirituality and identity, and the way that these furthered the cause of attaining swaraj. The key concepts offered by the movement were the ones which Tagore deployed in developing his ashram, albeit with his distinctive interpretations of them. The years following the partition of Bengal help to reveal Tagore’s political commitments and ideologies by placing him in bold relief with the political current of the time and his dissensions with it. I argue that Tagore’s response to the concepts that informed the political ideology of the Swadeshi leaders was precisely the formulation of an alternative political vision articulated through his keywords.

Tagore’s political context

Taking a cue from Tagore’s statement above, this section discusses the three movements in Bengal, beginning with the literary movement, followed by the religious and national movements. I identify the influence of these movements on Tagore and his contentions with them. The distinctiveness of Tagore’s political vision can be seen in his disagreements with the movements and the alternatives that he proposed. Tagore’s political commitments, expressed through his multivalent keywords, comprise the categories around which the conceptual chapters of the study are woven.

243 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Autobiographical’ Talks in China (Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1925), 30 244 Rabindranath Tagore, My Life in My Words ed. Uma Das Gupta (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2011), 6

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a) Bankim’s influence on the Swadeshi movement vis-à-vis Tagore’s distance from him

As the pioneer of the literary movement in Bengal, Bankim represented the characteristic feature of anti-colonial nationalism which accepted the objectification of its own culture by the protagonists of the dominant culture, psychologically propelling the nationalists to assert their superiority, or at least equality, with the West.245 Bankim accepted the superiority of the West and simultaneously compensated for the resultant sense of inferiority by pointing out the eminence of India’s spiritual heritage.246 For him, the substance of religion was nothing but ‘culture’ or the balanced cultivation of all human faculties. Condemning all forms of asceticism or a life solely devoted to the gratification of senses or the narrow pursuit of self-interest, Bankim emphasised anusilan or ‘culture’ which implied involvement with, instead of withdrawal from, the world.247 The ultimate expression of anusilan, as Bankim saw it, was service to the motherland, which involved the human body being a ‘sharpened weapon’ ready for use. The cultivation of physical faculties was an essential component of this ‘culture.’248 ‘Culture’ for him was the prescription for reinventing the Hindu identity drawing from scriptural sources. Bankim’s use of anusilan, rooted in his concerns with the question of identity, became the tool for resisting the British policies for a group of nationalists in Bengal following the announcement of its partition. The partition of Bengal which was announced by the then Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Curzon, in 1903 and came into effect on 16 October 1905, brought the question of identity into sharp focus. The response of the Bengali leadership, to the criticisms levelled against them by the British administrators for resisting partition, confirms the claim.

Bengal was divided into two administrative units: the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, with Dacca as the capital, had a Muslim majority population while the western half of Bengal, along with Orissa and Bihar, was mainly occupied by Hindus. Bengal’s response to its partition was spearheaded by its intelligentsia, who rallied against the government’s decision. Colonial anxieties were realised with the widespread resentment in the Hindu-majority province, where the politically charged response, led by the Bengali intelligentsia, saw an active involvement from students and

245 Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi: OUP, 1988), 136-7 246 Ibid., 247 Ibid., 150-51 248 Ibid., 152-3

71 youth groups. A series of meetings, processions, and demonstrations were held across Calcutta. Pamphlets, journals, editorials, and newspapers of the day contained arguments refuting those tendered in favour of the partition.

Describing the Bengali leaders, Curzon wrote that they:

dominate public opinion in Calcutta, they affect the High Court; they frighten the local government of India. The whole of their activity is directed to creating an agency so powerful that they may one day be able to force a weak Government to give them what they desire.249 A similar observation is made by the 4th Earl of Minto, Viceroy of India between 1905 and 1910 in a correspondence with John Morley (the Liberal Secretary of State for India). He notes:

It is the growing power of a population with great intellectual gifts and a talent for making itself heard, a population which, though it is far from representing the more manly characteristics of the many races of India, it is not unlikely to influence public opinion at home most mischievously. Therefore, from the political point of view alone, putting aside the administrative difficulties of the old province, I believe partition to have been necessary.250 These observations confirm that government officials considered the Bengali people as capable of influencing public opinion and challenging the policies and decisions of the government. Therefore, the political division of the province was necessary to counter their resistance. While Curzon was wary of the rising agency of the Bengali people forcing a weak government to give in to their demands, Minto believed that their lack of manliness would not deter that attempt in any way, strengthening the apprehension of Ramsay MacDonald who concluded that, ‘Bengal is perhaps doing better than political agitation. It is idealizing India. It is translating nationalism into religion, into music and poetry, into painting and literature… it is creating India by song and worship, it is clothing her in queenly garments.’251

Accusations of ‘effeminacy’ made a section of Bengalis resort to ‘culture’ or anusilan as a strategy to counter the allegation. The Calcutta secret societies wanting to improve the ‘national physique’

249 Cited in Sankari Prasad Basu, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal and Freedom Struggle in India (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2004), 34. Emphasis mine. 250 Minto to Morley, 5 February, 1906. Cited in Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010), 17 251 Modern Review, October 1910. Cited in S.P. Basu (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2004), 87. Ramsay Mac Donald was a member of the Royal Commission on Public Services in India. He later became the British Prime Minister in 1924.

72 gained momentum since a samiti (association) for physical culture was founded in 1900. Such societies quickly multiplied and much of their activity consisted of meeting in secret societies, starting gymnasiums, and recruiting young men for revolutionary work. Among secret societies which carried out these activities, the most notable were the Jugantar group located mainly in western Bengal and the Anusilan group with its centre at Dacca in the east.252 The influence of Bankim’s anusilan on such societies was discernible from their activities. The image of the motherland, in terms of the mother goddess designed by Bankim, inspired the secret societies and also became the symbol of militant nationalism in the years following 1905. As a sympathiser and organiser of extremist politics drawing on Bankim, the revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose proposed the ‘religion of nationalism’ which was divinely ordained. In his words:

It is not by any mere political programme, not by National Education alone, not by Swadeshi (use of indigenous products) alone, not by Boycott alone, that this country can be saved. These are merely ways of working; they are merely particular concrete lines upon which the spirit of God is working in a Nation, but they are not in themselves the one thing needful. What is the one thing needful? … [It is] the idea that there is a great power at work to help India, and that we are doing what it bids us.253 The impact of Bankim’s literary contributions on the politics of the Swadeshi period could be noticed from the fact that, after 1905, Bande Mataram became the slogan of Indian nationalism and Anandamath (1882)254 the Bible of the armed revolutionaries.255 On the 16th of October, when the partition of Bengal came into effect, the political scene in Calcutta has been described by Surendranath Banerjea as follows:

The day dawned; the streets of Calcutta re-echoed from the early hours of the morning with the cry of Bande Mataram, as band after band of men young and old, paraded the streets on their way to bathe in the river, stopping at intervals to tie Rakhi round the wrists of passers-by. They were often accompanied by Sankirtan parties singing Bande Mataram and patriotic songs. The bathing-ghats were crammed with a surging mass of men and women, all furnished with quantities of rakhis, which they tied round the wrists of friends and acquaintances, and even of

252Jennifer Pitts (2005), 276-277 253 Aurobindo Ghose’s speech (19 January ,1908) in Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram (1972), 659-660 254 Anandamath was written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and was published in 1882. It contained the song Bande Mataram. A detailed study of the song has been published by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya in his book Vande Mataram The Biography of a Song (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003). 255 See Tapan Raychaudhuri (1988), 134

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strangers…It was a day worth living for – a day of inspiration that perhaps comes only once in a life time.256 Bande Mataram, which became the war-cry of the Swadeshi agitation, was set to tune by Rabindranath Tagore at the Calcutta Session of the Congress in 1896, at his family residence. He was instrumental in popularising the Rakhibandhan, where men and women tied threads around each other’s wrists, marking the invincible unity of the Bengalis. He also composed a number of songs during this time, upholding the spirit of undivided Bengal.

Image permission pending

Image 1: Facsimile of the Rakhi song composed by Tagore. Source: The Calcutta Municipal Gazette (September 13, 1941).

Despite his involvement in the Swadeshi movement, it must be remembered that such activities did not mark the beginning of Tagore’s political contributions. In 1897, Tagore addressed the session of The Bengal Provincial Conference (an offshoot of the Indian National Congress), and in 1898 he took over the podium at the Calcutta Town Hall to protest against the Sedition Bill. The proposal for boycotting foreign goods and manufacturing indigenous ones, as a national mode of struggle was officially adopted on the 7th of August 1905, as a mode of protest. This technique was

256 Surendranath Banerjea, A Nation in the Making (Humphrey Milford, 1927), 164

74 anticipated by Tagore in 1897 when he set up a Swadeshi Bhandar along with his family members in Calcutta, marketing indigenous goods.257 Tagore’s involvement with the Swadeshi movement has been interpreted by Kathleen M. O’ Connell as his ‘political forays’ keeping alive the Tagore family’s tradition where they chose ‘not to participate in the political office’ but expressed ‘their patriotism in the area of cultural nationalism.’258

The Swadeshi movement marks Tagore’s use of culture as a political tool in terms which differed from Bankim’s interpretation of it as anusilan. Rathindranath Tagore recounts his father’s association with the movement in his memoir. He writes:

Father took an effective part in the agitation that followed the partition of Bengal. It almost appeared as if one day he emerged out of his seclusion to become overnight the high priest of Indian nationalism. In songs and poems and in trenchant addresses on the public platforms he bitterly attacked Curzon’s policy of divide and rule. At the same time, he made a powerful appeal to the people to stand together – self-respecting and self-reliant. He gave a new orientation to the traditional Rakhi- bandhan and under his inspiration the wrist band of coloured thread became the symbol of undying unity in Bengal. On the day of Rakhi-bandhan he headed a huge procession through the streets of the city singing songs […]259 Some of the patriotic songs composed by Tagore during this time were, Banglar Mati Banglar Jol, Bidhir badhon katbe tumi emni saktiman and Ekla cholo re in the spirit of forging brotherhood among the people of Bengal.260 He composed Amar Sonar Bangla in 1906 which was replete with the image of a pastoral Bengal—with her mango groves, paddy fields, riverbanks and banyan trees. This song was intended to rouse Bengalis to protest the division of Bengal by invoking the once- whole mother whose very body was now endangered. The original words and their translation would be as follows:

Amar sonar Bangla ami tomay bhalobashi (My golden Bengal, I love thee), Chirodin tomar aakash, tomar batash, amar prane bajay bashi (Forever thy skies, thy air set my heart to the tune of flute),

257 The establishment of the Swadeshi Bhandar was in tune with the other self-help activities that was taking place in Bengal. For instance, Jogeshchandra Chowdhury started Indian stores in 1901, Sarala Debi’s Lakshmi Bhandar was an antecedent to Tagore’s initiative while the establishment of The Bengal Chemicals was a precedent that was set up in 1893. 258 Kathleen M. O’ Connell, Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet Educator (Kolkata: Visva Bharati,2002), 27 259 Rathindranath Tagore, On The Edges of Time (1958), 71. Rathindranath Tagore was the eldest son of Rabindranath Tagore and Mrinalini Devi. He was born in November, 1888 at the Tagore residence in Jorasanko of erstwhile Calcutta. 260 See Poulomi Saha, ‘Singing Bengal into a Nation: Tagore the Colonial Cosmopolitan?’ Journal of Modern Literature 36, No.2 Aesthetic Politics – Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary (Winter, 2013): 5,6 and Reba Som, Margot: Sister Nivedita of Swami Vivekananda (Viking: 7 July, 2017)

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O Maa Fagun e tor amer boney ghraney pagol kore (O Mother! The aroma from thy mango orchards in Spring, drive me crazy), O Maa Aghryane tor bhora khete ami ki dekhechi modhur hashi (O Mother! Thy paddy fields ripe in Autumn, spreads sweet smiles)

The beauty of Bengal’s soil and air, the sweet smell of her mango orchards and the ripened paddy made Tagore gleefully declare his motherland to be ‘The Golden Bengal.’ Tagore’s description of Bengal in this particular song is strikingly similar to Bankim’s Bande Mataram, composed in 1882.

Bande Mataram Sujalam, Sufalam, Malayaja Shetalam, Sashya shyamalam mataram Bande mataram

The song was translated into English by Aurobindo Ghose in 1909 in Karmayogin261 as follows:

Mother, I praise thee! Rich with thy hurrying streams, bright with orchard gleams, Cool with thy winds of delight, Dark fields waving Mother of might, Mother free.

Bande Mataram (Hail Motherland) sung praises of the motherland’s bounty. The water, the fruits, the cool shades and the lush green harvests are epitomised in Bankim’s motherland. Although the song belongs to the novel Anandamath which was set in Bengal, the essence of it was such that, ‘it deserved’ in Bipin Chandra Pal’s opinion, ‘to be the true national anthem of India.’262 About Rabindranath Tagore’s contributions to the Swadeshi movement, Pal is of the view that his ‘hymnology idealises the actualities of our physical and social life and thus touches the chord that has never been touched before.’263 Within the ‘hymnology of the new patriotism’ Tagore’s

261 Aurobindo Ghose, Karmayogin (20 June, 1909). 262 Bipin Chandra Pal’s Speech (19th March, 1903) published in his book, Swadeshi and Swaraj (Calcutta: Yugayatri Prakashak, 1954), 91. Bipin Chandra Pal 1858-1932) was one of the most notable leaders of the Swadeshi agitation in Bengal. He strongly advocated the manufacture and use of indigenous goods and the boycott of foreign ones. He also favoured extremist means of political agitation including revolutionary terrorism. 263 Ibid., 99

76 compositions stood ‘first and foremost both in points of quality and quantity...’264 The following composition of Tagore serves as an example.

Sarthak janam amar, jonmechi ei deshe (Blessed is my birth, for I am born unto this country), Sarthak janam amar, maa go tomay bhalobeshe (Blessed is my birth o Mother, for I love thee), Jani na tor dhon roton ache kina raanir moton (I do not know if thou hast riches like a queen), Shudhu jani amar anga joray tomar chhayay eshe (All I know is that thy shade soothes my limbs), … Aankhi mele tomar aalo prothom amar chokh joralo (My eyes first opened in thy light) Oi aalotei nayan rekhe, mudbo nayan sheshe (And I will finally close my eyes upon that very light).

This song embodies Tagore’s pride of being born in Bengal, embracing the reality of his motherland shorn of her riches. Her beauty lies in her ability to soothe the weary children born unto her. Tagore associates his destiny with that of his mother and declares that his birth was blessed for being born in Bengal and expresses an earnest desire to rest in her lap forever. If the similarity in the images of Bengal deployed by Bankim and subsequently by Rabindranath marks the influence of the literary movement on Tagore, the significant differences that distinguished Tagore from his literary predecessor are not difficult to discern.

Scholars have observed that Bankim’s statements ‘avowing British superiority and Bengali worthlessness in every sphere’ reflected a generalised experience of inadequacy which an encounter with colonialism had induced in him.265 Unlike Bankim, Tagore did not aim to assert the spiritual superiority of the Bengalis by drawing on scriptural sources or iconic figures. He focused instead on the creative pursuits of a poet and exerted his cultural predisposition towards song composition. This method served two purposes. On the one hand, it showcased Tagore’s discomfort of being identified as a Bengali which did not fit into his appreciation of universal humanism. On the other hand, his songs, which were sung and appreciated by people of Bengal, also became a powerful tool of protest against the government. Rathindranath Tagore’s

264 Ibid., 265 See Tapan Raychaudhury (1988).

77 observation about his father’s conduct on the occasion of a congratulatory meeting of political leaders at Taraknath Palit’s266 residence, is a pertinent instance of which he writes:

The appearance of father dressed in dhoti and chaddar in the midst of the anglicised diners was in itself a protest. When on top of this, he poured out in the song his pent-up sorrow and resentment, there was an embarrassing hush, after which the party broke up.267 Rabindranath was not too keen on being a part of an English dinner hosted to honour the leaders of the Indian National Congress. When Taraknath insisted on Tagore singing a few songs to entertain the guests, Tagore’s resentment found adequate expression as he sang his own composition:

Do not ask me to sing, I pray you ask me not. Are we here to talk and receive clap? Who will stay wake, work and wipe mother’s disgrace? Shame to this festival of words and fun!268 The creative avenue of song composition and the indigenous style of dressing which marked Tagore as different from the lot of political leaders, in effect became Tagore’s brand of politics. It was a protest against wholesale borrowing of cultural norms of the West by donning their attire. While Bankim’s anusilan became the basis of promoting physical culture and training revolutionaries, within a rank of the Swadeshi leadership, Tagore too emphasised the physical well-being of the students at his ashram. However, his concern for the physical fitness of his students did not amount to the advocacy of a training regime to build future revolutionaries, committed to the service of the nation. Tagore included sports and physical activity at his ashram and ensured ghee (clarified butter) was incorporated in the diet of his students to build physically strong and capable individuals. The promotion of physical strength at the Santiniketan ashram was not an attempt to counter the accusations of effeminacy levelled against Bengalis by the colonial masters nor was it an attempt to revive the Hindu identity through an allusion to sacred texts or iconic figures. It was central to the ashram’s curricula which combined Tagore’s educational views and his political vision.

266 Taraknath Palit (1831-1914) was a lawyer by profession but remembered as a philanthropist giving up his lucrative legal career and devoting himself to the cause of promoting and supporting national education. He was closely associated with the anti-partition movement in Bengal in the years following 1905. 267 Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1958), 9 268 See Kamala Sarkar, Nationalism in Bengal 1856-1912: A study of cultural conflict towards British Racial Impositions (Kolkata: Seribaan, 2012), 29

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b) Tagore and the Brahmo Samaj: Links and disagreements

The association of religion and culture was not obvious for Tagore as it was for Bankim. It was the influence of Brahmo faith on Rabindranath Tagore that facilitated this distancing between religion and culture. As the founder of Brahmo Sabha in 1828, Ram Mohan Roy’s universalistic religion was founded on the basis of a relentless critic of idol worship and Brahminical priest- craft that mediated an individual’s relationship with God. The religious reform introduced by Roy aimed to release individuals from the corruption of priestly agencies, enabling them to seek direct knowledge of the Absolute regardless of their caste, status, or capacity.269 In 1843, Debendranath Tagore institutionalised Ram Mohan’s ideology of Hindu reform and founded the Brahmo Samaj. Rabindranath’s commitment to the tenets of Brahmo faith, as espoused by his father Debendranath,270 made him a non-worshipper of avatars or incarnations and a nonbeliever in the necessity of mediators such as symbols, idols, books, or images. Tagore’s allegiance to Brahmoism was informed by an ‘identity crisis, continually shifting between universalism and nationalism.’271 By 1910, it was clear that Rabindranath was drawn towards the universality of the Brahmo faith as opposed to the spirituality that it endorsed. In his words,

Truth is to be sought in all religions – it is to be revealed and then accepted. This was Keshub’s272 burning desire. This is what he achieved [through comparative religion] and then revealed it in the name of New Dispensation. When I realised this, all my earlier antagonism for him vanished and I came to pay him homage.273 Rabindranath’s admission that his inclination towards Keshub, who represented the universalistic aspects of Brahmo faith, helps to explain his opposition to ‘nationalism.’ It became the ground for

269 See Andrew Sartori, ‘The Categorical Logic of Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal, 1904-1908’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle-East 23, No. 1&2 (2003): 271-285 270 See David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1979), 15. The reference to Debendranath here pertains to the address he delivered at the Brahmo Sammilan in 1867. See, The Autobiography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore translated by Indira Devi and Satyendranath Tagore (Calcutta: S.K. Lahiri and Co., 1909), 151-52 271 David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 182 272 Keshub joined the Brahmo Samaj in 1857 as a disciple of Debendranath. However differences arose between Keshub and the older generation of Brahmos as the latter remained unconvinced about the need for practical social reform and a mission society. In 1879 Keshub and his followers inaugurated the Nava Bidhan or New Dispensation with Keshub as prophet of a universal religion. 273 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Keshub Anniversary Address’ January 9, 1910. Reprinted in G.C. Banerji, Keshub as seen by his Opponents (Allahabad: K. Mittra, 1930), 102, 106-108

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Tagore’s critique of the idea of ‘a nation’ and the reason for his endorsement of the ‘freedom for humanity’ (discussed below).

What distinguishes Tagore from his predecessor Ram Mohan Roy and contemporaries Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose is the fact that he did not share their views on India’s cultural unity being rooted in the Hindu texts. While acknowledging that the canonical Hindu texts i.e. the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Gita were at the centre of India’s classical culture, Tagore did not consider them as constituting the heart of Indian unity or providing the basis for it.274 A large proportion of India’s modern elite who were influenced by the three major nineteenth century reform movements in Hinduism, namely the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj and the Ramkrishna Mission, were convinced that the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Gita enshrined a rational strand in Indian traditions and could be the main means of rectifying the defects of Hinduism. This realisation also led Bankim to reconstruct the iconic figure of Krishna from sensuality and playfulness into a representation of masculinity—an agent of action and self-control.275 Scholars have argued that, in Bengal, the imagination of a nation on the basis of its cultural unity paved the way for the re-emergence of the Bhagavad Gita as a key text for liberals, Vedantists and radicals alike.276 The reimagining of the Indian identity, by adhering to canonical texts or reconstructing iconic figures were attempts to subvert and challenge the hyper-masculinity of the British imperial ideology in India. Identity concerns did not occupy Tagore’s attention. In fact, he opposed a sense of group belonging fostered through the characteristic features shared in common by individuals or groups that distinguished them from the ‘other.’ To challenge this ‘otherness’ embedded in the construction of identities, Tagore moved away from Bankim’s preoccupation with the Bengali identity and endorsed the idea of a ‘supreme person’ who is central to his appreciation of humanity and not limited by the ethnic barriers of identity. Tagore’s stance militated against the eminent reformers and leaders of the nineteenth century while also negating a part of his own Brahmo inheritance.277 Although Tagore abstained from idol worship

274 See Ashis Nandy, ‘Nationalism, Genuine and Spurious: Mourning Two Early Post-Nationalist Strains’ Economic and Political Weekly 41, No.32 (August 2006): 3500-3504 275 Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving Masculinity a History: some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’ Gender and History 11, No.3 (November, 1999): 448 276 Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the age of Capital (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), Brian A. Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism or the faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from early Colonial Bengal (OUP, 2008), 23-26, 42-56 277 Ashis Nandy (2006): 3501

80 as part of his allegiance to the Brahmo faith, he did not follow the Brahmo practices of using uncontaminated, canonical, sacred texts of India like the Vedas and Upanishads for bringing about social reform.278 Instead, he used these texts as bases for collective rituals at his ashram. Tagore’s idea of dharmashikhsha (discussed in Chapter III) and the way he practised it in the ashram with the chanting of Vedic hymns demonstrates his use of texts.

Tagore’s distance from the nationalist and Swadeshi politics and contentions with it were instrumental in the formulation of his own distinct version of politics. For understanding Tagore’s views, it is important to acknowledge the precise position that he occupies within his context, which includes the relationship he shared with his inherited tradition along with the specific experiences of his encounter with what Raychaudhuri calls the ‘alien civilisation,’279 and the ways in which he chose to respond to them.

c) Tagore and the national movement: association and withdrawal

With reference to Tagore’s contributions during the Swadeshi movement discussed above, Sumit Sarkar notes that it was Tagore’s poetic vision and imagination that gave a unique dimension to the Swadeshi movement. He argues that the proposition of the rakhi bandhan ceremony alongside the composition of patriotic songs would endure in public memory even if all else about the Swadeshi movement is forgotten.280 This estimate of Tagore’s contribution to the Swadeshi movement or to the politics of Bengal in general, is partial in its completeness. Tagore’s withdrawal from the movement was foundational to his design of an alternative politics. It constituted Tagore’s response to the violent political agitations and his fundamental opposition to the idea of the nation.

Historians have offered a range of theories about Tagore’s shift from an ardent contributor to the Swadeshi movement to its committed critic. Leonard Gordon argues that the years that witnessed the fizzing out of the initial frenzy of the Swadeshi movement also saw Tagore moving from the centre of activity to the periphery, spending the years between 1907-1911 in experiments with

278 Ibid. 279 See Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (New Delhi: OUP, 2002), 5 280 Sarkar (2010), 47-48

81 education and village work, and immune from the sufferings of factional strife.281 Gordon attributes this to Tagore’s disillusionment with the divisions within the movement, and cites the primacy of politics in the movement that had upset Tagore at a point of personal tragedy.282 Sumit Sarkar assigns Tagore’s break away from the swadeshi movement mid-way, in 1907, to the impact of communal riots.283 Tanika Sarkar argues that what explains the time lag between Tagore’s distancing himself from the movement in 1907 to coming up with an ‘existential refusal of its politics of nation worship’ until 1915, was the fact that Tagore mourned Bengal’s inability to recover appropriately from the trauma of partition and reconcile itself. His commitment to the idea of a unified Bengal was shaken to the core by the divisive forces that the partition unleashed on Bengal more than the actual event itself.284

I claim that these arguments are flawed on two counts. Firstly, one cannot ascertain Tagore’s formal departure from the movement as his anguish can still be noticed in the songs he composed (till 1911 when he penned ‘Jana Gana Mana’). Secondly, these arguments also stem from the assumption that Tagore’s ‘political activities’ in Calcutta were replaced by the ‘educational activities’ at the Santiniketan ashram. In contrast, my analysis shows that, in moving from Calcutta to Bolpur, Tagore did not withdraw from political activity, instead he engaged in it with renewed vigour, in his own terms that he could develop and practice at the ashram.

Tagore wrote about his withdrawal from the Swadeshi movement in the following words:

In those days there was practically nothing to stand in the way of the spirit of destructive revel, which spread all over the country. We went about picketing, burning, placing thorns in the path of those whose way was not ours, acknowledging no restrains in language or behaviour – all in the frenzy of our wrath… there were my countrymen encountering for the time being, no check to the overflow of their outraged feelings. It was like a strange dream. Everything seemed possible. Then all of a sudden it was my misfortune to appear on the scene with my doubts and my

281 Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement 1876-1940 (New York, London: Columbia University Press, 1974). The personal tragedy that Gordon refers to is the death of Rabindranath’s father Debendranath Tagore in 1905. 282 Ibid. 283 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 115 284 Tanika Sarkar, ‘Many Faces of Love: Country, Woman and God in the Home and the World’ In Pradip K. Datta ed. Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World: A Critical Companion (London: Anthem, 2005): 27- 44

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attempts to divert the current into the path of self-determination. My only success was in diverting their wrath on to my own devoted head.285 It’s ‘we’ instead of ‘they’, when Tagore writes about burning and picketing shops because, initially, Tagore supported these efforts, even if he himself did not partake in violent actions. His support for them, however, was short-lived as he grew sceptical of angry political protests which lacked the determination to work for the betterment of the country. Tagore’s subsequent withdrawal from the movement was not taken well by his contemporaries. Ramendra Sundar Trivedi expressed disappointment with Tagore’s withdrawal from the boycott agitation, and the editors of the journals Sahitya and Narayana, Suresh Chandra Samajpati, and Chitta Ranjan Das, ridiculed Tagore’s non- political constructive Swadeshi.286

The Santiniketan ashram embodied the elements of what Tagore’s critics termed as ‘non-political constructive Swadeshi.’ Charted out through a series of disagreements with the Swadeshi movement, Tagore’s educational experiment at Santiniketan was Tagore’s politics, with the village as its organising unit. In response to his criticism, Tagore wrote to Ramendra Sundar Trivedi in 1905:

[W]hat is the purpose of trying to pull me into this? …Please be aware that those who have diverted from their objective and believed that protesting against the government is the realization of atma-shakti or self-reliance are under the sway of illusion. Any long-term welfare cannot be expected in any direction.287 Questions that arise include: What was it that Tagore wanted to be pulled away from? What did his withdrawal entail and what was the long-term welfare that he is suggesting?

Tagore later wrote,

So in the midst of world-wide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Shantiniketan... hoping that our efforts will touch the hearts of our village neighbours, and help them in re-asserting

285 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’ (1921) in S. Bhattacharya ed. The Mahatma and the Poet (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997), 78 286 See Kamala Sarkar, Nationalism in Bengal: A Study of Cultural Conflict towards British Racial Impositions (Kolkata: Seribaan, 2012). 287 Rabindranath Tagore to Ramendra Sundar Trivedi, Letter dated 25 Aghrayan 1312 B.S. (1905). Source: RBA Translations and emphasis mine.

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themselves in a new social order. If we can give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others – and my life work will have been done.288 Tagore suggests here that he committed himself to doing his work at Santiniketan at a small scale that positively impacted its neighbouring villages in bringing about a new social order. He chose not to be overwhelmed with the worldwide anguish that affected millions of people. Instead, he began his work as a model for laying the foundation for largescale changes. Through his dissensions with the ‘revolutionary movements’ of his time, Tagore predicated his political vision. His politics moved away from the concerns of the nation-state and its autonomy from foreign rule, as well as from the ethnicity of identities which inspired violent political agitations and negative programmes of boycott, to focus on the wellbeing of the samaj. The blueprint of this welfare plan was articulated in his essay ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ (1904), discussed below.

The Nation versus the village: Tagorean Samaj

Tagore attributed primary importance to the village. He was of the view that the process of making a few villages self-reliant through a new social order would pave the way for neighbouring villages to emulate them, and this process would continue till most villages in India would attain self- sufficiency. Tagore’s vision of the village organisation was different from how his contemporaries viewed the village. Aurobindo Ghose, for instance, wrote:

The organisation of our villages is an indispensable work to which we must immediately set our hands, but we must be careful to organise them as to make them feel that they are imperfect parts of a single national unity, dependent at every turn on the cooperation… of the nation.289 For Ghose, the village was an incomplete unit, part of the nation but in no way its miniature embodiment. Bipin Chandra Pal echoed a similar imagination of the nation, where the village is replaced by individuals who comprise the nation. He wrote:

In a nation, the individuals composing it stand in an organic relation to one another and to the whole, of which they are limbs and organs… Organs find the fulfilment

288 Rabindranath Tagore, (Letter to Elmhirst, 21st December 1937) in L.K. Elmhirst ed. Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in Education (London: John Murray, 1961), 38 289 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Village and the Nation’ Bande Mataram (March 8, 1908) in Haridas and Uma Mukherjee eds., Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics (Calcutta: K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1964), 281

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of their ends not in themselves but in the collective life of the organism to which they belong.290 According to Pal, the nation was not just another form of ‘association’ of the kinds one sees in civil society where ‘individuals stand by themselves’ even when ‘moved by a common impulse.’291 While the leaders of Bengal saw the village as an instrument in the hands of the nation, there were other ways in which the village was evoked throughout the nationalist movement. Gandhi, for instance, was of the view that:

The village life has to be touched at all points, the economic, the hygienic, the social and the political. The immediate solution of the distress is undoubtedly the wheel in the vast majority of cases… The hygiene included insanitation and disease. Here the student is expected to work with his own body and labour…to make the villages more habitable. The village worker has also to touch the social side and gently persuade the people to give up bad customs and bad habits, such as untouchability, infant marriages, unequal matches, drink and drug evil and many local superstitions. Lastly, comes the political part. Here the worker will study the political grievances of the villagers and teach them the dignity of freedom, self- reliance and self-help in everything. Although Gandhi thought about village reform from the standpoint of health and hygiene, society and politics, yet it was the economic project of spinning khadi that was intricately tied to his political programme of nation-building. As Natasha Eaton has observed, from 1921, Gandhi had the spinning of the charkha (spinning wheel) at the forefront of his village organisation initiative. The use of khadi (homespun white cloth) demonstrated the centrality of the white cloth as the means by which the geo body of the nation could be made imaginable.292 Tagore was against such mass movements be it radical political mobilisation, as seen in Swadeshi Bengal, or the nationwide spinning drive that Gandhi advocated. He wrote:

That is why I am not ashamed, - though there is every reason to be afraid, - to admit that the depths of my mind have not been moved by the charkha agitation… I am strongly of the opinion that all intense pressure of persuasion brought upon the crowd psychology is unhealthy for it. Some strong and wide-spread intoxication of belief among a vast number of men can suddenly produce a convenient uniformity of purpose, immense and powerful. Human nature has its elasticity; and dies in the name of urgency, it can be forced towards a particular direction far beyond its normal and wholesome limits. But the rebound is sure to follow, and the consequent

290 Bipin Chandra Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj: The Rise of new Patriotism (Calcutta: Yugayatri Prakashak, 1954), 289 291 Ibid., 292 See Natasha Eaton, ‘Swadeshi Colour: Artistic Production and Indian Nationalism ca. 1905 - ca. 1947’ The Art Bulletin 95, No. 4 (December, 2013): 630

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disillusionment will leave behind it a desert track of demoralisation… And therefore I am afraid of a blind faith on a very large scale in the charkha, in a country, which is so liable to succumb to the lure of short cuts when pointed out by a personality about whose moral earnestness they can have no doubt.293 Tagore moved away from the momentary excitement such movements could inspire. When ‘the nation’ was being evoked as a political category to stage protests and organise a mass movement against partition, and the village was used as an instrument at the hands of a larger collective, ‘the nation’, Tagore kept emphasising the need for imagining a collective, a samaj that was opposed to ‘a nation,’ and had the village at its core.

Tagore’s contribution to politics is rooted in his conceptualisation of the country as desh as opposed to a nation. In 1901, in his essay ‘Nation ki’ Tagore proclaimed that ‘Nations are not eternal. Each one has a beginning and will come to an end.’294 Thus, he found it futile to channel his energies into nation-building or forging a national unity, taking a contrasting position to many of his contemporaries in Bengal. With reference to the Swadeshi movement, Bipin Chandra Pal was of the view that ‘the cornerstone of this movement’ was ‘namely Faith in the people, Faith in the genius of the Nation, faith in God, who has been guiding the genius of this Nation through historic evolution…’295 He also maintained that ‘it is in the flowering of the national mind that may be induced by any particular movement that one must seek for the surest test of its strength and reality.’296 Contrary to these views, Tagore wrote,

[W]e have no word for Nation in our language. When we borrow this word from other people, it never fits us…The idea that our country is ours merely because we were born into it, can only be held by those who are fastened in a parasitic existence upon the outside world… Therefore, that only can be a man’s true country which he can help to create by his wisdom and will, his love and his actions. So, in 1905, I called upon my countrymen to create their country by putting forth their own powers from within. For the act of creation itself, is the realization of truth.297 In his essay ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ (1904) Tagore made clear his opposition to the borrowed concept of the ‘nation.’ He wrote that, unlike in Europe, since ancient times, the ‘state’ has never been the

293 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Cult of Charkha’ (1921) in S. Bhattacharya ed. The Mahatma and the Poet (1997), 105-106 294 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nation ki’ in Rabindra Rachanabali (RR) Vol. 12 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1961-68), 675. The original date of publication is mentioned above. 295 Bipin Chandra Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj (Yugayatri Prakashak: Calcutta, 1954), 137 296 Ibid., 137, 96 297 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’ in S. Bhattacharya (1997), 77

86 lifeblood of India, and has always remained external to the ‘society’ (samaj) which formed the core of its civilisation.298 Tagore’s essay ‘Nationalism’, published in 1917 and in which he offers an in-depth critique of nationalism attracted much criticism from his contemporaries. C.R. Das questioned the views of the poet who, according to him, had been ‘the high-priest of the nation- idea at the inception of the Swadeshi movement.’ The ‘whole of [Tagore’s] anti-nation idea’ appeared to Das as ‘insubstantial—based upon a vague and nebulous conception of universal humanity.’ Das refused to accept that the ‘idea of nationalism was a foreign importation.’ The ‘spirit of nationalism’, for him, was founded upon a ‘permanent and immutable relation, which subsists between a particular people and the land which they inhabit.’ Thus, for C.R. Das Bengali, nationalism which was moulded by the soil and atmosphere of Bengal would become the ground on which ‘the universal brotherhood of man’ could be forged.299

Differing with such views, Tagore opined that the groundwork had to begin in the villages where people unite themselves into a community and set out on improving its health and education, its economic life, and its amusements no less. In his view, this would be a swaraj for the whole of India. It had to be an organic process which thrived on its own living growth and not on an external set of meanings or practices.300 Tagore’s contention with the notions of nation and his distinctive interpretation of swaraj were also reasons for his discomfort with and subsequent withdrawal from the Swadeshi movement. The importance of this move for understanding Tagore’s political commitments as well as its significance for the working of the Santiniketan ashram are discussed next.

Tagore and Boycott: Education’s association with politics

The contest between the coloniser and the colonised was conceived of as a battle between nations, which presupposed forging a national unity among Indian people. Surendranath Banerjea

298 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ 1904 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1962). Translations mine. 299 See Sugata Bose and Ira Pandey, ‘Tagore Universalism and Cosmopolitanism’ India International Centre Quarterly 38, No. 1 (Summer 2011): 7-8 300 Tagore’s views on swaraj are scattered across many essays. I examined two of them here: ‘The striving for Swaraj’ (1925) and his Presidential Address delivered at a session of Congress (1908). In response to the launch of a nationwide spinning drive by Gandhi in an attempt to achieve swaraj, Tagore wrote ‘The Call for Truth’ (1921) which too contains some ideas on swaraj. I have also referred to these texts to present his ideas on swaraj in Chapter IV.

87 considered this unity to be ‘primarily the unity of the English educated.’301 It has been mentioned earlier that the Swadeshi agitation saw students and youth groups being actively involved in the anti-partition. About the excitement of the Swadeshi days Rathindranath Tagore recollects:

I remember how Bipin Chandra Pal, Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, Ramendra Sundar Trivedi, Hem Chandra Mullick, Satish Chandra Mukherjee and others would often turn up in the middle of the night and hold secret conferences with Father and Gaganendranath about some wild project. All sorts of rumours would spread like wild fire in one moment to be replaced by others of a more thrilling nature […]302 The plan for political action during the times was taken on the spur of the moment and dozens of young men flung themselves in the wave of excitement to execute them. Rathindranath Tagore’s recollections confirm that his father was involved in such activities, at least in the initial days. However, Rabindranath did not support the participation of students in the boycott movement. He recounts:

I remember the day, during the swadeshi movement in Bengal, when a crowd of young students came to see me in the first-floor hall of our Vichitra House. They said to me that if I would order them to leave their schools and colleges they would instantly obey. I was emphatic in my refusal to do so, and they went away angry, doubting the sincerity of my love for my motherland.303 Tagore did not sympathise with a movement that was essentially negative—one which would tempt students out of their schools without arranging any viable alternatives. He was discouraged to lightly take upon himself ‘the tremendous responsibility of a mere negative programme for them which would uproot their life from its soil, however thin and poor that soil might be.’304 With regard to education’s association with politics, Aurobindo Ghose considered reforming education as an important aspect of emancipation and stressed the need to create a band of educated workers who would be devoted to the service of the nation, and restore her to the pedestal of glory that was rightfully hers in the scale of nations. He stated that ‘steps should be taken for promoting a system

301 Surendranath’s Address on Indian Unity to the Student’s Association, Calcutta, 16th March, 1878. Cited in K.P. Karunakaran, Modern Indian Political Tradition (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1962), 40 302 Rathindranath Tagore (1958), 69-70 303 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Reflections on non-cooperation and Cooperation,’ in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya ed. The Mahatma and the Poet (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997), 58. These views were expressed by Tagore in a letter to C.F. Andrews published in The Modern Review (May,1921) 304 Ibid.

88 of education, literary, scientific and technical, suited to the requirements of the country on national lines, under national control and to establish and maintain national schools across the country.’305 An emphasis on the ‘national’ is evident in Aurobindo’s plan of political action. This commitment, however, was only a positive supplement to the more important negative programme of boycott that he championed. The boycott agitation’s multi-pronged approach was aimed at paralysing the foreign administration as Ghose considered political freedom to be quintessential for any social and moral regeneration. It is in this respect that Aurobindo Ghose’s response to students in boycotting government schools was very different from Tagore. On the issue of observing educational strike Ghose remarked:

A few boys will be expelled here, a teacher dismissed there, a school disaffiliated where it is most difficult to replace it until the power of the attack and the helplessness of the defence demoralizes us into submission…We should now learn to take of our own initiative the steps which our country, our duty, our self- respect demand of us and not wait to be forced unwillingly to it by the pressure of circumstances…. We should therefore declare an educational strike by which the students would …rather profit than lose by it mentally, morally and physically.306 As a staunch supporter of the boycott resolution, Ghose was fiercely critical of Tagore’s distance from it. About Tagore’s anti-boycott stance, he wrote:

Let our Babu Rabindranath not forget this supreme significance of the boycott. It was no mere outcome of resentment, spite or pique, but an act of the people in fulfilment of a deep-felt yearning, to the birth and growth of which the poet- prophet himself had so much contributed.307 Reminding Tagore of his full-hearted involvement in the Swadeshi movement by penning songs, Ghose hoped that Tagore would be supporting the boycott resolution with similar excitement. Tagore was influenced neither by the criticism of Ghose nor the official crackdown on the boycott movement. The government came down heavily upon the boycott agitation and issued a circular on October 23, 1905, that read as follows:

A circular has been issued by the District Magistrates to the heads of schools and colleges in the mofussil pointing out that the use which has recently been made of school boys and students for political purposes is absolutely subversive to discipline

305 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose (Chandernagore: Prabartak Publishing House, 1922), 177 306Aurobindo Ghose, ‘An Educational Strike’ Bande Mataram (May 29, 1907). In Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee ed. Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics (Calcutta: Firma, 1964), 82-83 307 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Why the Boycott Succeeded’ Bande Mataram (30 July, 1908): 125-28

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and injurious to the interests of boys and cannot be tolerated. Warning is given that unless the school and college authorities and teachers prevent their pupils from taking public action in connection with political questions or the so-called Swadeshi movement, the schools and colleges concerned will forfeit their grants-in-aid and privileges.308 As the Santiniketan ashram was not supported by any government grant, the circular would not apply to the students at Tagore’s institute. It was not authoritative to mandate Tagore’s advice to students asking them to refrain from boycott. Tagore’s propositions, in effect, emerged from his division with the Bengali intelligentsia on the question of swaraj.

Swaraj for the nation and Mukti for humanity: Tagore’s views

The Swadeshi movement brought to the forefront the question of attaining swaraj. The clamour for swaraj or self-rule was deeply rooted in the idea of a nation as an embodiment of divinity. Aurobindo Ghose committed himself to a programme of national emancipation which had the worship of the divine motherland at the centre of its political agenda:

We recognise no political object of worship except the divinity in our Motherland, no present object of political endeavour except liberty, and no method or action as politically good or evil except as it truly helps or hinders our progress towards national emancipation. 309 Idioms of the divine were intricately woven into Ghose’s political programme of emancipating the motherland and he proclaimed liberty as the object of the nationalist project. Tagore, however, resorted to a wide variety of innovative media borrowed from elements of traditional folklore such as melas (fairs), jatras (pilgrimages), and kathakatas (religious recitals) in his essay ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ (1904). This was done as a means of educating people and bridging the gap between the masses and the elite, stressing the need for such activities to be conducted in the vernacular medium.310 The different political strategies available to leaders of the Swadeshi movement and ways in which they chose to use them becomes crucial for distinguishing Tagore’s brand of politics from that of other prominent leaders, most notably Aurobindo Ghose.

308 The Pioneer was an English newspaper founded in Allahabad in 1865. From 1869 it became a daily. See The Pioneer (October 23, 1905). 309 Aurobindo Ghose, Doctrine of Passive Resistance, 66-67. In Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903- 1908. 310 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ 1904 published later in RR Vol. IV. (1961).

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Aurobindo Ghose considered spirituality as an essential pre-requisite of political service and proclaimed:

To fight this imperialism that pretended to be benevolent, it is necessary first to create a vanguard of revolutionaries united into an institution. What is needed now is a band of spiritual workers whose tapasya (spiritual quest) will be devoted to the liberation of India…the organisation of Swaraj can only be effected by a host of self-less workers who will make it their sole life-work.311 It is observed here that Ghose is drawing a direct correlation between the devotion of a band of spiritual workers and India’s chances at liberation which he understands as ‘the organization of swaraj.’ He also proceeded to caution Indians that:

It is idle to feign that we can even think of regaining our spiritual greatness without re-establishing our normal political relation with the other advanced peoples of the world. In fact, the true aim of the nationalist movement is to restore the spiritual greatness of the nation by the essential preliminary of its political regeneration.312 For Ghose, spiritual greatness was secondary to the political regeneration of the nation, yet both were intrinsically linked to his vision of swaraj. Scholars have viewed him as fundamentally transforming the notion of emancipation into components of an ideology that ‘linked the culturalist conception of humanity to the indigenous tradition of Hinduism.’313 In other words, for Ghose, idioms of Hinduism became the basis for perceiving humanity albeit in cultural terms.

For Tagore, politics, spirituality, and the project of national regeneration were interconnected but the terms in which he worked out their association, distinguished him from Ghose who preached nationalism as a religion, with devout fervour. Tagore wrote:

Our fight is a spiritual fight, it is for Man. We are to emancipate man from the meshes that he himself has woven around him – these organisations of National Egoism. The butterfly will have to be persuaded that the freedom of the sky is of higher value than the shelter of the cocoon… And then Man will find his swaraj.

311 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Need of the Moment’ Bande Mataram (March 18, 1908). Source: NMML Microfilm section. 312 Aurobindo Ghose ‘Politics and Spirituality’ (November, 9, 1907) in Haridas Mukherjee, Uma Mukherjee eds. Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian politics. Being a study in the ideas of Indian Nationalism, based on the rare writings of Sri Aurobindo in the daily Bande Mataram during the years 1906-1908 (Calcutta: Firma, 1964), 218- 19 313 Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 142

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We, the famished, ragged, ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all Humanity.314 Tagore asserted that men need to be freed from the meshes of egoism that were woven around the concept of nation. They needed to be convinced that the attainment of swaraj for the nation, to which they had devoted themselves blindly, was not their true purpose. It was the attainment of freedom for humanity that was at stake. The national struggle, therefore, was to be replaced by a universal one, ‘for all of humanity.’ Tagore warned:

What is Swaraj? It is maya, it is a like a mist, that will vanish leaving no stain on the radiance of the Eternal. However, we may delude ourselves with the phrases learnt from the West, swaraj is not our objective.315 Tagore neither endorses nor totally dismisses ‘swaraj’. He ties the concept to the emancipation of man rather than the self-governance of the nation which was a concept borrowed from ‘the West’ and unsuited to the Indian cause. What made Tagore conceive of swaraj as a Western category, and his discomfort with it, can be seen from the rampant invocation of swaraj in the early twentieth century. Jawaharlal Nehru observed:

Of course, we all grew eloquent about swaraj, but each one of us probably interpreted the word in his or her own way. To most of the younger men it meant political independence, or something like it, and a democratic form of government, and we said it at our public utterances.316 Before Gandhi articulated his understanding of the term in his Hind Swaraj (1909), the word ‘swaraj’ was introduced by Dadabhai Naoroji in his Presidential Address to the session of The Indian National Congress in 1906. He proclaimed the goal of the Congress as attainting ‘swaraj’, a synonym of ‘self-government’ like that of the United Kingdom. Later, Bal Gangadhar Tilak added a more militant and nationalistic fervour to the concept by adding, ‘Swarajya is my birth right and I will have it.’317 He did not advocate the model of colonial self-government, but agitated for the realisation of complete independence.318 Gandhi’s version of swaraj probed deeper into the

314 Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Reflections on Co-operation and Non-cooperation’ in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya ed. The Mahatma and the Poet (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997), 61-62 315 Ibid., 316 Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom (New York: John Day, 1941), 74 317 Bal Gangadhar Tilak made this pronouncement in May 1908. See Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 330, 107 318C. Mackenzie Brown, ‘Svarāj, the Indian Ideal of Freedom: A Political or Religious Concept?’ Religious Studies 20, No. 3 (September, 1984).

92 roots of the problems that plagued Indian society. He argued that his patriotism did not teach him ‘to allow people to be crushed under the toes of Indian princes once the English retire.’319 Political freedom as self-governance and as territorial independence were folded into the term ‘swaraj.’ In Bengal, one finds a convergence of views held by Ghose and Tagore on the issue of swaraj being a Western import as Ghose argued that, ‘Swaraj as a sort of European ideal, political liberty for the sake of political self-assertion, will not awaken India.’320 However, Tagore’s views on the ongoing association and engagement by his contemporaries with the term swaraj read as:

Some of us say that we want self-government within the British Commonwealth. Others say we want independence without any British connection. We forget that all such claims are mere verbal gymnastics. They refer to objects so distant that they have no bearing on our responsibilities of today… Freedom for the individual as for the nation, freedom is the ultimate goal… the obstacles to its attainment lie hidden in our own nature and must first be removed by work… If we do not remove them through deeds, we cannot do so through mere debates. 321 Tagore moves away from swaraj to uphold ‘freedom.’ It is not simply a linguistic preference but implied the limitedness of what the term swaraj captured through the various interpretations it has had. For Tagore, bickering over the meaning of swaraj was a waste of valuable energy. Discussing the pros and cons of swaraj in an atmosphere which required prompt action would result in a verbal cyclone with no reasonable solutions. His commitment was to building a sound programme of work dedicated to building an edifice that reflected national aspirations. Opposed to swaraj Tagore upheld the idea of mukti which derived its essence from the perfectness of human relationships. It became the bridge between individual and social freedom as it was founded on the notion of relatedness of human beings among themselves as well as with their samaj. In Tagore’s words:

Comfort is mine alone, welfare is universal. When I pray to the Father to bestow upon me all that is good, I ask for the goodness of the universe to be issued to me. My welfare lies in the welfare of all…When the wellness of the universe is at stake we need to abide by every rule till the very end. We cannot ignore any liabilities or

319 Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1909), 68 320 Bande Mataram, 3 May I908, cited in Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee eds., 'Bande Mataram' and Indian Nationalism (1906-1908) (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1957), 84-5 321 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Presidential Address’ delivered at Pabna in 1908. Cited in Rabindranath Tagore, Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), 114-115

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fetters that come in the way… Only on internalising this provision completely can we attain mukti.322 As observance of rules and regulations were compulsory to ensure the wellbeing of all, mukti does not translate as an absence of regulations or impediments. On the contrary, it seeks the acknowledgement of regulations that ensures welfare for all. Mukti is distinguishable from swaraj insofar as it does not have the nation as the object of reference. It is also distinct from the idea of liberation articulated as ‘moksha.’323 While ‘moksha’ sees the loss of individuality as its ultimate goal or highest end, ‘mukti’ does not require self-renunciation for attaining fulfilment of human relationships. Instead, through mukti, the individual assumes for himself the important task of attaining, in the human world, the ‘perfect arrangement of interdependence’ which ‘gives rise to freedom.’324

Tagore disengaged with the ideal of swaraj, while also being vocal against the methods adopted in the course of the Swadeshi movement, for its attainment. Years later he wrote:

In the heat of the enthusiasm of the partition days, a band of youths attempted to bring about the millennium through political revolution. Their offer of themselves as the first sacrifice of the fire which they had lighted makes not only their country, but other countries as well, bow their heads to them in reverence… In the midst of the supreme travail they realised at length that the way of bloody revolution is not the true way;… a political revolution is like a short cut to nothing… it does not reach the goal, and only grievously hurts the feet… these impetuous youths offered their lives as the price of their country’s deliverance; to them it meant the loss of their all but alas! The price offered on behalf of the country was insufficient.325 Tagore disapproved of the method of political revolution in which young lives were lost and yet the objective of attaining deliverance for the country was far from sight. Tagore’s disagreement with boycott as a means of protest was an extension of his opposition to what political engagements were directed at. He wrote:

In my paper called ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ … I discussed at length the ways and means by which we could make the country of our birth more fully our own… I did not

322 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Niyam o Mukti’ (dated 30 Chaitra, year unknown). Source RBA Manuscript files. Translations mine. 323 See Mithi Mukherjee, ‘Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Non-violence and the Pursuit of a Different Freedom in Modern India’ The American Historical Review 115, No.2 (April, 2010): 453-473. Moksha is the Buddhist idea of obtaining liberation by renouncing all worldly attachments. 324 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Philosophy of Our People’ (19th December, 1925). 325 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’ (1921) in S. Bhattacharya ed. The Mahatma and the Poet (1997), 80

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fail to lay emphasis on the truth, that we must win our country, not from some foreigner, but from our own inertia, our own indifference… Any public benefit done by the alien government goes to their credit not ours… our country will only get more and more completely lost to us thereby.326 Tagore objected to the idea of obtaining help from the government to alleviate the conditions facing India. He was of the view that getting support from the foreign rulers would estrange the people from their own country. Hence, swadeshbhakti327 became the touchstone of the educational curricula at his Santiniketan ashram. In addition, the analysis of the daily activities of Tagore’s ashram helps reveal how mukti was made realisable in practice. The dynamics between discipline and obedience, between freedoms and restrictions bring out the essence of Tagore’s version of freedom i.e. mukti, discussed at length in Chapter IV.

The Santiniketan ashram and Swadeshi Bengal

In August 1905, the Santiniketan Brahmacharyasram set up in 1901, was still in its formative stages, when students in Calcutta organised themselves in bands and began parading the bazaars to enforce the boycott with remarkable success. The attitude of students, frightened the Governments of both Bengals, compelling them to suppress these actions.328 To estimate the impact of the Swadeshi movement on the Santiniketan ashram, one needs to reckon with two simultaneous forces at work. One was the tide of political protests that took Bengal in its grip in the years following the announcement of its partition. The second was the participation of Tagore in that tide. I have already discussed these earlier in the chapter. I aim to highlight here, that when the students in Calcutta publicly expressed their views on ideas of Swadeshi and boycott, in several meetings across July and August of 1905, Santiniketan too felt the impact of the political turmoil that swept Bengal in those years. This happened despite Tagore’s advocacy of keeping educational institutions away from the heat of political agitation. But as Tagore himself participated in the movement, Santiniketan was reeling under the absence of its founder.

Ajit Chakrabarty, one of the first teachers at the ashram, recounts:

The great national Movement with its trumpet-blast of Bande Mataram, its flaunting hopes and high aspirations, its riotous extent and frantic expectancy, came. The poet

326Rabindranath Tagore, in Ibid., 77 327 For details see Chapter III. 328 See Hiren Chakrabarty, Political Protest in Bengal Boycott and Terrorism 1905-1918 (Kolkata: Papyrus, 1992).

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became its high priest. The ashram was no longer a shadow of the benighted past, it was a reality of the dawning day. The country consciousness surged high in the ashram. Of course, the Western features of the school, e.g. self-government of the boys and the atmosphere of freedom, did not suffer at this period. But the emphasis was certainly laid on the spirit of ancient India. Not simply on the spiritual side of India, but on the side of social life and rules as well, which were, without question, narrow and convention bound.329 An emphasis upon the ancient ideals of India where life was governed by narrow social conventions also meant that the ashram was increasingly adopting the word’s conventional meaning i.e. of observing the strict tenets of Brahmacharya, following the organisation of human life in four stages or ashrams. This was opposed to Tagore’s intended purpose of setting it up as a space ‘where nature and human soul lives in a selfless union.’330 Despite Tagore’s withdrawal from the anti-partition agitation, when it took a violent turn, government officials were suspicious of the Santiniketan project. Sudhi Ranjan Das, a student of the ashram in those days, recounts in his essay ‘Amader Santiniketan’ that the English governors were initially doubtful regarding the whereabouts of the erstwhile Swadeshi leader hailing from the Thakur Bari331 of Calcutta, and his mission in the desolate fields of Bolpur. Following their suspicions government employees or sympathisers of the British regime were reluctant to send their children to the ashram, which resulted in reduced enrolment.332 In addition to Tagore’s absence from the ashram, what made matters worse was Aurobindo Ghose’s endorsement of Tagore’s nomination as the President of the Pabna Provincial Congress in 1908,333 which inspired other Congress workers, like Kalimohan Ghosh, Nepal Chandra Roy and Hiralal Sen, to join Tagore at Santiniketan.334 As a result,

329 Cited in Kathleen M. O’Connell, Rabindranath Tagore The Poet As Educator (Visva-Bharati, 2002), 149 330 See footnote, 197 331 In Bengal the residence of the Tagore’s was known as Thakur Bari. The surname ‘Thakur’ was anglicized as ‘Tagore’. 332 See Sudhi Ranjan Das ‘Amader Santiniketan’ (Visva Bharati, 1366 B.S., 1959), 12. Translation mine. Another account discussing Santiniketan during swadeshi is by Jyotirmoy Ghosh, Bangabhongo o Swadeshi Andolan ebong Rabindranath (Kolkata: Punascha, 2005). 333 Aurobindo Ghose was of the opinion that the literature and music of the Bengali poet had been a source of inspiration of the Bengali nationalists in ways similar to that of the great Greek poets who had ushered in the nationalist movement in that country. See Bande Mataram, January 30th, 1908. Source: Microfilm Section NMML (New Delhi). 334 Hiralal Sen joined the ashram in 1909. He was arrested by the government for a collection of patriotic verses dedicated to Rabindranath titled ‘Hunkar’. His close association with the Swadeshi movement made him a suspect in the eyes of the government and Tagore had to remove him from the services of the ashram and employ him in the Tagore estates. Similarly, Kalimohan Ghosh while protesting the partition of Bengal joined the Anushilan Samiti (the secret revolutionary group) leaving his college in 1904. He joined the ashram in 1907. Nepal Chandra Roy too

96 suspicions of the government peaked, and by 1912, the Director of Public Instruction who was in charge of East Bengal and Assam Mr Sharp wrote to the Director of Education in Bengal:

…It has come to my knowledge that an institution known as Santiniketan or Brahmacharyasrama at Bolpur in the Birbhum district of Bengal, is a place altogether unsuitable for the education of the sons of Government servants. As I have information that some Government servants in this province have sent their children there, I think it is necessary to ask you to warn any well-disposed Government servant whom you may know or believe to have sons in this institution or to be about to send sons to it, to withdraw them or refrain from sending them as the case may be.335 In the midst of such crisis, Tagore’s emphasis on bringing students closer to the social reality of their country could be gauged from his address to students in 1905. A telling excerpt from it is cited below:

I do not vouch for knowing one’s country alone. There is a sense of fulfilment that being in tune with the actions and reactions of people, feeling their pulse warrants, which no amount of bookish knowledge or classroom teaching can guarantee. Only by closely observing actual people, alive and active, can one learn about them and such learning holds within it immense possibilities which classroom education falls short of offering... We have given immense importance to books, ignoring the reality of which the book is a mere reflection...If our students can dismiss the lethargic reliance on books and seek the knowledge of their surroundings themselves, their work will undoubtedly be rewarded.336 The way in which the ashram conducted itself during the Swadeshi movement illustrates how Tagore’s instructions were implemented despite the challenges faced by the ashram. Scholars have observed that during the Swadeshi movement, teachers at the Santiniketan ashram urged their pupils to teach the boys at the neighbouring village, they would also assist the villagers in their daily activities. The teachers also shared the responsibilities of teaching and, in some cases, providing villagers with Homeopathic medicines.337 However, some issues still remained. Ajit

shared close association with the National Movement and aspired to inspire students with idealism and build character for future citizens of India, which made him a suspect in the eyes of the government. 335 Cited in Prasanta Kumar Pal, Rabijibani Vol. 8 (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2001). See also Amiya Ghosh, ‘Santiniketan Sriniketan in Police File’ Proceedings of the Indian History Congress Vol.70 (2009-2010): 538-9 336 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Chhatrader Prati Sambhasan’ (1322 B.S.)(1905), 24 in Shiksha (1944). Translations mine. This address was delivered at Bangiya Sahitya Parishad to a group of University students. The crux of the point that Tagore made was to devise a system of education that would not hold students captive to books and classrooms but offer them the scope to learn and investigate for themselves their socio-political realities and become individuals who are not just well informed but aware and agile. 337 See Swati Ghosh and Ashok Sarkar ed. Kabir Pathshala Patha Bhavan o Shikhsa Satrer Itihas (Calcutta: Signet Press, 2015), 35. Translations mine.

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Kumar Chakrabarty recounts that the most disturbing trend that the ashram experienced during the peak of the Swadeshi movement was ‘discipline’ becoming its characteristic feature. Differences arose among teachers as selfishness and self-governance became commonplace at the ashram. Some of the denizens began to view the ashram in terms of the nation and others in terms of character building. The ideal of spiritualism was fragmented and the various approaches adopted by the ashramites for its realisation, did not lead upto it.338 These differences became most visible when Mohitchandra Sen took charge of the ashram in 1904, and despite his academic prowess, the notion of Brahmacharyasram, under him moved further away from Tagore’s ashram model through the introduction of an expanded curriculum and the admission of older students to higher classes. Upon his return to the ashram, Tagore brought in some changes, and in the years following 1906, only boys of less than twelve years of age were to be admitted to the ashram.339 By 1907-08 Tagore had introduced at his ashram, the learning of music and arts as a formal part of educating students, including opportunities for playing sports along with engaging in spiritual practices.340 The designing and implementation of such practices show that Tagore’s ashram was the centre stage where his political ideas engaged in a complex interplay.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I traced the influences of the literary, religious, and national movements on the politics of Swadeshi Bengal which constitutes the working context of the Santiniketan ashram. I discussed Tagore’s concerns as well as contentions with his predecessors, Bankim and Ram Mohan Roy, as well as with the Bengali intelligentsia leading the Swadeshi agitation. Tagore did envisage a free India, centred on the idea of samaj with self-sufficient village units. Unlike Bankim, the accusations of effeminacy levelled against the Bengali bhadralok (English-educated middle class), did not make Tagore resort to Hindu idioms as a strategy to counter such allegations.

338 Ajit Kumar Chakrabarty, Brahmavidyalay (Visva-Bharati, 1951). 339 See Ajit Neogy, Twin Dreams of Tagore (2010), 35. Mohitchandra Sen was a scholar of English and Philosophy who joined the Brahmavidyalay in February 1904. Besides his service as the principal of the school, Sen extended financial support to the educational mission of Tagore. He was also actively involved in the Swadeshi movement and his oratorical skills were applauded by Sister Nivedita who sought his cooperation in propagating Nationalism. Ill health however, had him return to Calcutta and take up teaching at the City College since 1905. 340 Ghosh and Sarkar (2016), 47 Kathleen O’Connell in her book, Rabindranath Tagore The Poet as Educator (Visva-Bharati, 2002), 148 writes, though Tagore ‘had been an active participant in the National Council, he gradually began to move away from its activities. His essay ‘The problem of Education’ delivered in June 1906, as a response to N.C.E request for a constitution for the school section, indirectly brings out his own differences with the Council.’

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In fact, Tagore moved away from the tendencies of worshipping the nation as a mother goddess and made pupils of his ashram aware of the living realities of their country by bringing them in close contact with village life. While objecting to student participation in violent political agitations, he advocated their physical well-being and spiritual training as opposed to martial training aimed at making them revolutionaries for serving their ‘nation.’ Tagore’s dismissal of the ‘nation’ and denouncement of ‘nationalism’ informed his ideas of ‘swadesh’ and the congregational ritual practices at Santiniketan ashram. Tagore’s stance on ‘swaraj’ reveals his discomfort with the concept of self-governance that was to be earned at the mercy of alien rule. He prescribed a programme of constructive village work that would ensure making the country of one’s birth truly one’s own. His proposed ideal of mukti was not an absence of bondage but a scheme for universal welfare. The contest between swaraj and mukti informed the practices of the ashram and its daily life.

This chapter has outlined Tagore’s deviance from the nationalist current which was foundational to his politics conducted at the ashram. Tagore’s objection to and distance from the political vocabulary of the Bengali leaders during Swadeshi agitation, saw the articulation of his alternative political lexicon. Tagore’s anti-statist politics articulated through the keywords, swadesh, mukti, and supreme persons actively interacted with one another in the premises of Santiniketan, away from the ‘dusty politics’ of swaraj that had taken Bengal in its grip in the aftermath of its partition.

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Chapter III: Dharmashiksha and swadeshbhakti at the Santiniketan ashram

In 1912, Tagore wrote to C.F. Andrews:

I sold all my books, my copyrights, everything I had, in order to carry on with the school. I cannot really tell you what a struggle it was, and what difficulties I had to go through. At first the object in view was patriotism, but later on it grew more spiritual. Then in the midst of all these outer difficulties and trials, there came the greatest change of all … the change in my own inner life.341 This chapter discusses the spiritual objective of the Santiniketan ashram and its relation to patriotism though the institutionalisation of dharmashiksha and swadeshbhakti that Tagore designed for his ashram.

In his 1902 letter to Kunjalal Ghosh,342 Tagore provided a detailed plan for the working of the ashram, which is considered to be its first constitution.343 Tagore wrote that ‘[T]he students of the Brahmavidyalaya must be made especially faithful and devoted to their own country.’344 He further insisted that this commitment and loyalty of pupils to their country was not a cultivation of ‘nationalism’, which he derided as a bhougalik apadevata (territorial demon) and saw Santiniketan as an ‘alternative educational mission’ and ‘a temple to exorcise that demon.’345 But what was Tagore’s ‘faith and devotion to one’s own country’ – his swadeshbhakti – if not nationalism? And how was this attitude to be cultivated at the ashram? In this chapter, I examine Tagore’s distinctive idea of devotion to one’s own country—swadeshbhakti—which he considered antithetical to nationalism, and dharmashiksha, his ideas of a ‘spiritual’ education at the Santiniketan ashram, as the means to cultivate it.

In the ashram’s first constitution, Tagore wrote:

In this world many things are bought and sold, but dharma is not such a commodity. On the one hand it is given through the desire for mangal (wellbeing), on the other

341 Rabindranath Tagore to C. F. Andrews, letter written from London in September, 1912. See Letters to a Friend (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1928), 28-29 342 Kunjalal Ghosh was a close associate of Tagore and a guru at the ashram. He joined the Brahmacharyasram in 1902 as a teacher and secretary. It was to him that Rabindranath Tagore wrote the letter which is understood as the first working constitution of the school and entrusted him with the responsibility of carrying out the ideals set out therein. 343 Tagore’s letter to Kunjalal Ghosh (1902). See Kathleen M. O’Connell, Rabindranath Tagore, The Poet Educator (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 2002), 65. The author offers the first English translation of this letter in this volume. 344 Paragraph 6 of the letter in O’Connell (2002), 129 345 Rabindranath Tagore’s letter to Jagadananada Roy, cited in Seema Bandopadhyay, Rabindrasangite Swadeshchetana (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1986), 22

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it is accepted with humble faith. Because of this, learning was not considered to be a commodity in ancient India. Nowadays those who teach are simply teachers, but at that time those who gave lessons were considered gurus. Along with the learning, such a thing was given which could only be transferred through the adhyatmik (spiritual) guru-disciple relationship. The prime objective of the Santiniketan Brahmavidyalay is to establish this paramarthik (spiritual) relationship.346 Tagore offers no further explanation of the term adhyatmik. He proclaims the realisation of the paramarthik bond between the guru and the pupil as the purpose of founding the Brahmacharyasram. ‘Paramartha’, which I explore next, also meant the attainment of a ‘transcendent goal’, which for Tagore was the way to attain dharma. About this relation, Tagore wrote:

That the attainment of humanness is not a selfish goal but a transcendent goal (paramartha)—this our forefathers knew. The education at the base of this humanness is called Brahmacharya. It constituted more than memorising and passing exams. Brahmacharya is a sadhana (discipline) preparing one for worldly duties – by self-control, by devout faith, by purity and one pointed dedication – for the mundane state of life and, beyond the mundane state, for the discipline of eternal union with the Brahman (the divine). This is the path of dharma.347 The above excerpt prompts some pertinent questions such as: What meaning did Tagore ascribe to dharma? By dharma, did he mean ‘religion’ as ‘organised belief’?348 How did dharma render itself in the day-to-day practices of the ashram? Was it converted into religious instruction?

Tagore does not expressly theorise spirituality, dharma, or religion, but his thoughts on these concepts pervade many of his essays. In order to arrive at an understanding of Tagore’s distinctive notion of dharmashiksha, I have referred mostly to his essays ‘Tapovan’ (1909) and ‘Dharmashiksha’ (1911), which are especially eloquent about his understanding of spirituality and spiritual practices. They supplement the letter he wrote to Kunjalal which spells out his vision of

346 See O’Connell (2002), 66. I have used the author’s translations for the most part but the words adhyatmik and paramarthik have been included from the original Bangla text in Chhithipatra Vol. 13 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, Grantha Bibhag, 1992), 164. Connell translates both the terms adhyatmik and paramarthik as ‘spiritual’ which is not misleading as in any standard Bangla to English dictionary, the meaning of adhyatmik is given as relating to the supreme spirit or soul or belonging to the Supreme Being, while paramarthik means pertaining to a spiritual object. Here, I have taken recourse to Ashutosh Dey’s, Students’ Bengali to English Dictionary (Calcutta, 1950). 347 Ibid., 66. Here Tagore uses paramartha as a transcendent goal. 348 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Macmillan, 1931), 107

101 the guru-pupil bond at the ashram. I also draw extensively on Tagore’s Hibbert lectures, which were published as The Religion of Man (1931), for interpreting his conception of dharma and spiritual life, and the ways in which they relate to religion. The textual analysis of Santiniketan constitution’s practices, set alongside Tagore’s writings in The Religion of Man, enable a richer interpretation of Tagore’s ‘spiritual’ ideas and how these inflected his ‘political’ views. I then proceed to the understanding swadeshbhakti, for which I refer to Tagore’s ‘political’ tracts on desh and samaj as opposed to the idea of ‘nation’ contained in his essays, ‘Nation ki’ (1901), ‘Bharatvarshiya Samaj’ (1901), ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ (1904) and ‘Nationalism’(1917), to understand how spiritual cultivation developed ‘devotion to one’s own country’ (swadeshbhakti), and how it’s aims were different from the nationalism he despised. An analysis of these texts, alongside his writings on love of one’s country in the ashram’s constitution provide critical links to Tagore’s notion of swadeshbhakti and reveal the political nature of his Santiniketan project.

‘Dharma’, ‘Jivan Devata’ and the ‘guru’ at Santiniketan

I have explained, in the Introduction, that the terms I use to critically analyse Tagore’s work and views do not have fixed meanings, but refer to multivalent concepts which Tagore employed for different purposes and contexts—some with different meanings. He wrote, for instance, in the ashram’s constitution, that dharma is an end goal of the Brahmacharya; however, in The Religion of Man he defined dharma thus:

In the Sanskrit language, religion goes by the name dharma, which in the derivative meaning implies the principle of relationship that holds us firm, and in its technical sense means the virtue of a thing, the essential quality of it; for instance, heat is the essential quality of fire... Religion consists in the endeavour of men to cultivate and express those qualities which are inherent in the nature of Man the Eternal, and to have faith in him.349 Here, dharma appears as the essential quality of an object as well as ‘religion’ and the path to attaining that quality. However, Tagore points out that if such virtues were indeed inherent in human beings, then religion would have no purpose. Its aim, he writes elsewhere, is this: Man ‘misses himself when isolated, he finds his own larger and truer self in his wide human relationship... the consciousness of this unity is spiritual and our effort to be true to it is our

349 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Macmillan, 1931), 141. Emphasis mine.

102 religion.’350 These give us a very general understanding of what dharma is, but it is unclear how religion helps in establishing spiritual unity and what is the nature of this wider human relationship that Tagore hints at. Very broadly, Tagore seems to be suggesting that humans are fundamentally social, and their sociable unity is connected to their deeper divine essence. The element of human relatedness is thus interestingly entwined with the divinity of humanity. Although there is nothing specific to determine how these ideas were translated into practice and how they contribute to the process of exorcising the demon of nationalism, a close textual analysis of Tagore’s essays, alongside the practices of the ashram, clarifies the concerns.

The ashram was originally envisaged by Debendranath Tagore, who in 1888 ratified a Trust Deed in which he laid out his vision of its purpose, more than a decade before the Santiniketan Brahmacharyashram was established in 1901 by Rabindranath. The Brahmo practices of worshipping a formless God were passed down from Debendranath to Rabindranath, but the purposes of this worship were understood quite differently by the latter. A closer look at the Trust Deed of the Santiniketan ashram sanctioned by Debendranath provides a crucial lens onto this difference.

Apart from worshipping the Formless (niraakar), no community may worship any idol depicting God, man, or animals; neither may anyone arrange sacrificial fires or rituals in Santiniketan... No insult to any religion or religious deity will be allowed here. The sermons given here will be such that will be appropriate to the worship of the Creator and Father and will help in ethics, benevolence and brotherhood. To cultivate the ethos of religiosity an annual mela should be planned for and organised by the trustees. This was to be a platform for the discussion of religious ideas and practices, but any form of idol worship should be refrained from. The sale of food items other than meat and alcohol would be permitted but inappropriate indulgence in amusement is strictly forbidden.351 Through adhering to a strict anti-idolatry policy and abstinence from meat and alcohol, Debendranath dedicated this space to himself and others for meditation and spiritual retreat. A grove of Chhatim trees (Alstonia scholaris), the only vegetation in the arid land of Birbhum, was marked out specifically for meditation and there still stands a plaque that reads, ‘He is the repose of my life, the joy of my heart, the peace of my soul.’ Known today as the Chhatimtala, this place

350 Ibid., 13 351 Cited in Sri Yogesh Chandra Bagal, Debendranath Tagore 1817-1905 (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 1350 B.S.), 77. Translations mine.

103 is referred to as the starting point of the Santiniketan. Rabindranath adhered to the practice of meditating upon a formless God. Moreover, he also wrote that ‘the anxious striving of the devotee to keep himself thoroughly pure’ did not represent any ‘pride of puritanism,’ but followed from the realisation that ‘his soul is the playground where God would revel in Himself. Had not God’s radiance, His beauty, thus found its form in the Universe, its joy in the devotee, He would have remained mere formless, colourless being in the nothingness of infinity.’352 Thus, for Rabindranath, the formless, boundless God did not remain an abstract entity but came within the ambit of human realisation through the relational dimension of the divine-human bond. Tagore’s position is on what Kumkum Bhattacharya calls ‘a temporal plane’, which offers scope for an active and dynamic engagement of consciousness with the personal divinity rather than an unconscious and unconditional surrender to a universal supreme being.353 The most compelling image of the Formless divinity is captured in Tagore’s notion of the Jivan Devata, which he explains as ‘having a double strand.’ There is the ‘Vaishnava dualism – always keeping the separateness of the self, and there is the Upanishadic monism where God is wooing each individual and He is also the ground reality of all as in Vedantist unification.’354 How this worshipping of the Supreme Being could enter the realm of human realization for the residents of Santiniketan became a pivotal question for Tagore.

An analysis of the tenets of Brahmacharya life, which Tagore considered to be foundational to the guru-pupil relationship, set alongside an analysis of spiritual practices in the ashram, reveal Tagore’s ideas about how the relationship between man and divine could become practicable. It is important for us to consider here, the tenets of Brahmacharya life as outlined by Rabindranath in the Santiniketan constitution:

For attaining Brahmacharya, the students must practice austerity. Pleasure seeking and pride over riches must be renounced. I want to completely abolish the importance of wealth from the students’ minds. Wherever there are such signs it will be our responsibility to abolish them... Excessive interest in dress must be abandoned. No one should find poverty shameful or repugnant. Luxury in eating and dress also are to be removed.

352 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (1931), 230 353 See Kumkum Bhattacharya, ‘Creative Spirituality: Entering the World of Tagore’s Jivan Devata’ Literature Compass 12, No. 5(2015): 177 354 Rabindranath Tagore, Letter to E.P. Thompson (1922) Cited in Ibid.

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...The regulations concerning rising, sitting, studying, playing, bathing, eating, neatness and cleanliness must be followed rigorously. No impurities, either inside or out, concerning resting, dressing or health can be given indulgence...It is advisable for the students to clean their teacher’s quarters in rotation. Serving the teachers must be considered a necessary duty of the students. ...I wish the students to be devoted to their teachers with no reservation. Even the injustices they commit should be politely tolerated without revolt. One cannot join in criticism or rebuke of them in any way. If ever the teachers are engaged in mutual criticism, care must be taken that no student is present... Students must touch the feet of their teachers daily (pranam). The teachers should salute one another (namaskar). Through their courteous behaviour to one other, they should set a living ideal for the students.355 In stipulating the norms for the pupils, Tagore adopts an austere and authoritative tone. The three cornerstones of Brahmacharya life were austerity, steadfastness in observing rules, and a deep devotion towards the teachers at the ashram. The spiritual relationship outlined by Tagore is a unidirectional and uncritical devotion of students to their gurus. Teachers did not have to earn the respect of pupils, only to conduct themselves appropriately and abstain from mutual criticism in their presence. The guru appears to be what Kraig Klaudt has identified as a figure worthy of respect and worship. Historically, observes Klaudt, ‘the ashram has revolved around the guru who is considered as either a God or a representative of a God in various Indian writings’ where guru- student relationship is characterised by the servant-like commitment of the student to the God-like guru.356 Tagore conceived of the gurus at his ashram, as the human alternatives to schoolmasters who were the mechanical instruments of transferring knowledge to pupils.357 What is important to note, at this stage, is that if Klaudt’s observation is applied to view the gurus at Tagore’s ashram, then they would appear more oppressive than the schoolmasters in the government institutions, who they were meant to counter. Yet, in practice, we observe that at Tagore’s ashram, instead of the schoolmaster, the guru stood in opposition to the divine. The guru-pupil bond at Santiniketan was such that students were expected to be submissive and loyal to their gurus. This sat in sharp contrast with the human-divine equation, which did not rest upon a complete and unconditional submission, but rather entailed a dynamic interaction in which the divine was brought within the

355 Rabindranath’s letter to Kunjalal Ghosh as translated by O’Connell. See Rabindranath Tagore The Poet as Educator (2002), 68 356 Kraig Klaudt, ‘The Ashram as a model for Theological Education’ Theological Education 34, No. 1 (1997): 27 357 For details see Chapter I, pages 50-51 and IV, pages 130-132

105 realm of human experience. In fact, if the guru-pupil relation was strictly hierarchical, the divine- human relation was one of reciprocal unity.

Also, the caste system proved a stumbling stone in the ideal of guru-student bonding at Santiniketan. Tagore wrote, that apart from pursuing the ideals of Brahmacharya and observing the principle of respecting elders, those students and teachers who wished to adhere to the ‘rites and rituals of the Hindu society must not be restrained or demeaned in any way’ as ‘this would go against the practices of this Vidyalay.’358 The practice requiring students to touch the feet of gurus, which is expressly mentioned in the constitution, contravened the principle of respect for the ‘rites and rituals of Hindu society’ when students were Brahmins and gurus were not, further raising intense controversies in the ashram. A prominent incident surrounded Kunjalal Ghosh, a guru at Santiniketan and one of Tagore’s closest associates, to whom he wrote for the very first time about the ashram’s working plan and who he entrusted with its implementation. However, Ghosh was not a Brahmin, and a student who was, refused to touch his feet. To avoid complications, Tagore chose to uphold the rites and rituals of the Hindu society, removing Kunjalal Ghosh from the position of a guru and appointing him to a non-academic role.359 Tagore’s solution revealed the limits of his vision, in which the hierarchy of the guru-student relation was in direct conflict with the already-existing hierarchies in Hindu society. Indeed, the hierarchical social dynamics of the ashram’s institutional make-up, closely parallel those within the Hindu family, school, university and caste.360 Thus, when conflicts arose, Tagore judged in favour of the Hindu hierarchies, not those he attempted to set up in the ashram. While yearning to include girls among the ashram’s pupils, Tagore admitted that fear of social sanctions had prevented him from doing so earlier. He waited till 1909 to admit the first set of girls into his ashram, something he thought was right and proper, but was at odds with the popular views of the time. On 13th April 1909, he wrote to Manoranjan Bandopadhyay: ‘I have cherished this desire for a long time, fear prevented me from proceeding with it. Now that God has descended on our home, worship is unavoidable.’361 Tagore

358 Kathleen M. O’Connell (2002), 68 359 See Supriya Roy ed. Makers of a Mission 1901-1941 (Visva-Bharati: 2001), 38 360 See Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2 361 Rabindranath Tagore to Manoranjan Bandopadhyay, Letter dated 31 Baisakh 1315 B.S. (1909), Chhithipatra Vol. 13 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati Grantha Vibhag, 1992), 79. Translations mine. Manoranjan Bandopadhyay was a cousin of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay and joined the services of the ashram in March 1902. In his short stay at

106 did not see caste hierarchies as inimical to the ashram’s educational mission or to the realisation of the guru-student bond. He did not show the urge of ‘resolving’ the caste issue in the same way he tackled the inclusion of girls at Santiniketan. Thus, Tagore removed Kunjalal Ghosh from the position of guru, without much hesitation.

The practice of ‘spirituality’ in the ashram as distinguished from religious instruction

Tagore’s instructions for spiritual training at the ashram provide further insight into the role of social relations in his vision of the human-divine bond.

Before starting the lessons, the students should bow down after chanting in unison ‘Om pita namah si’ (I bow to thee, Father). I want that the students should be reminded daily that the God is our father and like a father always gives lessons of wisdom. The teachers are only the vehicles, but real knowledge comes from our universal father...When this knowledge is received, there follows with devotion daily prayer to the lord.362 Here God is a father. Tagore casts the divine within both the familial and familiar relational trope. The divine is located in the temporal plane of experience, devoid of idol worship practices or adherence to any particular deity or text. Tagore’s attempt was not to devise congregational practices based upon a monotheistic order which owed its allegiance to a sacred text determining the morality of actions in the secular world.363 Upholding his interpretation of dharma as the ‘essential quality’ of an entity, Tagore maintains that humanity, or ‘the essential quality of man’, can only be realised through the perfection of human relationships, in which religion and spirituality play the following role:

Man in his religion cultivates the vision of a Being who exceeds him in truth and with whom also he has a kinship... In them [religions] men seek their own supreme value, which they call divine, in some personality, anthropomorphic in character...

Santiniketan, which lasted only for a year, he prepared Rathindranath Tagore and Santosh Majumdar for their Entrance examination. 362 Paragraph fifteen of the letter. See Connell (2002), 71 363 Revivalist movements, like the Arya Samaj, discovered in Hinduism a monotheistic God, a Book, and congregational worship. This was a substantial transformation of a set of polytheistic traditions with a great variety of scriptures, none of which is really dominant, and domestic and temple worship that is seldom congregational. These movements wanted to create a modern Hinduism that would be respectable in the eyes of the world. For example: Mohandas Gandhi's use of the Bhagavad-Gita as the foundational text for social work. See Peter Van Der Veer, ‘Religion in South Asia’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002): 173-187

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religion is not essentially cosmic or even abstract; it finds itself when it touches the Brahma in man; otherwise it has no justification to exist.364 ... [T]rue spiritual realization is not through augmentation of possession in dimension or number. The truth that is infinite dwells in the ideal of unity which we find in deeper relatedness.365 Within the kinship that is at the heart of the spiritual practice at Santiniketan, the father gains pre- eminence while the mother is conspicuous in her absence. The boys at Santiniketan chanted as they went around the groves:

Thou art our Father. Do thou help us to know Thee as Father. We bow down to Thee. Do Thou never afflict us, O Father, by causing a separation between Thee and us. O Thou self-revealing One, O Thou parent of the Universe, purge away the multitude of our sins, and send unto us whatever is good and noble. To Thee, from whom spring joy and goodness, nay who art all goodness Thyself, to Thee we bow down now and forever.’366 This is Tagore’s consistent reading of the Upanishads, which he believed to give primacy to the father-child relationship as the one closest to the relationship an individual shares with God. The father shelters within him the love of the mother but is not confined by it. Therefore, his boundless love is not very obviously visible. The father does not simply ensure one’s happiness, he also ensures their wellbeing. That is why obeisance is paid to him not only in times of joy but also in times of distress. In his capacity to inflict pain lies the completeness of the father.367 At the Santiniketan ashram, text-based religious instruction like those designed for the students of the Dawn Society (discussed in Chapter I), is substituted with spiritual practices enabling the realisation of the relationship that humans share with the divine.

The residents of the ashram did chant a mantra that addressed a goddess, the Gayatri mantra. It was meant to express Tagore’s universalism, reminding its reciters that they were specks in the universe, not residents of any particular nation.368 Meditating upon the creative power of the

364 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (1931), 60-61 365 Ibid., 64 366 See Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore His Life and Work (London: OUP, 1928), 90 367 See Rabindranth Tagore, ‘Bhoy o Ananda’ (29 Chaitra, 1316 B.S., (1908), Source RBA Manuscript files. Translations mine. 368 The Gayatri Mantra is a sacred hymn of the Arya Samaj, the practice of chanting it was common in the Santiniketan ashram. The essence of it is explained by Tagore as he understood it, to Kunjalal Ghosh. In his explanation Tagore outlines that the first aspect of meditation revolves around uniting oneself with the universe, stepping aside from the consciousness of one’s national identity. The second step is to be united with the force

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Supreme Being was meant to facilitate this realisation, dispel notions of separateness, reveal bonds of intrinsic unity between individual consciousness and that of the universe, and thereby conquering the narrowness of selfishness, fear, and disillusionment.369 The evening prayer ran as follows: ‘The deity who is in fire and water, nay who pervades the universe through and through, and makes His abode in tiny plants and towering forests – to such a deity we bow down forever.’370 This deity could be evoked as the universal creator whose presence permeated every element of nature and also experienced as love in the form of fatherly affection, which brought the personal and the universal into one fold. In one of his Upasana speeches Tagore said:

The losses I have suffered have not diminished a bit of what I have gained from Him. This world has not been able to take away any inner possessions of mine, several deaths around me have not minimized me in front of You, and the limitless universe has been unable to denude me – not even a single atom of my existence. He is omni present in my life with his eternal blessings.371 Tagore speaks about his sense of a deep connection with an eternal, universal creator, manifest in every aspect of life and not confined to any one creed or denomination. In the practices of the ashram, this idea was to be expressed in meditations on the Supreme Being and the devotion to one’s guru. Here, Tagore echoes the Advaita Vedanta372 tradition in which the master is not different from the absolute, by virtue of which his authority is autonomous. Unlike the Catholic ashrams373 in India, which distinguished between Christ as the supreme guru and the acharya as the head of the ashram, 374 the guru at Tagore’s ashram claimed wholesale devotion from the pupils within the hierarchy of guru-student bond. In fact, the hierarchical guru-student bond and the

that has creatively constituted the universe. It establishes the bond between the inside world of men and the world outside. Source: Manuscript Files of the letter that Tagore wrote to Kunjalal Ghosh (RBA). Translations mine. 369 Ibid., Translations mine. 370 See Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore His Life and Work (London: OUP, 1928), 90 371 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Santiniketan’ (Kolkata: Visva Bharati Grantha Vibhaga, 1991), 153. Cited in Sushanta Dattagupta, A Random Walk in Santiniketan Ashram (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2016), 41 372 Advaita Vedanta is a philosophical system attributed to Shankara (788-820) advancing the non-dualistic interpretation of Upanishads. Every distinction in being is regarded as (maya) illusion born out of ignorance (avidya). For a detailed account of this see, Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1969). 373 Christian Ashrams of India were reformist institutions within Christianity, influenced by the Advaita tradition. The Catholic ashrams remained within the Catholic Church and assumed juridical position. In case of the Protestant ashrams there was a clear resistance against the tendency of being subsumed under the ecclesiastical authority of the church. For details see Catherine Cornille, The Guru in Indian Catholicism: Ambiguity of Opportunity of Inculturation? (Louvain: Peeters Press, 1992). 374 Ibid.

109 reciprocal unity which humans share with the divine, were fused together in the spiritual practices of the ashram.

Dharmashiksha and Tapovan

A reference to the essays ‘Tapovan’ and ‘Dharmashiksha’ reveals how Tagore sought to distinguish the ritual practices of the ashram from conventions of religious instruction. They also crucially shaped the daily life at the Santiniketan ashram. In his ‘Dharmashiksha’ Tagore writes:

It has to be ascertained that memorising fixed lessons, or adopting dated ritualistic traditions is not the purpose of Dharmashiksha... Other organised religions have the opportunity of easier methods at their disposal, which should not perturb us. There is no gain is replacing what is true with what is easy.375 He further comments on sects and cults that promote the performance of yajnas, or recitation of hymns or intoxication by sedative substances as part of attaining dharma, writing that yajnas were indeed practised by philosophers and ascetics who did attain salvation, but that the gap between their experience and its explanation was a source of untruth.376 As a member of the Brahmo Samaj, Tagore was not only distancing himself from ‘a specific shastra, particular mandir, certain doctrinal philosophies or worship rituals which threaten to occupy the space for truth’, but aiming to realise ‘the highest potential of human life (sarvaccha siddha) where every action is guided by the light of inner consciousness.’ This according to him ‘is man’s true dharma.’377

Tagore informs that dharmashiksha is the realisation of dharma as an organic part of human life, a process attuned to human consciousness and actions. This clearly distinguishes Tagore’s conception of dharmashiksha from his father’s. Debendranath Tagore’s Tattavabodhini Pathshala set up in Calcutta in 1840 was an attempt at two simultaneous purposes: ‘the education of the rising youths in the vernacular languages in the country’378 and, as biographer Jogesh Chandra Bagal recounts, for countering the spread of Western education, by emphasizing ‘religious instruction, delivered through the vernacular medium.’379 By contrast, Rabindranath’s dharmashiksha at

375 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Dharmashiksha’(1911) in Shiksha Revised ed.(Visva Bharati, 1944), 110 376 Ibid. Translations mine. 377 Ibid. 378 The Calcutta Courier (June 13, 1840) cited in Jogesh Chandra Bagal, Debendranath Tagore 1817-1905(Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 1350 B.S. (1889), 32 379 Ibid.

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Santiniketan was neither a reaction to colonial education nor was it a replica of monastic orders. Tagore sharply differentiated his ashram from the monastic orders in mathhs, which thrived on divorcing the individual from family life. He wrote, ‘In this, the sadhak’s (one who strives for spiritual realisation) life is divorced from worldly affairs and his humanity is crippled. This will not work.’380 Contrary to the designs of the mathhs, Tagore, at his ashram, sought to create a space best suited to his vision of dharmashiksha.

A place where the wellbeing of man and the beauty of nature has been combined through everyday life and is perceived by and expressed through the human mind - that is the space for dharmashiksha.381 Tagore’s ideal of dharmashiksha has two curious features: First, he insists that dharmashiksha must be removed from the bustle of the city and situated close to nature. Second, while keeping a distance from monastic orders, he refers to students as chhatras as opposed to sadhaks meaning a devotee, worshipper or disciple/follower.382 Tagore’s dharmashiksha was not meant to develop a group of sadhaks (devotees or worshippers, but as the education for chhatras (students or pupils). While Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, Tagore’s contemporaries in Bengal, became cult figures with a large following, Tagore himself never became a guru of this kind.383 Ramakrishna acted as a role model to his followers in a way Lise McKean has observed in her study, about disciples worshipping their gurus as living gods. The process entails ‘transmitting authoritative spiritual knowledge to worthy followers’ rendering the guru a ‘conduit of spiritual power’, and making the ‘exchanges between the guru and the follower asymmetrical.’384 The gurus in Tagore’s ashram were not vested with spiritual superiority or divine authority as they were merely ‘vehicles’ who transmitted knowledge originating from the ‘universal father.’385 In this capacity, the gurus

380 ‘Dharmashiksha’(1911) in Shiksha (1944), 114. Translations mine. 381 Ibid., 382 I have used Ashutosh Dey’s, Student’s Bengali to English Dictionary (Calcutta, 1950), 589 383 The reason Sri is used before Ramakrishna, and Swami before Vivekananada, is precisely to drive home the reverence accorded these figures where they transcend the world of ordinary men with vision to cult heroes with mass following. The basis of their legitimacy ranged from being spiritual and philosophical in attempting a revival of Hinduism and valourising Hindu youth. See Tapan Raychaudhuri Perceptions, Emotions and sensibilities Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-colonial Experiments (New Delhi: OUP, 1999). For the point about Ramakrishna’s disciples, see Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga’, ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti’: Ramakrishna and His Times’ Economic and Political Weekly 27, No. 29 (July 18, 1992): 1543-1556 384 Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1-2 385 See footnote 362.

111 at Tagore’s ashram were key players in the realisation of the spiritual objective of Santiniketan as envisaged by Tagore.

The rural location of Santiniketan, a couple of hundred kilometres north-west of Calcutta, was not accidental. That the city was a space unsuited for education in general, and dharmashiksha in particular, appears in Rabindranath’s writings. ‘The nest is simple’, Tagore wrote,

It has an early relationship with the sky; the cage is complex and costly; it is too much itself excommunicated from whatever lies outside. And man is building his cage... He is always occupied in adapting himself to its dead angularities, limits himself to its limitations, and merely becomes a part of it.386 Tagore describes the limits which man imposes upon himself by constructing cages and cutting himself out from his surroundings. For him, the city was similar to a cage and evidence of his discomfort with it is obtained from a page from Rathindranath Tagore’s diary that read:

On arrival in New York, we found father, Pearson and Kedar Babu comfortably lodged in a hotel in the heart of the city. The arrangements in the hotel… though not a first class one were very comfortable, the proprietor taking a personal interest in welcoming father to his hotel. But however comfortable the rooms may be, father could not but feel that he was shut up in cage.387 The city’s advancements despite being efficient compromised man’s adaptive capacities and his symbiotic relationship with nature, to which the Tapovan, or forest, offered an alternative. Drawing on the Puranas (Hindu religious texts that are a part of the Vedas) for his understanding and explanation of Tapovan, Tagore suggests that it was a place in ancient India where everything that was ‘valuable, grand, incredible and pure, whatever was best and revered’ was ‘associated with the memory of Tapovan life.’388 The life force of nature when in union with human life finds its perfect representation in the forest. The resourceful forest was not an avenue to satisfy man’s physical needs, but a realm of spiritual realisation—a place of worshipping the formless God, the creative energy behind all that is living. In Tagore’s words, ‘if human settlements were only infested by men without any trace of nature percolating in his scheme of things, then his life and work become a suicidal burden of scrap. Nature through its abundance soothes man’s drudgery of

386 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (1931), 168 387 From Rathindranath Tagore’s Diary. Entry dated 24th December 1920. Source: Manuscript Files at RBA 388 Rabindranath Tagore ‘Tapovan’(1909) in Shiksha (1944), 80. Translations mine.

112 everydayness and infuses in him the tune of eternity.’389 This relationship of man to nature is the essence of adhyatmik shakti (spiritual power). ‘Excess does not guarantee fulfilment’ wrote Tagore, ‘this fulfilment is achieved through union with the universe. This unity removes the sense of ahankar (ego) and instils vinamrata (humility). This humility is the adhyatmik shakti.’390 The ‘Tapovan’ facilitated the realisation of adhyatmik relationship between the guru and the student premised upon a connection with the universal creator, to be experienced through kin-like bonds between gurus and students and those they share with nature.

In their memoirs, the ashramites documented the crux of their spiritual experience. At Santiniketan, W.W. Pearson attended a service in the temple, a building open to the light and air on all sides and while recollecting his experiences, wrote:

As I entered, the boys were seated, some on the marble steps outside, and some on the white marble floor, in an attitude of meditation. After an opening prayer in Bengali, the boys stood up and chanted a Sanskrit verse ending with these words, “Om, Shanti! Shanti! Shanti!” The sound of this chant filling the fresh morning air with the solemn notes of youthful aspiration was very moving.391 A former student of the ashram, Amita Sen, remembers the Wednesday prayer services when Tagore himself would conduct the proceedings. He would arrive before anyone else and ring the bell to summon the ashram’s residents. At the sound of the bell, everyone assembled in the prayer hall. He would then take his seat and with the chants of the choir would begin the service. As Tagore recited mantras and offered prayer songs, the sunlight filtered through the colourful glasses presenting a different image of Tagore to admiring residents.392 Students in their pictographic visions remembered more vividly the image of Tagore delivering an address amidst the play of light and shade in the Upasana Griha (prayer hall)393 than what he actually said. An element of visual pleasure, a sense of joy prevails over the meaning of prayers, offerings and textual learning.

389 Ibid., 82. Translations mine. This aspect of Tagore’s views with regard to the forest can quite easily be related to the practice of ‘Vriksharopan’ or the festival of planting trees that was observed every year at the Santiniketan ashram. 390 Ibid., 100. Translations mine. 391 W.W. Pearson, The Dawn of a New Age and Other Essays (Madras: S. Ganesan, 1922), 47 392 Amita Sen, Santiniketan e Asram Kanya (Kolkata: Tagore Research Institute, 1977), 39. Translations mine. Amita Sen was the daughter of Kshitimohan Sen, one of the teachers at the ashram. The exact period of her stay at the ashram is not known but one can assume she was there from a very young age as it was a common practice at Santiniketan of teachers living with their families within the ashram premises. 393 The Upasana Griha was established in 1890 (1297 B.S.) by Rabindranath’s elder brother Dwijendranath Tagore. The approximate cost for building the structure with imported glass was around 15000 Rupees. Source: RBA.

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These experiences were at once deeply personal and collective, shared with other residents within the ashram’s public setting. The ashram education was designed by Tagore neither to oppose government schooling nor to attach students to a cult figure/guru, but for putting into practice his ideal of dharmashiksha.

Training of students in dharmashiksha through formal meditative practices and the chanting of mantras and hymns, is very different from what ‘spiritual practice’ has come to mean for many twenty-first-century Euro-Americans. In the United States, the notion of spirituality is largely conceived as a matter of personal belief and private experience.394 This is the crux, writes Fuller, of what Americans mean when they say they are ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious’ where, ‘spiritual’ implies private practices (ritual or otherwise) of people which are individual and internal, whereas being ‘religious’ pertains to one’s affiliation to any particular body of organised religion i.e. the Church. 395 In Tagore’s ashram ‘spiritual practices’ were mostly collective and not the experiences of isolated individuals. Conducted publicly at the ashram, these practices were inspired by tenets of Brahmo faith—a ‘non-sectarian religion based on the simple and rationally acceptable credo of love for God and service to humanity.’396 Tagore’s dharmashiksha institutionalised at the ashram in the midst of nature, incorporates Keshub’s vision of seeking God ‘in the natural world’ and in ‘innate human intuitions.’397 At the heart of Tagore’s spirituality was the perfection of human relationships, i.e. between humans and the Universal divine and between gurus and pupils.

Swadeshbhakti as Tagore’s alternative to nationalism

The value of relatedness, which was so central to life at the Santiniketan, is also basic to Tagore’s ‘political’ ideas as seen in his notion of swadeshbhakti, which is discussed in this section. It helps to make sense of Tagore’s aversion to nationalism as a ‘demon’ and his Santiniketan ashram as an attempt to ‘exorcise that demon.’398 Tagore viewed ‘nationalism’ as an evil and considered the

394 Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, et al. Habits of the Heart Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). 395 See Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 396 See Brain A. Hatcher, Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 109-110 397 Ibid., 398 Rabindranath Tagore’s letter to Jagadananada Roy, cited in Seema Bandopadhyay, Rabindrasangite Swadeshchetana (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1986), 22

114 value of relatedness as crucial for forging a people’s collective and spiritually rich enterprise—a samaj—as distinct from what Tagore thought, ‘an essentially political and commercial organisation’ i.e. a nation. Putting Tagore’s more explicitly ‘political’ writings in conversation with the ashram’s constitution, I examine here, his idea of swadeshbhakti and how it differed from nationalism and blind patriotism.

Tagore’s stipulated swadeshbhakti, or devotion to one’s own country, in the ashram’s constitution is contained in the following excerpt:

The students of the Brahma Vidyalaya must be made especially faithful and devoted to their own country (swadesh). Just as there is a special manifestation of deity in one’s father and mother, so too for us there is a special presence of deity in our own country, the place where our forefathers were born and taught. As father and mother are deities, so also is one’s swadesh a deity. We must keep careful vigilance so that the students do not learn to be flippant, neglectful, contemptuous or hateful of their swadesh – even to compare it unfavourably with another country. We shall never attain fulfilment if we go against the ingrained values of the country. It is precisely by giving our own nature its fullness in terms of that special nobility of our country that once existed that we may rightly rise up within humanity as a whole. To destroy our self-identity by emulating others will accomplish nothing. Therefore, it is better to be excessively devoted to the ways of one’s country than to think oneself glorified through a spell-bound imitation of the foreigner.399 Here swadesh is a personified deity, like one’s mother or father, or guru. Just as the aims of the dharmashiksha were bound up in familial ties with the divinity, devotion towards one’s country was imagined as a parent-child relationship. The ultimate goal of swadeshbhakti was universalistic—to serve the whole of humanity rather than a territorially delimited nation. The point is further clarified in Tagore’s article entitled ‘Nation ki’ that was published by the Bangadarshan journal in 1901:

We will use the word jati as a synonym for the English word ‘race’ and call the nation ‘nation.’ If the words ‘nation’ and ‘national’ are adopted in the Bengali language, we would be able to avoid many confusions of meaning... I do not hesitate at all in using the word ‘nation’ in its original form. We have received the idea from the English; we should be prepared to acknowledge our debt by retaining the language too.400

399 See paragraph 6 of the letter in O’Connell (2002), 129. I have used the Bangla word in enclosed brackets from the text of the letter published in Chhitipatra Vol.13 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, Grantha Bibhag, 1992), 169 400 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nation ki’ (1901) in Rabindra Rachanabali (RR) Volume XII (Kolkata: Government of West Bengal, 1961-68), 675. Emphasis mine.

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There is no suitable Bangla equivalent for the English word ‘nation’, writes Tagore, an idea borrowed from the English and external to Bengali thinking:

That the English are in India is an external fact, that there is a desh, we know within ourselves. The truth within ourselves is the eternal truth; the external fact is mere appearance – maya ... Once we realize this truth, the maya of external appearances will disappear.401 The nation, just as the Raj, is illusory and bound to vanish. Desh, conversely, is our own as ‘we know’ it ‘within ourselves.’

The certain knowledge that I have a desh comes out of a quest. Those who think that a country is theirs simply because they have been born into it are creatures besotted by the external things of the world. But, since the true character of the human being lies in his/her inner nature imbued with the force of self-making (atmasakti), only that country can be one’s swadesh that is created by one’s knowledge, intelligence, love an effort.402 Desh is forged in a people’s quest for a collective, in their sacrifices; in an organised, wilful human enterprise that is an organic part of their social life, not an external category imposed by the rulers. Swadesh is the product of people’s own efforts, not a borrowed entity, political, linguistic, or conceptual. It was diametrically opposed to the notion of a nation that Tagore detested and which he defined as the ‘political and economic union of a people’ which ‘the whole population assumes when organised for a mechanical purpose.’403 This mechanical entity is fundamentally opposed to samaj (society), which is the principal social organ in India and which ‘as such has no ulterior purpose. It is an end in itself. It is a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being. It is a natural regulation of human relationships, so that men can develop ideals of life in cooperation with one another.’404

In our country, the samaj stands above all else. Elsewhere, the nation has preserved itself through many revolutions and emerged victorious. In our country, the samaj has protected itself against all dangers for a much longer time. The fact that we have not, despite a thousand years of revolution, oppression, and servitude, sunk to the

401 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Satyer Ahvan’ (1921) in RR Volume 13 (1961-68), 293 402 Ibid., 403 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917), reprinted by Penguin India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009), 37. All subsequent references are from this edition. The original year of the essay’s publication was 1917 as indicated. 404 Ibid.,

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lowest depths of degeneration... is only because of the strength of our ancient samaj.405 The samaj, as the foundation of India’s collective life, becomes the ground of Tagore’s critique of the nation as well as its government—the state’s dehumanised machinery. This nation was a threat not only to subject peoples, but also to humanity at large, capable of drastically altering its future. ‘It is not a question of the British Government’, Tagore warned, ‘but of government by the nation—the nation which is the organised self-interest of a whole people, where it is least human and least spiritual.’406 Through the ashram’s constitution and his political tracts, Tagore works out an alternative to the nation i.e. swadesh emanating from the samaj.

Samaj was Tagore’s alternative to the dehumanised ‘mechanical’ arrangements of nation-state politics, as he opposed the commercial organisation of people through instrumental, ‘selfish’ interests. Samaj, in contrast, was a living embodiment of human relationships and an expression of human endeavour, selflessness, and spirituality. Although Tagore admitted that the presence of some machinery was inevitable for governing people, he sought to limit its scope and minimise reliance upon it: ‘India cannot run by machinery alone: unless we can directly experience the individual feelings of our heats, our true selves will not be drawn to such a thing.’407

Tagore’s ideas of swadesh, samaj and nation, and patriotism as blind nation worship, all inform his concept of swadeshbhakti, which was central to the constitution as well the life of the ashram. Historians who rely on later ideas of nationhood, such as Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities,408 miss what Tagore himself thought the nation was and why he opposed it. While later twentieth-century accounts of the nation-state are echoed in Tagore’s comments on the nation’s ‘mechanical’ nature and dehumanised territoriality, his vision of the nation and his concerns with it are distinct. In Chapter II, the thesis examined how the violent political climate of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal had displeased Tagore who did not support the concerns of self-government for the nation-state or mobilisations of ethnic identities as forms of protest. His vision of the ‘nation’ is embedded in specifically colonial ways of defining it, especially in

405 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Bharatvarshiya Samaj’ (1901), in RR Volume II (1961-68), 679. Translations mine. 406 ‘Nationalism’ (2009), 41 407 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ (1904), in RR Volume 12 (1961-68), 693. Translations mine. 408 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). In Anderson’s view, the ‘nation’ is an entity united by homogenising language technologies which produce a linguistically homogenous territorial state.

117 techniques of enumerating people, land and resources, in census reports, various demographic compendia, annuals of material and moral progress published by the India Office London, and the dictionaries of the economic products of India.409 These practices shaped emergent conceptions of a nation as a bounded territorial whole created for the sake of extracting resources, with no care for its people and land, who themselves played no role in it.410 Tagore’s swadesh, conversely, came into being through its people’s creative spirit, which flourished unbounded by the exclusionary territoriality of the imperial national project that only imprisoned its citizens:

While the spirit of the West marches under the banner of freedom, the Nation of the West forges its iron chains of organisation which are the most relentless and unbreakable that have been manufactured in the whole history of man... out of the long birth-throes of mechanical energy has been born this fully developed apparatus of magnificent power and surprising appetite, which has been christened in the West as the Nation.411 Tagore refrained from Gandhi’s nationalism, and its elevation of objects of daily use, like khadi cloth, to the status of national symbols.412 Tagore was as averse to national symbols as he was to the territorialisation and commercialisation of Indian land and life. Devotion to one’s country was imagined as devotion to one’s guru— a parent-child relation—filled with the essence of the divine. Rather than sharing a language, a map or cultural symbolism, Tagore’s swadesh is bound by spiritual human relationships that transcend family relations and tie one to one’s country by a sacred, primordial bond. Tagore’s swadeshbhakti was deeply spiritual and did not subscribe to the binary of the ‘national’ versus the ‘spiritual’ which informed the political project of the nationalist movement in India.413 Tagore does warn against imitating of the ‘other’ and advocates full-hearted

409 Colonial records of various departments contained monthly statistics of population, prices, property values, bank assets, circulation of money, industrial output, railway traffic, imports and exports on a local, provincial and all-India; the statistical and census reports based spatially on the territorial reach of the colonial state within India. See Bernard Cohn, The census, social structure and objectification in South Asia (1998), George Watt’s A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India 7 vols. Published in 1908 is a comprehensive and mega history of colonial strategy of enumerating a nation and its products. 410 Manu Goswami, ‘From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy and Territory in South Asia, 1870-1907’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, No.4 (October, 1998): 613 411 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (2009), 57 412 This was albeit the second wave of swadeshi as Lisa. N. Trivedi points out between the years 1915-1935 and Khadi is home spun cotton thread that was used as a mechanism to substitute British made cloth. But despite being an economic measure initially it later became a cultural idiom for the swadeshi workers to be used for a visual mapping of the nation. See Lisa. N. Trivedi, ‘Visually Mapping the “Nation”: Swadeshi Politics in Nationalist India 1920-1930’ The journal of Asian Studies, 62 No.1 (February, 2003): 11 413 For the distinction of ‘material/national’ and ‘spiritual’ within the nationalist movement, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (New Delhi: OUP, 1994). In Tagore’s scheme we

118 devotion towards one’s country, the ultimate goal of recovering one’s Indianness was to partake in universal humanity rather than compete over national supremacy. Tagore’s opposition to nationalism echoes simultaneously, a rejection of what he had been taught:

India has never had a real sense of nationalism... I had been taught that the idolatry of nation is almost better than reverence to God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that teaching and it is my conviction that my countrymen will gain truly their India by fighting against that education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.414 Nationalism is parochial, swadeshbhakti is universal, swathed in the ideal of a spiritual, unified humanity. Humanity is put under threat, writes Tagore, when people indulge in nation worship or ‘patriotism’:

The ‘Nation’ with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the ‘Nation’ is the greatest evil for the ‘Nation’, that all its precautions against it, and any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril.415 When one nation is opposed to another nation, the struggle rots the vitality of human beings.

This political civilisation is scientific, not human... It betrays its trust, it weaves its meshes of lies without shame, it enshrines gigantic idols of greed in its temples, taking great pride in the costly ceremonials of its worship, calling this patriotism... And it can be safely prophesied that this cannot go on... This public sapping of ethical ideals slowly reacts upon each member of society, gradually breeding weakness, where it is not seen, and causing that cynical distrust of all things sacred in human nature, which is the true symptom of senility.416 Tagore insisted that an ideal community, a samaj, was a reflection of our natural, and naturally social, selves. It begins with a village, ‘We can only make a small village directly our own and assume the full burden of all its responsibilities... we can never visualise the country on the same scale as the village... which is why we cannot serve the country in an unmediated way.’417 The country—one’s own country—began in the village, which was not to be reduced to a speck in one

see the coming together of spirituality and swadeshbhakti, where loving one’s country and working for it was a political and spiritual project at once. 414 ‘Nationalism’(2009), 70-71 415 Ibid., 51-52 416 Ibid., 9 417 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ (1904) in RR Volume 12(1961-68), 693

119 single democratic nation.418 The nation, on the contrary, was to be a village writ large. The Santiniketan ashram in the village of Bolpur was the starting point of such a samaj, the beginning of an India, built one village at a time. In Tagore’s words:

We have to reconstruct our national life with the village as the centre. To bring completeness of life to the village has been a dream of mine of long standing.419 In another piece Tagore explains: Living in the villages of Shelaidah and Patisar I had made my first direct contact with rural life. Zamindari was then my calling. The tenants came to me with their joy and sorrow, complaints and requests, through which the village discovered itself to me. On the one hand was the external scene of rivers, meadows, rice-fields, and mud huts sheltering under trees. On the other was the inner story of the people. I came to understand their troubles in the course of my duties.420 Tagore’s first encounter with the village happened when he was entrusted with the responsibility of looking after his father’s estates at Selaidaha and Patisar in the year 1890 as noted by scholars.421 His close contact with the village enabled him to brush aside its external appeal and provided a deep understanding of the pathos of village life. Tagore came to appreciate the simplicity, the hardships, and the discomforts of a life punctuated with struggles and strife; but yet a life in which one was closer to oneself, in tune with nature, and in sympathy with others.

In the politics of early twentieth-century Bengal, the village assumed special significance as a trope, in what has been referred to as ‘the politics of making visible.’422 The urban-educated bhadralok423 in their bid to organise their leadership and make it a more inclusive force against the

418 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Village and the Nation’ (March 8, 1908) in Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee eds. Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics (Calcutta: K.L.Mukhopadhyay, 1964), 281 419 The poet’s speech at Ram Mohan Library, Calcutta (22July, 1922). See Neogy (2010), xxvii. Tagore’s anguish for the neglect faced by the villages has been articulated in his essay ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ (1904) which also provides a concrete plan of action based on the framework of village cooperatives to bring about self-sufficiency to each village as a unit. 420 Rabindranath Tagore ‘City and Village’ (1928) in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), 302-321 421 See Kumkum Bhattacharya, Rabindranath Tagore: Adventure of Ideas and Innovative Practices in Education (Springer, 2014), 79. In Katheleen M. O’Connell’s book Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator (2002), 281, we find the reference to Tagore’s work at his family estates. 422 Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History Gender and Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi, OUP, 2001). Ramya Sreenivasan also discusses the participation of members of the Tagore family in the Hindu Mela in the book, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, c. 1500-1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 166 423 The term bhadralok refers broadly to the English educated middle-class in Bengal. More on this in Chapter V.

120 colonisers, relied on the mela (village fair) to unite all denominations of the society. This is how the bhadralok hoped to incorporate the village in their political programme. A prominent example was the Hindu Mela initiated by the Tagore family in 1865 which continued for fourteen years and in which—apart from lectures and exhibitions of agricultural produce, birds, animals, handicraft items and machinery—cultural activities were included such as the staging of the play Bharat Mata by Kiran Chandra Bandopadhyay. These were attempts to make visible a ‘competent self-image’, which had only mixed success.424

The failure of the bhadralok approach to integrate the village into the nationalist programme can be observed from the following facts. Firstly, The Hindu Mela remained an upper class/caste national identity project that failed to engage the subordinate classes, and merely boosted ‘the rural’ numbers that gave their efforts an air of inclusivity. Having influential families like the Tagores of Jorasanko, as well as professional men in administrative posts and at the helm of affairs, created an element of bias and was contrary to its professed goal of moulding a ritually pure ‘Hindu identity’ for people as the legitimate sons/daughters of Bharat Mata.425 To prevent the ‘catastrophe’ of Hindu youth giving up their Hindu names it was ‘proposed that a society be established by the influential members of native society for the promotion of national feelings among the educated natives of Bengal.’426 The National Paper which was the mouthpiece of the Mela expressed anxiety at the democratisation of education that gave lower castes employment, which resulted in a decline in the number of barbers and washermen.427 Secondly, most Melas were held in Calcutta, at best reaching the mofussils, such as Baruipur, leaving the village outside the purview of their programme. Thirdly, the exclusive reliance on the cultural idiom for national

424 Indira Chowdhury (2001), 12 425 The details of the people associated with the Hindu Mela, tells us about the organised efforts of the bhadralok to provide leadership in the programme of national regeneration. Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s father, had included in the committee his uncle Ramanath, Gonendranath and his two sons-in-law, Nil Kamal Mukhopadhyay and Yogesh Prakash Gangopadhyay but had given the main responsibility to the Assistant Secretary of the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj, Nabagopal Mitra. The committee members of the second Hindu Mela as announced by the National Paper between March 18 and April 8, 1868 also included zamindars like Kamal Krishna Bahadur and Maharaja Digambar Mitra who had risen from the position of manager from the Kasimbazar zamindari. Professionals included Girish Chanda Ghosh, an eminent journalist who founded The Bengalee and Krishnadas Pal a journalist and orator. Durga Charan Laha and Kali Prasanna Ghosh were the other eminent associates with pundits like Jay Narayan Tarakapanchanan of the Sanskrit College and teachers like Pyari Charan Sarkar and Raj Narayan Basu. The success of these men either depended on their English education or the administrative posts that they held under the British government. 426 Rajnarayan Basu, ‘Prospectus’ Hindu Melar Itibritta. Cited in. Indira Chowdhury (2001),13 427 The National Paper, 2 October 1867.

121 unification prevailing in the melas did not work well. The performance of Bharat Mata, the display of handicrafts and cultural artefacts at the melas provided the basis of a shared cultural bond that was narrowly construed by their organisers.

Tagore’s dream of organising the country around the village brought together spirituality and swadeshbhakti in ways that distinguished it from the kind of anti-colonial nationalism that mobilised spirituality to further the project of national independence. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, anti-colonial nationalism’s reaffirmation of the purity of Hindu cultural tradition rested upon carving for itself a domain of cultural sovereignty.428 A prominent part of this movement, notes Andrew Sartori, was a band of gurus who emerged at this time in Bengal, including Ramakrishna Paramhansa and the most revered nationalist guru, Swami Vivekananda. They derived prestige from their endorsement of the rural folk idiom, as opposed to Western education.429 In addition to claiming indigenous authenticity they also promoted tantric430 traditions in public intellectual life. The tantric conceptualisation of the feminine (Shakti) aspect of the divine as immanent to the phenomenal world, led to the understanding of the ‘Divine Mother’ as an embodiment of the spiritual in the material world and became central to the imagination of an independent nation as Bharat Mata (Mother India).431 The Hindu nationalist ideas of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Aurobindo Ghose contributed to the subordination of the scientific-geographic to the anthropomorphic-sacred idea of the nation.432

Tagore challenged this brand of nationalism and its abstract images of Bharat Mata, which he saw as engaging in the ‘ceremonies of nation worship’, as being incommensurate with both the living reality of the village and the universal ‘ideals of humanity.’ In Tagore’s swadeshbhakti, Nandy identifies a distinct anti-modern flavour.433 Tagore’s imagination of a spiritually-inspired community was ‘essential for his non-nationalist forms of patriotism to prosper.’434 Therefore, he

428 See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi, Oxford: OUP, 1994). 429 See Andrew Sartori, ‘Beyond Culture Contact and Colonial Discourse: “Germanism” in Colonial Bengal’ Modern Intellectual History 4, No.1 (2007): 84 430 On the tantric tradition, see Ibid., 431 See Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation Mapping Mother India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 432 Ibid., 136-137 433 Ashis Nandy, ‘Nationalism, Genuine and Spurious: Mourning Two Early Post-Nationalist Strains’ EPW Vol. 41, No. 32 (Aug. 12-18, 2006): 3500-3504 434 Ibid.,

122 proposed the practice of spirituality and swadeshbhakti at the ashram, which he located purposefully in the village. There, one could cultivate the principles of relatedness, distance oneself from the lure of abstractions—either those in which the nation is invoked as a Mother Goddess, or where the figure of the guru is vested with divine spiritual authority. The country itself was both divine and human, filled with the familial relations, which facilitated and concretised sacred bonds in terms that were human. The village samaj was the elemental organising unit of swadesh, an organic product of human endeavour as opposed to the political and commercial enterprise i.e. the nation. The spiritual training of students at the ashram was meant to remind them that they were not residents of any particular country, but a speck in the universe. The aim was to dispel notions of separateness and reveal to the students the bonds of universal human unity, thereby empowering them to conquer selfishness, fear, and disillusionment. By proposing dharmashiksha and swadeshbhakti as the chief objectives for pupils at the ashram, Tagore brings man to the forefront of all action. The human element receives primacy over the soulless mechanising and dehumanising of the nation and city and at the heart of this project was the Santiniketan ashram.

Conclusion

Tagore’s ashram, founded for the purposes of institutionalising the adhyatmik bond between the guru and the pupil, saw the ideals of dharmashiksha as vital for the cultivation of love for one’s country i.e. swadeshbhakti. The collective meditation sessions at Santiniketan were designed to enable the realisation of the divine within the human, drawing on familial tropes of the father-child and guru-pupil bonds. For dharmashiksha’s fruitful implementation, Tagore chose the Tapovan as the ideal setting. He adjudged the city as an unsuitable place for the spiritual practices that were central to his ashram’s curricula. Stepping away from the mundane and mechanical conceptions of a nation, Tagore put forth his ideas of a creatively cultivated swadesh where love and devotion to one’s country was similar to what one displays towards one’s parents or gurus. Such swadeshbhakti protected the students at his ashram from being swayed by the abstractions of ‘nation’ as ‘Bharat Mata’ or nationalism as their ‘religion.’ Pointing out the notion of relatedness as central elements of Tagore’s dharmashiksha and swadeshbhakti, this chapter has shown how Tagore combined spirituality and the love for one’s country in a single frame. Working for the

123 country, with a sense of devotion to it, was a political and spiritual project at once, with the Santiniketan ashram at its heart.

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Chapter IV: Mukti versus swaraj: Freedom at the Santiniketan ashram

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the distinctiveness of Tagore’s idea of freedom as articulated through the term ‘mukti’ and as experienced by his students at the Santiniketan ashram as ‘chhatraswaraj.’ In Chapter II, I explained why Tagore preferred the term ‘freedom’ to swaraj in his English writings on politics. In his Bangla writings on Santiniketan, however, it is the term mukti that dominates Tagore’s discussions of ‘freedom.’ In this chapter, I examine more closely, the contrast between Tagore’s use of mukti and swaraj to get at a better understanding of what he meant by ‘freedom,’ an idea central to his educational mission, which was not limited to the ashram, but also permeated his political vision.

The ideal of ‘swaraj’ as advocated by Gandhi denotes both self-rule and self-government.435 Tagore’s formulations of mukti sat at odds with Gandhi’s scheme, where swaraj was an ideal for the individual as well as the nation, with the provision that ‘[S]waraj has to be experienced by each one for himself.’436 Although the Swadeshi leaders of Bengal did not champion the cause of swaraj as a European ideal which proposed political liberty as a means to political self-assertion, they suggested self-government for the nation as the end goal of the anti-British agitation.437 However, both these versions of swaraj endorse the elements of autonomy and liberty which are central to the European notion of freedom.

Tagore’s vision of mukti does not lean on autonomy or self-government. Instead, he appears to draw on Rousseau’s views where the extent of individual freedom was determined by, as well and curtailed through, a robust societal structure. While Sunil Chandra Sarkar has already noted Rousseau’s influence on Tagore, in this chapter, I explore the meaning of mukti through a textual analysis of Tagore’s essays on the same theme and explain the association between education and freedom as seen by him.438 I examine the notion of chhatraswaraj (self-rule for students, contained

435 See Anthony J. Parel, Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings Centenary Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 53 436 M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (1909) in Rudrangshu Mukherjee ed. The Penguin Gandhi Reader (UK: Penguin, 2010), 37-38 437 See Bande Mataram, 3 May 1908, cited in Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee eds., 'Bande Mataram' and Indian Nationalism (1906-1908) (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1957), 84-5 438 Sunil Chandra Sarkar, ‘Tagore as Poet Educator’ in S. Radhakrishnan ed. Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume 1861-1961(New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961), 243-244

125 in their memoirs), as a telling experience of the student life at Santiniketan in relation to chhatrashashantantra (the ritual of disciplining students) to understand the extent to which following rules and the need to observe discipline helped or hindered the experience of freedom at the ashram. Taking a close look at the pedagogy of the ashram, I identify and discuss the obstacles that stood in the way of attaining the ideal of freedom as envisaged by Tagore. This is done in order to demonstrate that Tagore’s distinctive vision of freedom operated with no sense of fixity or permanence and often stood compromised in the face of adversities.

Mukti as Tagore’s ideal

To understand mukti, one must reckon with the fact that while the nationalist leadership clamoured for political independence from the British, Tagore diverted his attention to the languishing villages:

I am preoccupied with the problems of our village society. I have made up my mind to provide an example of rural reconstruction work… A few boys from East Bengal …are living in the villages and trying to inspire the villagers to organise their own education and sanitation, take measures for the settlement of disputes, etc. …A deep despair pervades rural life all over the country. That is why high-sounding phrases like home rule, autonomy, etc., appear ridiculous to me. I feel embarrassed to utter them.439 The focus for Tagore was the wellbeing of the villages and the realisation of their self-sufficiency rather than autonomy from foreign yoke. Work, related to relieving the distress of the villages, assumed primacy in Tagore’s scheme rather than a pre-occupation with a nation-wide programme of charkha (spinning wheel) which symbolised economic independence and was a mass-based strategy for national independence. Tagore detested wholesale obedience to such mantras or unreasoned creed that promised swaraj:

And why this obedience? Here again comes that same greed, our spiritual enemy. There dangles before the country the bait of getting a thing of inestimable value dirt cheap and in double-quick time. It is like the faqir with his gold making trick. With such a lure, men cast so readily to the winds their independent judgement and wax so mightily wroth with those who will not do likewise. So easy is to overpower, in the name of outside freedom, the inner freedom of man. The most deplorable part of it is that so many do not even honestly believe in the hope that they swear by. ‘It will serve to make our countrymen do what is necessary’ — they say. Evidently,

439 Rabindranath Tagore to Abala Bose, letter undated (circa 1905-1906), later published in the journal Prabasi (1938), 466

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according to them, the India which once declared: ‘In truth is Victory, not in untruth’ – that India would not have been fit for swaraj.440 Obedience to a cult figure (in this case Gandhi), or blindly adopting political strategies were, according to Tagore, the surest forms of bondage. They led men to believe in the worth of freedom which is external and which rests upon the sacrifice of man’s inner freedom. It makes individuals sacrifice their independent judgement to follow principles and practices in the name of necessity, compelling them to do things that they could not fully trust. Swaraj was not a quick fix that would come upon Indians through these measures:

For our master, the Mahatma may our devotion to him never grow less!—we must learn the truth of love in all its purity, but the science and art of building up swaraj is a vast subject; its pathways are difficult to traverse and take time. For this task, aspiration and emotion must be there, but no less must study and thought be there likewise. For it, the economist must think, the mechanic must labour, the educationist and statesman must teach and contrive. In a word, the mind of the country must exert itself in all directions. Above all, the spirit of inquiry throughout the whole country must be kept intact and untrammelled, its mind not made timid or inactive by compulsion open or secret.441 Tagore’s distance from swaraj as self-rule has been discussed in Chapter II. Here, Tagore acknowledges the complexity of the path that leads to swaraj, if at all, and reminds his countrymen that there would be many paths and multiple means to attain it. No ‘one formula’ is going to be sufficient in bringing about swaraj. It would be a combination of aspiration and emotion, of hard labour and imagination. Most importantly, the project of attaining swaraj required mitigating the tendencies of unquestioned submission and timidity of the human mind and reinstating the spirit of objective inquiry. Tagore highlights the complications of striving for swaraj and suggests mukti as an alternative. An investigation into mukti reveals that it encompassed Tagore’s vision of ‘freedom for all of humanity’ attained through a ‘spiritual fight for man.’442 In his essay ‘Mukti’ Tagore wrote:

Leaving one’s home in search of light and travelling to a distant land is futile. Darkness can be truly eliminated when one opens the doors of one’s home to the world outside. Similarly, mukti cannot be attained by abandoning one’s home and family. It can be realised by abstaining from sin and rigidity, curtailing narrow self-

440 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’ (1921) in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya ed. The Mahatma and the Poet (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997), 84 441 Ibid., 85 442 Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Reflections on Co-operation and Non-cooperation’ In ibid., 61-62

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interest and vanity, eliminating ignorance and the fetters of prejudice. When we are able to perceive our reality as the truth, when we work with truth as a living ideal and when we live in the truth of our surroundings, we find mukti.443 Tagore makes a clear distinction between mukti and renunciative freedom earned through abandoning family and social bonds. The element of renunciation as a defining the category of freedom was common to the major Indic religions including Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism.444 This tradition upholds moksha as liberty and proclaims it to be the ultimate goal of human life. To attain moksha is to lose one’s identity, individuality, specificity, and social relations.445 The articulation of moksha as liberty attained through renunciation is similar to the notion of nirvana (liberation) based upon the observance of ascetic practices. But moksha occupies a position that is diametrically opposed to the nineteenth century western interpretations of freedom, centred on two interrelated forms of identity: individual identity, as reflected in the notions of individual rights and private property, and collective identity, as contained in the ideas of popular national sovereignty, the nation-state, and the ideology of nationalism.446

Moksha requires the losing of one’s identity, and views politics as the pursuit of power to be incompatible with, and mutually exclusive to, freedom. Thus, moksha conflicted with the pursuit of the political goal of the Indian nationalist leadership i.e. swaraj or self-rule. Tagore’s rendition of freedom as mukti, however, did not encounter such difficulties. As active participation in the socio-political realities fell within the ambit of Tagore’s vision of mukti, it could very well replace swaraj as the political goal of the national movement in a way that the concept of moksha could not. In 1908, while delivering the Congress Presidential Address at Pabna Tagore said:

We may, if we wish, carry on a peaceful debate about the various forms of liberty and discuss whether freedom in isolation is better than freedom in association. But whether it be federation or autonomy, it can be attained only through deeds.447

443 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Mukti’ in Santiniketan (7 Baisakh, year unknown). Source RBA manuscript files. Translations mine. 444 Mithi Mukherjee, ‘Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Pursuit of a "Different" Freedom in Modern India’ The American Historical Review 115, No. 2 (April, 2010): 453-473 445 Ibid., 446 For Western theorisations on freedom see, Isiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (1689) and J.S. Mill, On Liberty (London: John W. Parker and Sons, 1859). 447 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Presidential Address’ Pabna 1908, in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), 115

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Tagore does not subscribe to complete renunciation and dissociation from society. Neither does he put the freedom of individuals as his vision’s end-goal. Instead, he focuses on the importance of ‘deeds’ as the foundation of freedom. Individuals who actively engage with their socio-political contingencies are the true agents of freedom. Tagore reiterates that ‘adherents’ of the different versions of freedom ‘must realise that work—not argument and much less bickering—is our immediate duty.’448 The attainment of political goals rested upon an active participation in worldly affairs rather than a blind pursuit of power or a complete detachment from them. Reconciling the atomistic inclinations of individual liberty with the social responsibility of a subject people, Tagore proclaimed that the history of the growth of freedom was the history of the perfection of human relationships.449 ‘One may imagine’ said Tagore, ‘that an individual who succeeds in dissociating himself from his fellows attains real freedom inasmuch as all ties of relationship imply obligation to others. But we know that, though it may sound paradoxical, it is true that in the human world only perfect arrangement of interdependence gives rise to freedom.’450 The basis of mukti was the union of men, the coming together of the finite with the infinite, and an association of duality with non-dualism. Tagore reminds us that there can be no mukti (respite) from this understanding of freedom by reciting,

…the eternal bond of union between the infinite and the finite soul, from which there can be no mukti, because it is an interrelation which makes the truth complete. Because love is ultimate, because absolute independence is the blankness of utter sterility. The idea in it is the same as we have in the Upanishad that truth id neither pure vidya (knowledge) nor in avidya (ignorance) but in their union.451 Mukti had the possibility of growth as it accommodates the finite and the ignorant alongside the infinite and the knowledgeable. It did not have a teleological outcome attached to itself like that of political autonomy or self-governance which were the end goals of swaraj.

At the Santiniketan ashram, we find the realisation of freedom as mukti through the interpersonal relations of the gurus and pupils. The perfection of chhatraswaraj as a distinctive feature of the Santiniketan ashram happened through Tagore’s vision of mukti. In such a scheme the presence of

448 Ibid., 449 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Philosophy of our People’ (19 December 1925), in RBA manuscript files. 450 Ibid., 451 Ibid.,

129 a rule book and abiding by the laws it contained were not antithetical to mukti but an integral part of it:

We attain mukti from the bane of discipline, not by avoiding the rules but by owning them… Mukti does not exclude anything, it fulfils everything. Bonds are not rendered empty but become fertile, deeds do not disappear but become devoid of attachment and symbolises restfulness.452 Here, mukti appears to be commensurate with the observance of and abidance by rules. It did not bind students in empty relationships, but their bonds with fellow ashramites formed the basis of the fulfilment of their human lives. Tagore’s idea of mukti visualises ‘freedom’ less as liberty, un- attachment or autonomy, and more as the cultivation of meaningful and virtuous relations within the frame of social bonds. The distinctiveness of Tagore’s vision of freedom can be obtained by closely examining the links between education and freedom that Tagore espoused.

Education and freedom

‘So long I was forced to attend school’, wrote Tagore, I felt an unbearable torture. I often counted the years before I would have my freedom…How I wished that, by some magic spell, I could cross the intervening fifteen or twenty years and suddenly become a grown up man, I afterwards realised that what then weighed on my mind was the unnatural pressure of a system of education which prevailed everywhere.453 Tagore saw the prevalent educational system as an anti-thesis of freedom. The pressure exerted by education on his young mind was unnatural and hence going to school was painful for Tagore. For Tagore, a magical transition into adulthood was the only tangible solution to such an ordeal. Tagore attributed the quantum of his suffering to the ‘non-civilised’ part of himself which was ‘sensitive’ and had a ‘great thirst for colour, for music,’ and for ‘movement of life.’ The ‘city- built’ education took no account of that ‘living fact’ and offered, instead, its ‘luggage van’ with ‘bales of marketable result.’454 Unable to endure the school-inflicted torment, Tagore ‘finished going to school’ when he was ‘thirteen.’455 ‘This was the experience’, Tagore wrote, ‘of my own

452 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Mukti’ (undated) in RBA Manuscript files. Translations mine. 453 Rabindranath Tagore, Talks in China (Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1925), 96. Emphasis mine. 454 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘A Poet’s School’ Santiniketan Vidyalay (Visva Bharati, 1928), 20 455 Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan Company, 1917), 107-109

130 young days and I believe that a large part of such success or reputations I may have acquired, I owe to that early freedom, won with wilfulness.’456

What this ‘freedom’ meant for Tagore, however, and what role it played in his own educational mission is not immediately clear and will be the focus of my discussion below. In a lecture entitled ‘My School’, Tagore described childhood as: ‘the period when we have or ought to have more freedom—freedom from the necessity of specialisation into the narrow bounds of social and professional conventionalism.’457 Tagore’s emphasis on the need to free young minds from the narrow bonds of convention, both social and professional, could not be ensured under the educational system to which he thought they were subjected. In a 1924 essay entitled ‘The Schoolmaster,’ he outlined why freedom was unattainable in the prevalent schooling system. He argued that here children had become the battleground for a fight between the schoolmaster and Mother Nature. The former refused to acknowledge that the childish qualities of children were nature’s provision which enabled them to learn new things, and allowed their restless minds to stumble upon new information.458 Hence, Tagore was careful of replacing ‘masters’ with ‘gurus’ at his ashram. Further, Tagore pointed out that,

Every morning exactly on the stroke of the clock, the pupil must attend school, must come to a particular class to hear the same subject taught by the same teacher... Exactly at a particular hour he finds his freedom. The holidays are all on the calendar long beforehand and everything is accurate and perfect.459 Tagore did not advocate the kind of freedom that came as a reward after the bondage of classroom lessons, or the ones precisely dictated by the calendar. He was also not in favour of imposing arbitrary restrictions on the freedom of children in order to correct behaviour. Freedoms that were doled out and not earned actively through one’s efforts were of no use. Elsewhere, Tagore clarifies his position on student freedom:

Mind, when long deprived of its natural food of truth and freedom of growth, develops unnatural craving for success; and our students have fallen victim to the mania for success in examinations. Success consists in obtaining the largest number

456 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My School’, Santiniketan Vidyalay (Visva Bharati, 1916), 11. Emphasis mine. 457 Ibid., 458 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Schoolmaster’ (1924) in Sisir Kumar Das ed. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: A Miscellany Vol. 3 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), 504 459 Ibid., 505. Emphasis mine.

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of marks in the strictest economy of knowledge…We pass examinations and shrivel up into clerks, lawyers and police inspectors, and we die young.460 Tagore saw the drive for ‘success’ in examinations as ‘the mania’ to which young minds fell prey. He believed that occupations like those of lawyers, clerks, or police inspectors, considerably shrunk the capacities of students. Education that drove students to succeed in examinations and made them employable in government services remained outside the ambit of freedom that concerned Tagore. On the one hand, Tagore’s criticism was symbolic of the wider discontent with English education and the scramble for government jobs that it had unleashed.461 On the other hand, conforming to the norms of passing exams and being employed with the government also meant a severe curtailment of one’s creativity and freedom to experience the world without being subject to restraints. The elements of intuitive learning and creative self-expression were central to Tagore’s vision of practising freedom at the Santiniketan ashram as borne out by its pedagogical practices discussed in the next section.

To combat the tendency of students falling prey to the conventional norms of examinations and employment, Tagore proposed for his students what he termed ‘freedom cure’:

I adopted a system of freedom cure... The boys were allowed to run about, to climb difficult trees, and often to come to grief in their falls... Freedom is not merely unrestricted space and movement. There is such a thing as unrestricted human relationship which is also necessary for the children... I became the playmate of my students and shared their life completely.462 What Tagore means by unrestricted human relationships for children is illustrated further with the help of the mother-child analogy. He notes:

They have this freedom of relationship with their mother, though she is much older in age – in fact through her human love, she feels no obstruction in their communion of hearts, and the mother almost becomes a comrade to her children.463 Tagore considered the perfection of familial bonds as furthering human freedom, and an integral part of human experience—within the family, the society as well as the ashram. In the image below, we observe, Tagore sharing the stage with his students as an actor for the performance of

460 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Creative Unity’ (London: Macmillan, 1922) pg. missing 461 See Chapter I. 462Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (1922), 506. Emphasis mine. 463 Ibid.,

132 his play ‘Dakghar’ (Post Office) at the Vichitra House in Calcutta, 1917. ‘Gurudev’ shared the life of his pupils without imposing himself upon his students. Instead, the bond was symbolic of an improvised separation where the benign distance between the two allowed room for the individuality of the child to flourish.464 It was like a journey, where, as Tagore saw it, both the young and old were wayfarers travelling the same path towards one goal.465 Tagore’s proximity with his students on stage demonstrates how the hierarchy between the guru and the pupil is suspended in the context of their interactions.

Image permission pending

Image 2: Rabindranath Tagore, (second from Right) sharing stage with his students, for the play; Dakghar at the Vichitra House, 1917. Source: On the Edges of Time (1958)

The above-cited essays were written many years after the opening of the ashram and yet they are crucial in setting out the multiple ways in which Tagore imagined the links between education and freedom.

464 See Satadru Sen, ‘Remembering Robi: Childhood, Freedom and Rabindranath Tagore’ in Debashish Banerji ed. Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century: Theoretical Renewals (Springer India, 2015), 125. Here the author draws an analogy between the relationship that Rabindranath shared with his father Debendranath (Pitri-Deb or Father- God) and the one he shared with his pupils at Santiniketan as Gurudev. The latter was modelled on the former, authority was contextual and the improvised separation between the two individuals in the relationship was founded on the principles of freedom and joy. 465 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The School Master’ (1924) in Sisir Kumar Das ed. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: A Miscellany Vol. 3 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), 507

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Scholars have argued that Tagore’s institution was founded on three kinds of freedom: freedom of mind, freedom of will, and above all freedom of sympathy.466 Tagore’s attempt at keeping children immune from an education that taught them the tricks of passing exams has been interpreted as building a culture which did not always come with a ‘set of standard values and codes endorsed through coercive means of execution. On the contrary, such culture spoke of independence, the freedom to think and wish beyond pedagogical dependence on their educators.’467 These observations raise the question whether institutionalised freedom was the driving force behind the establishment of Tagore’s ashram. The cue to this puzzle lies in the pedagogical practices of the ashram which were integral to the everyday life of its pupils, as they reveal how the ideals of mukti were put into practice at the ashram.

Freedom through the pedagogical practices of the ashram

One of the foremost influences on the ashram’s pedagogy can be traced to the lessons offered to Tagore as a child at his Jorasanko residence. The family provided him with home education that was much broader and more inclusive than the school curriculum. In his Reminiscences, Tagore narrates:

[A]t home we had to go through much more than what was required by the school course. We had to get up before dawn and, clad in loincloths, begin with a bout or two with a blind wrestler. Without a pause we donned our tunics on our dusty bodies, and started on our courses of literature, mathematics, geography and history. On our return from school our drawing and gymnastic masters would be ready for us. In the evening Aghore Babu came for our English lessons. It was only after nine that we were free.468 Besides the regular lessons in Geography, Literature, Arithmetic, History, and Geometry, an emphasis on the physical training of the body is observed in the provisions of wrestling and gymnastics. Music, drawing, and rising before sunrise were central to the learning experience of the Tagore family.469 The details of Tagore’s recollection of being educated at home suggests that freedom did not mean an unstructured use of time where one did as they pleased. Yet, Tagore

466 John. J. Cornelius, ‘Rabindranath Tagore: India’s Schoolmaster’, Unpublished doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Columbia (1930), 162 467 Ranjan Ghosh, Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 406 468 Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences (New York: The Macmillan Company ,1917), 39 469 See ‘Jiban Smriti’ in Rabindra Rachanabali Vol XIV, 224

134 found that experience to be liberating when compared to what he faced while attending a regular school. The ashram’s curriculum was the product of Rabindranath’s experience inside one of the most influential families of colonial Calcutta that developed in a yearning for freedom. Tagore wrote: ‘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.’470

Typically, a day in the ashram was set out by Tagore for the children as follows:

Time for elders Work schedule Time for children

4:40 AM Waking up 5:15 AM

5:05 AM Arranging beds and sweeping 5:30 AM

5:15 AM Exercise 5:45 AM

(10Mins)

5 Min rest

5:35 AM Bath

6:00 AM Upasana (prayer services) 6:00 AM

6:15 AM Breakfast 6:15 AM

6:35 AM Baitalik 6:35 AM

6:45 AM Classes commence 6:45 – 6:55 AM (Attendance check and personal cleanliness for children monitored)

470 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘A Poet’s School’ in Towards Universal Man (1961), 291. Emphasis mine.

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The classes for children 6:55 AM commence

9:00 AM Interval 9:00 AM

9:45 AM Classes over 10:00 AM

Bath 10:00 -10:45 AM

10: 55 AM Lunch 10:55 AM

11:25AM - 12:10 PM Rest 11:25AM – 12:10 PM

12:10 – 1:10 PM Learning and indoor games 12:10 – 1:10 PM

1:15 PM Classes 1:15 PM

3:30 PM Classes over 3:30 PM

3:35 PM Broom and cleaning the rooms 3:35 PM

3:42 PM Meal 3:42 PM

3:55 PM General Call 3:55 PM

Till 5:10 PM Playing and gardening etc. Till 5:10 PM

5:20 PM Upasana 5:20 PM

5:35 PM End of Upasana 5:35 PM

6:00 PM Dinner 8:15 PM

Till 8:30 Entertainment/ learning Till 8:30 PM

8:30 Retiring to bed 9:15 PM

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Table 2: The daily routine of the staff and students at Santiniketan in 1929 (RBA).471

The table above indicates the meticulous use of time that Tagore outlined for his students at the ashram. In what appears to be a tightly regimented minute-by-minute organisation of daily tasks, one wonders whether there was room for freedom, as unbridled activity of the kind Tagore described in his lectures and essays. Such doubts arise when one sets out to understand freedom as autonomy or as the absence of restraint along with the right to choose. Gandhi, for instance, remarked: ‘Santiniketan lacks discipline [in Gujarati, shisth]. You say at Santiniketan there is more individual liberty, but I do not call that liberty I call it license.’472 To the question of discipline, I shall return, in a later section. As for Gandhi’s observation regarding the ‘individual liberty’ as ‘license’ at Santiniketan, a close look at the daily schedule of Tagore’s ashram negates the allowance of unrestricted liberty that Gandhi saw. We have seen earlier that Tagore did not regard hierarchical human bonds as impediments to freedom. Also, the minute by minute accountability of one’s day worked in perfect harmony with mukti. In fact, for Tagore, observing rules and abiding by them lay at the heart of mukti and were the means to attaining it.

Students and teachers at the ashram recount in their memoirs, the allowances of freedom at Santiniketan. C.F. Andrews, who was closely associated with Tagore’s ashram project, recounts how classes were suspended on days ‘when heavy storms came on and keen delight was shown by the students when they saw that a dark and threatening sky offered them the chance of a cooling shower after the long-drawn sultry day in summer.’473 Another instance of digression from a strict routine appears in the recollections of Amita Sen, once a student at the ashram. While looking back at her days in the ashram, Sen remembers how the water scarcity at the ashram, coupled with the scheduled summer holidays for students, would convert the ashram into a desert-like expanse interrupted by the presence of a handful of trees. The dearth of water was experienced very dearly in the harsh summer months, and even thereafter, so the ashram would not reopen (even after its

471 The daily routine of the ashram presented here is from 1929. This is the first recorded evidence in tabular form from the manuscript section at RBA undersigned by Rabindranath Tagore. These details were published later in the descriptive accounts of C.F. Andrews, ‘Old Memories of the Ashram’ VBN 7, No. 11 (May 1939) and Rathindranath Tagore, ‘Early Days of Santiniketan’ VBN 5, (November 1939). 472 See, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Vol 26, (February 9, 1922), 125-27 473 See C.F. Andrews, Old Memories of the Ashram’ VBN 7, No. 11 (May 1939)

137 scheduled date) until the monsoon showers replenished the reservoirs. This meant that the summer holidays depended on the will of nature and the residents of the ashram gladly accepted that arrangement in defiance of a timeline worked out in the ashram’s calendar.474 Amartya Sen, an ex- student of the ashram, fondly remembers his school as being ‘unusual in many different ways, such as the oddity when classes, excepting those requiring a laboratory, were held outdoors (whenever the weather permitted) ... There was something remarkable about the ease with which class discussions could move from Indian traditional literature to contemporary as well as classical Western thought, and then to the culture of China and Japan or elsewhere.’475 Freedom at the ashram, thus meant respite from the grip of mechanical methods of learning and strict adherence to a syllabus to overcome the narrowness of curricular objectives. The study breaks were not dictated by the timetable set out for pupils, but was decided organically, based upon what the day or season had to offer.

Additionally, there was freedom from confinement to the mechanical arrangements of sitting in a classroom where desks and benches were symmetrically arranged, dictating the posture of young learners. Tagore paid considerable attention to keeping material provisions to a bare minimum, as he considered these to be hindrances to the process of learning. He wrote:

Poverty brings us into complete touch with life and the world, for living richly is living mostly by proxy, thus living in a lesser world of reality. This may be good for one’s pleasure and pride, but not for one’s education… Therefore in my school, much to the disgust of the people of expensive habits, I had to provide for this great teacher – this bareness of furniture and materials – not because it is poverty, but because it leads to personal experience of the world.476 Thus, classes were held under the shade of trees. Not only did this provide pupils with a break from the walled confines of the classroom, but it also ensured an opportunity to build an intimate and loving bond with nature, while appreciating its aesthetic significance. Open-air classes were symbolic of Tagore’s vision of the ashram in the midst of a Tapovan, where the students of his

474 See Amita Sen, Santiniketan e Ashram Kanya (Kolkata: Tagore Research institute, 1977), 11. Translations mine. 475 Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005): 115. Amartya Sen’s views cited in Saranindranath Tagore’s, ‘Tagore, Education, Cosmopolitanism,’ Asian Interfaith Dialogue: Perspectives on Religion, Education and Social Cohesion World Bank (2003): 83 476 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My School’ in Personality (London: Macmillan, 1917), 117-118

138 ashram could cultivate deep sympathetic love and appreciation for the elements of nature and coexist in a ‘selfless union.’477

Image 3: Open-air classes at the Santiniketan ashram, circa (1904) (Rabindra Bhavan Reprography Section, reproduced with permission).

The constitution of the ashram, which I have discussed in detail in the previous chapter, had declared the spiritual bond between the guru and the pupil to be its primary objective. Three decades later, Tagore proclaimed that:

Training in the use of limbs, development of the spirit of questioning, thinking and observation, cultivation of interest and enjoyment in trees, birds and beasts and the varied phenomena of nature; experience in making of articles of daily use; habit of keeping one’s living room and surroundings clean, healthy and beautiful; practice of cleanliness extended to the body, dress and personal behaviour through adequate observance of bath, wholesome discipline in eating, physical exercise and rest and careful maintenance of bodily and mental strength, - these are essential to the life of this Asrama.478

477 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Dharmashiksha’ (1911) published in Shiksha (Visva Bharati: 1944), 71. Translations mine. 478 Rabindranath Tagore, Viva-Bharati Bulletin, No.17, (January 1935), i

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Proximity to nature and the appreciation of it as an object of beauty were as central to the curriculum as the observance of cleanliness in eating and dressing habits. Thinking, observing and taking interest in one’s surroundings were the keys to developing a questioning spirit among students. Self-sufficiency was inculcated through the experience of making the objects of daily use and keeping oneself and one’s surroundings tidy.

In order to ensure the physical well-being of the pupils at Santiniketan, Tagore had exercised the freedom to break away from the strict customs and rules that were followed in the ashram at the time of Debendranath. Following his father’s Brahmo inheritance, Rabindranath strictly observed the principle of not worshipping any idols at the ashram. The festivals at Santiniketan479 celebrated the seasons rather than deities. But when it came to the physical health of his pupils, we notice the emergence of a different Tagore who went against the practices established by Debendranath for the welfare of his students. Accounts of former students show that at Santiniketan there was the practice of measuring the children’s weight every Wednesday after the prayer service.480 If there was noticeable weight loss in any student, he was taken to the hospital and a diet, including milk and eggs, was arranged for him. At that point, there were restrictions on cooking of non-vegetarian food within the ashram premises. Even when the ashram was ridden with financial difficulties, observes Devburma, ‘Gurudev was attentive to the nutritional requirements of the children and ensured that they received ghee (clarified butter) and milk.’481 Despite the dairy supplements, however, it was found that the health of students was declining substantially and, on inspecting the ashram, Amulya Ukil, a dietitian from Calcutta, suggested that the students’ milk portions had to be either increased or substituted with another animal protein. The cooking of fish and meat was hence introduced at the ashram. However, a separate arrangement for cooking food for the vegetarian students still prevailed. Tagore thought that rules were for men, but men should not slavishly submit to them. What the body needs has to be tended to and depriving it by observing rigid rules would be stubborn and foolish.482 The provision of

479 See Uma Das Gupta, ‘Santiniketan and Sriniketan’ (Visvabharati, 1983). This work contains a detailed account of the festivals celebrated at Santiniketan. 480 In this case, I am referring to the account of Dhirenkrishna Devburma a former student at Santiniketan ashram. See next footnote. 481 See Dhirenkrishna Devburma, Smritipwote (Visva Bharati, 1358 B.S. 1951), 15, 19. Translations mine. 482 See Pramodaranjan Ghosh, Amar Dekha Rabindranath o Tnar Santiniketan (Kolkata: Reader’s Corner, 1963), 122. Also see, Santinath Chottopadhyay, Smritir Aloye Sriniketan Santiniketan (Kolkata: Muktomona, 2008).

140 non-vegetarian meals in the ashram also allowed students the freedom to choose their diet according to their bodily requirements.

The physical wellbeing of students was ensured in more ways than one. In 1904, Tagore wrote to Mohitchandra Sen, ‘I had forgotten to mention about the daily exercise for boys. Skipping is a very helpful thing. Let every boy be given a skipping rope, that way they would be able to skip even during the monsoons.’483 In the same year, Tagore wrote to Bhupendranath Sanyal:484

Special care should be taken of the health of students especially when the bitter cold winds have marked the onset of winter. Please be present to ensure that children apply oil on their bodies before taking bath… they should wear something warm along with their attire for Upasana. In the morning, every boy should practice breathing exercise which will reduce their chances of catching cold. In the event of them catching cold, the soles of their feet should be massaged with warm mustard oil.485 The akharas, as institutions promoting physical culture, conversely trained young men through a rigorous physical exercise regime, with a different tone and intent. There, students were coached to become revolutionaries who would handle weapons to bring about social reform.486 The inculcation of physical strength among students at Santiniketan had a different aim from that of the akharas. It also differed significantly from the recruitment and training of young men for revolutionary acts by the Calcutta secret societies such as the Anusilan samiti set up in 1902. This was another instance that revealed the distinctiveness of Tagore’s vision of an ashram as a space where the physical wellness of students was tied to the project of their welfare as opposed to serving the ‘nation’ as revolutionaries. In fact, the prescription of physical exercises for the students at Santiniketan was reminiscent of the exercise regime at the Tagore residence where the bodily health of children was considered very important.

483 Rabindranath Tagore to Mohitchandra Sen (letter dated 3rd July, 1904) source RBA. 484 Bhupendranath Sanyal joined the ashram as a teacher on Rabindranath’s request in 1903. He stayed in the ashram for about seven years before he left and found his own Brahmavidyalay near Bhagalpur. 485 Rabindranath Tagore to Bhupendranath Sanyal, (Letter dated 23rd November 1904) cited in Anathnath Das ed. Santiniketan Vidyalay er Shikshadarsha (Visva-Bharati, 1388 B.S. (1981), 109 486 Bipin Chandra Pal, a former student of Nabagopal Mitra (founder of a gymnastic school in 1868) used his physical training later to form and run a secret society which promoted physical culture among adults, trained them in the use of weapons and for the purposes of self-government and social reform. See John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’ Past and Present 86, (February, 1980): 127-28

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In his lecture, ‘My School’ Tagore notes:

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed… We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar. His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates. He was born in the human world, but is banished into the world of living gramophones, to expiate for the original sin of being born in ignorance.487 In order to rectify the shortcoming of the education system, Tagore ensured that bookish learning did not dominate the ashram curricula. Boys at the Santiniketan often left their classrooms to get acquainted with trees and plants, flora and fauna; they visited adjoining villages to learn about their ways of living and farming. During evening outings they frequently learned from their teachers about the position of the planets and stars in the open sky.488 Poromesh Acharya has rightly observed that the ‘cult of play and adventure was an important component of Tagore’s concept of education.’489 This was in contrast to Gandhi’s scheme which emphasised the cult of productive work. Thus, when Gandhi found ‘the spirit of play in work’, Tagore wanted to ‘turn work into play.’490

While recollecting his experience of the ashram in its early days, Sudhi Ranjan Das491 recalls following lessons effortlessly and not finding it irksome to work out all the problems and sums in Gaurishankar Dey’s Arithmetic, K.P Basu’s Algebra, and the geometry textbooks.492 This shows that textbooks remained in use at Santiniketan but their predominance was resisted. Tagore’s letter to Jagadananda Roy in 1912 confirms this. It reads:

I have sent to you a carton of books. You will perhaps receive them within a week from the receipt of this letter…I wish you use these books while delivering lectures to boys… One set of books contain material pertaining to most topics within the

487 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My School’ Lecture delivered in America (London: Macmillan, 1933), 12 488 See Ajit K. Neogy, (2010), xix, xx 489 Poromesh Acharya, “Educational Ideals of Tagore and Gandhi: A Comparative Study,” Economic and Political Weekly 32, no. 12 (March, 22-28, 1997): 605 490 Ibid., 491 Sudhi Ranjan Das joined the Santiniketan ashram as a ten year old lad by the end of 1904 or the beginning of 1905 and stayed in the ashram foe six years with a break of one year. See Sudhi Ranjan Das ‘Master Moshai Jagadananda Roy’ Visva Bharati News (Sept 1969). Jagadananda Roy was one of the first teachers at the Santiniketan ashram. He was a dedicated teacher who served the ashram till his retirement in 1932. He continued to take voluntary classes in Mathematics and wrote a number of books on popular science in Bengali. For details see, Supriya Roy ed. Makers of a Mission 1901-1941 (Visva-Bharati, 2001). 492 Ibid.,

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scientific discipline. If each of you take up a topic for discussion with the boys, it will be of great help.493 Tagore was not in favour of abolishing textbooks altogether and depending simply on techniques of observation and participation for learning. But he did wish to reduce the reliance on textbooks as the ultimate source of knowledge. Students were free to use their own means of learning and to learn at their own pace. Also, students did not study in a foreign language, but were free to learn in Bangla, their mother tongue. The first batch of students at Santiniketan was an odd mix of pupils belonging to different age groups.494 However, since June 1906, the Santiniketan ashram was primarily composed of students belonging to the upper primary age group as the practice of admitting boys above the age of twelve years was eliminated.495 Tagore considered the use of the mother tongue to be hugely beneficial for teaching younger boys. Scholars have interpreted Tagore’s ambivalence towards learning in English as the basis of a complex philosophy of pedagogy and culture in a colonial society by which Tagore viewed English as an unnecessary burden on Indian children. However, he considered the learning of English literature as desirable for conveying excitement and agitation to a culture that was essentially inert and to a child who was underdeveloped.496 It is known for a fact that Tagore encouraged the learning of English at the ashram from the textbooks he wrote namely, Ingraji Sahoj Shiksha and Inraji Sopan.497 To Jagadananda Roy, he wrote:

The Nepali boy should definitely be admitted. I am extremely wishful that two of the Madrasi boys recommended by Shubhakrishna be admitted too. In this manner if boys of different provinces gather in our ashram, it will qualify as a true

493 Rabindranath Tagore to Jagadananda Roy, Letter Dated 2 Aswin, 1319 B.S. (1912). Source: RBA MS files. 494 Ajit Neogy’s account provides the information that Rathindranath Tagore was thirteen years of age when he joined the Santiniketan School in 1901. Santosh Majumdar, who started studying at the ashram in the same year as Rathindranath was sixteen at the time. The first international student, Hori Sun who came to the ashram from Japan in 1902 was twenty five years of age, and much more receptive about learning a foreign language. See A. K. Neogy, The Twin Dreams of Tagore (2010). 495 Ibid., 35 496 See Satadru Sen, ‘Remembering Robi: Childhood, Freedom and Rabindranath Tagore’ in Debashish Banerji ed. Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century: Theoretical Renewals (Springer: India, 2015),121 497 Rabindranath Tagore penned the texts ‘Inraji Sopan’ in (1311 B.S.) 1904, its second part ‘Inraji Pathh’ came in (1323B.S) 1916. ‘Inraji Sahoj Shiksha’ was written in (1336 B.S.) 1929. A constant commitment to writing textbooks for teaching English to the ashramites shows that Tagore was unhappy with the books prescribed by the educational institutions of the day and he also wanted English learning to be a part of the ashram curricula. Alongside the use of these books, Pramodaranjan Ghosh, another ex-student at the ashram informs that children’s English readers were in vogue at the ashram which included Tom Thumb, Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer and the Children’s Classic Series published by Macmillan. See Amar Dekha Rabindranath o Tnar Santiniketan (Kolkata: Reader’s Corner, 1963), 34

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representation of India and will be beneficial for every inmate of the ashram. We should not be worried about incurring minimal financial losses to achieve the desired effect of the process.498 Even when Bangla was the medium of learning, students came to the ashram from different provinces of India and Nepal. However, I do not know how the learning needs of students whose mother tongue was not Bangla were catered for. Yet it does not seem that Bangla as the medium of instruction was much of a problem as no students appear to have left on grounds of not being able to cope with the medium of instruction or teaching arrangements. On the contrary, the financial crunch experienced by Tagore in 1914-15 (as we shall see later in the chapter) was in part caused by a student influx for which new buildings had to be constructed at the ashram.

Chhatraswaraj versus Chhatrashashantantra: Freedom versus obedience to discipline

Writing on student freedom at Santiniketan, Ajit Neogy observed that, at Tagore’s ashram, swaraj did not mean unrestricted freedom to do any and everything. Instead, Tagore believed true liberty to be based upon obedience and responsibility. The students took upon themselves the obligation of guiding, helping, and keeping each other straight and preventing individuals from excesses which brought discredit upon themselves. In such a system of spontaneous ownership of responsibility there was no need for an external body of law to control them.499 Pramathnath Bisi, a student at Tagore’s Brahmavidyalay for seventeen years, recounts how the institute which began with the onset of the new century had as its ideal the establishment of chhatraswaraj (student self- rule)500 as per its founder’s wishes. He argues that there were significant differences about the extent of freedom to be given to children, and in most cases, the scope allowed by parents, teachers and, more often than not, children themselves, was fairly narrow. In such circumstances, the hardship that Tagore had to tackle to establish the intended ideal of chhatraswaraj was not difficult to imagine. Bisi writes that the conventional role played by discipline within regular educational institutions resonated with most teachers at the ashram, who were the products of their own training and not shaped according to Tagore’s ideals. Upon arrival, they were surprised to find what they

498 Rabindranath Tagore to Jagadananda Roy, 18 Falgun 1318 B.S., (March, 1911), Source: RBA. The Marathi boys who joined the ashram in 1912 were Joyram Adal and Shyamakanta Govind Sardesai, the sons of eminent Maratha historian Sardesai of Baroda. The Nepali boys were Charu and Nara Bhup. These names have appeared in Prasanta Kumar Pal, Rabijibani Vol.6 (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1990), 387 499 Ajit Neogy, Twin Dreams of Tagore (2010), xxiv. Emphasis mine. 500 A simple translation of this term would mean freedom for students. But the implications of it were wider as the chapter discusses.

144 saw as the absence of discipline in the ashram and, as Bisi notes, upon their insistence Tagore had, in the initial days, allowed the prevalence of discipline within the ashram. Tagore later remedied this by placing the burden of observing and maintaining discipline on the pupils. ‘The poet’ was regarded as ‘impractical’ by the learned lot and the measure was considered as yet another one of his follies.501 Nonetheless, Tagore maintained his stance and was reluctant to be a disciplinarian. He believed that:

The offer of freedom to boys in most cases is the best cure. Imprisonment is the best way of making them confirmed criminals. It has been said ‘only he who loves has the right to punish.’502 Tagore did not prescribe penal servitude for culprits as he thought that it would turn them into repeat offenders. Thus, punishments, at Santiniketan ashram, if meted out at all, were administered by students to the defaulter. Neogy notes that these were moral rather than physical sanctions— requiring an offender, for instance, to eat meals separately from the rest.503 That Tagore’s prescriptions deviated from the ways in which discipline was implemented in the other educational institutes of the day is confirmed by Gandhi’s comment about the absence of discipline at Santiniketan (see above).

Chhatraswaraj was not coined by Tagore but was used by his students to describe their experience at the ashram. In order to fully understand what chhatraswaraj entailed one needs to reckon with the role of discipline and sanctions in the process of its attainment. Tagore wrote about the futility of disciplining measures in his essay ‘Chhatrashashantantra’ (The ritual of disciplining students) (1915):

Usually it is observed that those upon whom things could be forced, are the surest subjects of discipline… When the mistress of the house is unable to slap the daughter-in-law, she quite easily fulfils her responsibility by bashing the maid in the name of discipline… When students are disrespectful towards their teachers, it is not only an offence but also unnatural. Our respect automatically flows towards the source from where we attain knowledge. That is second to human nature. A distortion of this natural tendency is to be rebuked. But before the preventive

501 Pramathnath Bisi, Rabindranath o Santiniketan (Kolkata: Visvabharati Grantha Vibhag, 1351 B.S., 1944), 51-52 Translations mine. 502 Rabindranath Tagore, Cited in Neogy (2010), xxiii 503 Ibid.,

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mechanism is designed, we need to ask ourselves what led, in the first place, to the reversal of man’s natural order.504 Here Tagore highlights two aspects of discipline. First, there is an inherent hierarchy between those who discipline and those who are disciplined. The other aspect is that of circumstances that work against the ‘natural inclination’ of students to be respectful to their teachers and make them behave otherwise. Tagore does not blame the students for the miscarriage of behavioural norms. Instead, he calls for an introspection of the situations which influence their misbehaviour. More often than not, it is the teacher who, according to Tagore, builds the ground to provoke the misconduct of students:

Those teachers who are marked out for gaolers, drill sergeants and exorcists, should never be given the special care of students. Only those who can respect others who are younger in age, lesser in might, and subordinate in wisdom can be entrusted with the job of nurturing students. Those who commit themselves to the saying ‘forgiveness is the greatest virtue’ and can consider their chhatras (students) as their mitras (friends) are fit to become teachers.505 Tagore believes that compassion for and respect towards the young minds sets a teacher apart from disciplinarians. The teachers ought to be human first and appreciate the virtue of forgiveness. The virtue in their relationship flows downwards, from teacher to student. A teacher who lacks virtue is no more than a jailer:

A convict in a jail receives the strictest of sanctions upon breaking the law. This is because he is looked down upon as a criminal and not as a human. The severe humiliation at the hands of humans turns the convict into a non-human and he remains a mere sinner in the eyes of the law… We cannot consider students as convicts; we need to nurture them as humans.506 Teachers who constrict students unduly in the name of discipline sow the seeds of disrespect. Tagore assigns primacy to the humanness of conduct emphasising that teachers should not be tempted to become mere instruments of discipline. Chhhatraswaraj was therefore attainable only when the chhatrashashantanta did not necessitate an adherence to the strictness of discipline and where students had the room to make, and learn from, mistakes.

504 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Chhatrashashantantra’ (1915) in Shiksha (Kolkata, Visva Bharati, 1944), 158. Translations mine. 505 Ibid., 160-161. Translations mine. 506 Ibid., 160. Translations mine.

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Tagore’s version of freedom minimises the avenues for slavish submission to discipline while upholding the observance of rules and working within a regimented schedule of daily life. Celebrating the hierarchy between guru and pupil, father and son in the family, Tagore does not see them as an oppressive set-up, but considers these bonds as the basic condition of freedom. Contrasting Tagore’s views to those that were contained in Deenanath Bandopadhyay’s essay507 reveals the precise tendencies of slavishness contained within the conception of freedom that Tagore wished to eradicate. Bandopadhyay was of the view that freedom meant ‘freedom from the ego’ and ‘the capacity to serve and obey voluntarily’ almost making it interchangeable with slavery. 508 ‘To be able to subordinate oneself to others and to dharma… to free the soul from the slavery of the senses, are the first task of human freedom...’509 Tagore, however, saw the cultivation of senses as essential to the education of young people. He did not wish for sensory suspension and instead wanted children to use their faculties for nurturing deep bonds with their natural surroundings. The allowance of chhatraswaraj at Santiniketan was the way of putting Tagore’s views of mukti into practice within the ashram. In fact, mukti rested on a curious balance between chhatraswaraj and chhatrashashantantra. It thrived on the notion of relatedness that pervaded the ashram and could be seen in the bonds between gurus and pupils, the ones among the ashramites, in the relationship that the students shared with nature aa well as the ties which connected them to the divine. This endeavour, however, was not free of challenges and obstacles and as we shall see in the next section, on many occasions the high ideals of mukti stood compromised in the face of adversities.

Compromises on freedom

In 1917, Tagore wrote:

When ideas are stated in a paper, they appear too simple and complete. But in reality, their manifestation through the materials that are living and varied and ever changing is not so clear and perfect. We have obstacles in human nature and in outer circumstances...Delinquencies make their appearance unexpectedly, making us suspicious as to the efficacy of our own ideals. We pass through dark periods of doubt

507 See Deenanath Bandopadhyay, Nanabishayak Prabandha (Calcutta: 1887). 508 Quotation from Deenanath Bandopadhyay, Nanabishayak Prabandha (Calcutta: 1887). Cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who speaks for Indian Pasts?’ Representations 3, No.7(Winter 1992): 14 509Ibid.,

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and reaction… But these conflicts and waverings belong to the true aspects of reality.510 Tagore’s apprehensions about the struggles involved in putting ideas and ideals into practice were substantiated in the ashram. Finding the right teachers, who could be entrusted with the responsibility of nurturing young lives, was not easy. From the reminiscences of Tejeschandra Sen, we learn that the need for teachers at the ashram was never advertised in the papers. There was no interview board to ascertain the qualities and qualification of teachers. 511 This meant that not all appointments stood the test of time.512 Tagore was in favour of allowing freedom to become the guiding principle of the ashram, from the appointment process to spontaneous self-expression, from freedom in learning to the freedom of service. Most of the teachers, therefore, were either close associates of Tagore or men who had faith in his ideals and volunteered to be a part of his project. As a result of this arrangement, more often than not the ashram had to rely on the discretion of teachers. Frequently, there would be a dearth of teachers when those engaged in the services of the ashram would leave for personal or professional reasons. The requirement of gurus who could put Tagore’s ideas into practice, sat at odds with the need to have full-time teachers employed at the ashram. The exercise of freedom in appointing teachers by stepping aside from the conventions of recruitment, translated into a limitation of not having enough staff. Thus, the ideal of ashram education, which Tagore proposed as the antidote to the one doled out by the regular schools, suffered a setback for want of teachers.

A significant difference between Santiniketan and the educational institutions of the day was the way in which students were arranged in standards. It was done in accordance with pupils’ proficiency in a particular discipline rather than their age. For example, a boy (and from 1909 also a girl)513 could, by virtue of his/her proficiency in sciences, be in the sixth standard while being in

510 Rabindranath Tagore, Personality (London: Macmillan, 1917) in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore Vol. IV (New Delhi: 2007), 418 511 Tejeschandra Sen left home in 1909 to serve Santiniketan at the age of sixteen. He completed his studies and joined the ashram school as a teacher. He taught Geography, History, English, Bengali, Mathematics and nature study. But his contribution towards nature study is considered to be pioneering. Much of the greenery we see in Santiniketan today was a result of his handiwork. Source: Supriya Roy, ed. Makers of a Mission 1901-1941 (Visva Bharati: 2009), 73 512 See Swati Ghosh and Ashok Sarkar, Kobir Pathshala Pathabhaban o Shishasatrer Itihas (Kolkata: Signet Press, 2015), 23. Translations mine. 513 See Tagore’s letter to Manoranjan Bandopadhyay dated 31 Baisakh 1315 B.S. (1909), Chhithipatra Vol. 13 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati Grantha Vibhag, 1992), 79. For details see Chapter III.

148 the third standard for his/her language classes.514 It is useful to recall here that the Arya Samaj gurukuls observed, with strictness, separate learning provisions for boys and girls. Differences were chalked out not only in terms of having separate institutions for boys and girls but also in terms of following a distinct curriculum for each group. Thus, at a time when co-educational provisions for boys and girls were far from common, Tagore allowed girls to be educated at Santiniketan, although the fear of social sanctions had made him hesitant in the beginning. Such discomfort, however, was not discernible when it came to admitting boys from different regions as well as those coming from different religious backgrounds. With regard to the admission of a Muslim boy Tagore wrote to Nepal Chandra Roy in 1911:

Do accept the application (of the Muslim boy) Even if there are immediate difficulties, in the end it will ensure wellbeing…I have seen the vidyalay go through numerous struggles in the past – where teachers have been extremely restless and disillusioned – but each time after such upheavals and movements the ashram has emerged stronger in conviction and clearer in purpose… I have encountered and accepted difficulties and accepted differences as I do not endorse forceful enforcement of one’s opinion to restore justice.515 It is clear that Tagore was ready to incur some immediate difficulties and accept compromises on some fronts, while he was not willing to risk the implications of admitting girls at Santiniketan. His fears were not altogether baseless as can be seen from the criticisms that followed the induction of girls in the ashram after eight years of its inception. These were levelled against the free mixing of boys and girls of similar age within a residential educational set-up. The fall out of this resistance was that after 1910 the boarding for girls had ceased to be functional.516 This can be read as a compromise of the ideal of freedom for one section of pupils—girls—who were denied education at Santiniketan.

On certain occasions, however, Tagore did bypass societal reservations about free and unhindered interactions between boys and girls in public and within an educational institution. When the girls were first admitted, their dramatic and dance productions (which were part of the Santiniketan curriculum), were performed privately in the ashram or at the Poet’s residence in Calcutta, to avoid the scorn of this ‘expression of voluptuous sentiments’ as girls of respectable families were strictly

514 Swati Ghosh and Ashok Sarkar (2015), 46. Translations mine. 515 Tagore to Nepal Chandra Roy. Letter dated (16 Kartik 1318B.S. {1911}). Source: RBA. Translation mine. 516 Amita Sen informs that the boarding facilities for girls was reintroduced later but there is no mention of the exact date. See Amita Sen, Santiniketan e Asram Kanya (Kolkata: Tagore Research Institute, 1977).

149 forbidden from appearing on stage until much later.517 In 1910, following Rathindranath Tagore’s marriage to Pratima Devi, the female students decided to celebrate the induction of the new member into the ashram by staging a play called ‘Laxmi r Pariksha’ (Trials of Laxmi). While they were hesitant to perform in front of the boys, ‘to share their joy’, they wished to have everyone in the audience. When asked for a solution to their problem, Tagore devised a unique arrangement. The women performed on stage as usual, while the men were asked to watch them from behind the veil. In this way, everyone could partake in the enjoyment of the play and its performance without upsetting the social norms.518

The Vedic ideal of the ashram which offered education to pupils free of cost had inspired Tagore to set up a similar model and counter the tendency of commodifying education. However, the financial difficulties of the ashram hindered Tagore’s vision of offering education to children at no cost. Initially, the ashram did not charge tuition fees, but soon after, an alteration to this arrangement had to be worked out. Rathindranath Tagore wrote:

Considered from a worldly point of view it was foolhardy of father to have launched into this misadventure when he hardly had enough to support himself and his family… He had to dispose of everything he possessed including the jewellery belonging to my mother, in order to start the school.519 When this measure proved inadequate, a nominal fee was introduced for the maintenance of the institute and its boarding and lodging facilities much against Tagore’s wish.520 In 1903, Tagore admitted the seriousness of the financial crunch by writing to Manoranjan Bandopadhyay. In his letter, Tagore revealed that his calculations made it clear that the funds in his bank were insufficient to see him through the end of the year. His apprehension grew in 1907 when an expected addition of students took the number of pupils in the ashram to about a hundred, for which he needed to appoint additional teachers.521 Through the years 1914 and 1915 Tagore’s letters to the Macmillan

517 See Visva Bharati Bulletin No. 4b (1939): 249. The bulletin also records that the regular performance of high artistic quality distinguished by the presence of the Poet himself on stage, gradually tempered the shock of novelty and made possible the unique success of the Poet’s play Natir Puja (Worship of the Dancing Girl) in which the superb dancing of Gouri Devi, the talented daughter of the artist Nandalal Bose, converted the public to the possibilities of dance as a sublime vehicle of ecstatic religious devotion. 518 See Amita Sen, Santiniketan e Asram Kanya (Kolkata: Tagore Research Institute, 1977), 9. Translations mine. 519 Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1958), 154 520 See Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhay, Rabindra Jiban Katha (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2013). 521 Rabindranath Tagore to Manoranjan Banopadhyay, Letters dated (13th January, 1903) and (5th December, 1907) in Chhithipatra Vol. 13 (Kolkata: Visva Bharati Grantha Vibhag, 1992), 14, 66. Translations mine.

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Publishing Company bear evidence of him reeling under financial burden. ‘I am writing because I have some very important school building operations to carry through and I cannot begin them until I have money in hand from my books.’522 On the 7th of August 1915, Tagore wrote again:

If I remember correctly your Mr George Macmillan, when he saw me in India some time ago, told me that it would not inconvenience you to make me two payments a year, one after the annual settlement of accounts and an interim approximate payment after the close of each half year in June. As the finances of my school depend to a large extent on the income from my books, I should feel greatly obliged by your advancing the amount approximately due to me at the end of June last.523 As per the ashram’s prospectus of 1917:

There is an entrance fee of Rupees 20 and a monthly fee is 20 Rupees inclusive of boarding, lodging, tuition, light, washerman, barber and medical attendance and medicines. Boys have to keep a deposit of five rupees for stationery. When that sum is exhausted a further deposit of five rupees is required. All fees must be paid within the first week of the Bengali month. The most convenient method of sending fees is by money order. Three weeks’ grace is allowed for the payment, after which date, a fine of two rupees is imposed.524 This meant the introduction of the transactional element in education where knowledge was traded for money. The Vedic ideal of an ashram where the pupils lived with their gurus and received free education was compromised for the survival of Tagore’s vision. The same prospectus read: ‘Boys whose guardians for reasons of caste, wish them to eat separately, are allowed to do so. But if any boy of his own accord, wishes to eat with other boys, he is in no way prevented.’525 This can be simultaneously read as the freedom of students to decide for themselves if they wished to observe caste restrictions while dining and as the un-freedom of inter-dining for those who did not wish to observe caste rules. This was on account of the absence of any authoritative pronouncement by Tagore to prevent the adherence to practices linked with orthodox caste norms.

As the caste order of the Hindu society thrived on the hierarchical arrangement of people on the basis of their occupation, it would be important to understand how the Santiniketan ashram dealt

522 Rabindranath Tagore to Macmillan and Co., Letter dated (August 20, 1914). Source: RBA Manuscript files. 523 Rabindranath Tagore to Macmillan and Co., Letter dated August 7, 1915. Source RBA Manuscript files. 524 Santiniketan Prospectus. (August 8, 1917), 6. Source: British Library. 525 Ibid., 5

151 with the issue. Accounts of students and teachers at the ashram help us obtain a clear understanding of the ashram’s operational norms vis-à-vis the question of caste. Kshitimohan Sen writes:

In the asrama too I found most of the menials were from the ‘untouchable’ stock. But due to the Poet’s influence, no one treated them as such, with the exception of one or two fastidious members. This unorthodoxy on a large scale was a common feature of the institution, long before the country adopted it as part of the programme for national regeneration.526 The menial work at the ashram was carried out by people from the ‘untouchable stock’ but they were not mistreated for belonging to the lowest rung of society. The caste system was not erased at Santiniketan, but its ill effects on the lower sections were mitigated somewhat. Even the occupational rigidity of the caste order was considerably liquidated. Rathindranath Tagore wrote:

In those days we had fortunately no caste feeling; the doctor, besides his professional work, carried on the duties of the manager, the engineer, the kitchen superintendent and a host of other offices.527 Yet, heeding the wishes of those who desired to enforce caste norms had unfavourable outcomes. The most egregious incident was Tagore’s demotion of Kunjalal Ghosh, a lower-caste guru, so that the Brahmin boys would not have to touch his feet in respect.528 As the freedom to adhere to caste regulations translated into unfreedom to employ capable people as ashram gurus, matters became worse in the face of the already existing dearth of qualified teaching staff at the ashram.

As the years went by, there was a greater shift towards institutionalisation and the ashram underwent significant structural changes, leading to Tagore’s dissatisfaction. By 1939, Tagore spoke with a deep sense of grief to a confidante that with each passing day, he witnessed the lifeline of the ashram being left high and dry for want of service. He cursed his own fate with the realisation that much of his wishes had remained unfulfilled and many a sacrifice he made had gone in vain— the ashram had been reduced to a school, the burden of which was getting increasingly heavy.529 In an undated letter to Nepal Chandra Roy, Tagore admitted that the proposals to bring about changes to the Shiksha Bhavan530 and Patha Bhavan bore his signatures, although he had verbally,

526 Kshitimohan Sen, ‘Rabindranath and the Asrama of Early Days’ Visva-Bharati News VII, No. XII (June, 1939): 92 527 Rathindranath Tagore, ‘Early Days at Santiniketan’ Visva-Bharati News VIII, No. V (November, 1939): 36 528 See Chapter III for details. 529 Rabindranath Tagore to Tejeschandra Sen (February 24, 1939). Source; RBA. Translation mine. 530 In an undated letter to Nepal Chandra Roy Tagore wrote about his disinterest about the Shiksha Bhavan (College), he considered it to be an obstacle and almost shifts the locale of responsibility for it on the teachers who

152 disagreed to many of them. Yet, he did not withhold his signatures to stop the transitions from taking place as he believed in non-imposition and endorsed it as a matter of principle.531

The principle of non-imposition applied to the open career choices available to the students of Santiniketan, beyond their ashram days. Tagore wrote:

Livelihood is concerned only with meeting the negative demands of life, but life itself aims at fulfilment, beyond all needs. Our ideal of fulfilment way be different from Europe’s but if we do not accept that there is an ideal which is beyond feeding the body and making money, we make ourselves small. 532 Earlier in the chapter it has been mentioned that concerns of livelihood and material prosperity were not incorporated in Tagore’s vision of freedom or in the educational ideals of his ashram. At Santiniketan, children were not meant to, ‘be trained, to be soldiers, to be clerks in a bank, or to be merchants, but to be the makers of their own world and their own destiny. And for that they must have all their faculties fully developed in the atmosphere of freedom.’533 Tagore’s engagement with education is identified by Christine Kupfer as an attempt to preserve the element of culture and joy in the process of learning and not reducing it to its mere basics.534 In Tagore’s vision, freedom was defined by a dissociation from the instinct of mere material preservation. His version of freedom deviated from career orientations dependent on the passing examinations and was realized through the pedagogy of ashram education as borne out by the daily activities of pupils and their gurus. The analysis presented above reveals that Tagore’s idea of freedom operated with no sense of fixity of interpretation or rigidity of purpose. On many occasions, it stood compromised as other societal norms overpowered it which strengthens the argument that the Santiniketan ashram of Tagore was a significant instance of his experimental engagement with the ideas that gained political currency in early twentieth-century India, much like the ashram experiment itself.

had taken it upon them to initiate the idea. ‘As it has begun now, then by all means it should be kept straight’. Source RBA. Translations mine. 531 See Tagore’s letter to Nepal Chandra Roy (undated) source: RBA. Translation mine. 532 Rabindranath Tagore. Cited in Uma Das Gupta, ‘Santiniketan and Sriniketan’ (Visva Bharati, 1983), 14 533 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Schoolmaster’, in Sisir Kumar Das ed. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore Vol. 3: A Miscellany (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2006), 509 534 Christine Kupfer, ‘Rabindranath Tagore's Educational Ideas and Experiments’ at: http://www.scots- tagore.org/education

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Conclusion

This chapter has examined Tagore’s distinctive interpretation of mukti as the ideal of freedom at the Santiniketan ashram. Consulting Tagore’s essays in the theme and setting them in conversation with the experiences of the students at Santiniketan, I argue that chhatraswaraj was the way to the realisation of mukti at the ashram. In the realisation of mukti, discipline only played a nominal role. Despite Tagore’s speculative interpretations of mukti—without secure formulations or well- grounded meanings—one observes its specific character as distinct from freedom as swaraj (self- government), liberty, or autonomy in the language of politics. With the perfection of human relations at its heart, mukti also stands opposed to moksha—an understanding of freedom defined by renunciation and austerity. As mukti curtails the narrow aspirations of national independence, as well as atomistic inclinations towards individual liberty, and has at its core the notion of human relatedness, it expresses Tagore’s broader political vision centred on the swadeshi samaj and not ‘the nation.’ The Santiniketan ashram was the fertile ground for Tagore to put his vision of mukti into practice by designing a pedagogy suited to its objective. Just as Tagore had perceived the need for the right kind of teachers to shoulder the responsibility of teaching youngsters, he also had prescriptions for distinct individuals who would be the instruments for the attainment of mukti. This is discussed in the next chapter.

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Chapter V: From ‘identities’ to ‘persons’: Tagore’s notion of unique individuals at the Santiniketan ashram

‘It is difficult for me to say what is the idea which underlies my institution,’ wrote Tagore about the Santiniketan ashram:

For the idea is not like a fixed foundation upon which a building is erected. It is more like a seed which cannot be separated and pointed out directly as it begins to grow into a plant. And I know what it was to which this school owes its origin. It was not any new theory of education, but the memory of my schooldays.535

In the same piece, Tagore wrote that:

Because the growth of this school was the growth of my life and not that of a mere carrying out of my doctrines, its ideals changed with its maturity like a ripening fruit that not only grows in its bulk and deepens in its colour, but undergoes change in the very quality of its inner pulp.536 The Santiniketan experiment is inexorably linked to Tagore’s personal experiences, and he saw its growth as inseparable from the growth of his own person. What aspects of himself did Tagore see as being reflected in the ashram? To address this question, I explore Tagore’s own experience with schooling that shaped his vision of the ashram.

To understand the Santiniketan ashram as an extension of Tagore’s lived experiences, one needs to take into account his distance from the Bengali intelligentsia and their politics which emanated from their sense of self rootedness in their group belonging. Tagore’s vision of ‘persons’ rallied against the tribalism of what he understood as group identification. The contrast between ‘identity’ and ‘persons’ is crucial as Tagore considered the former to be limiting and unhelpful for his project of developing ‘unique persons’ at his ashram. I discuss identity as an analytical category, one that was basic to the nationalism and new-Hinduism of the Bengali intelligentsia to contrast it with Tagore’s conception of the ‘supreme person’ which he wrote about in his essay entitled ‘Personality.’ Tagore conveys his idea of ‘persons’, as we shall see in the chapter, by employing different terms, and ‘personality’ was one of them, which repeatedly surfaced in his writings. In

535 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My School’, Lecture delivered in America (London: Macmillan, 1933), 12 536 Ibid., 37

155 contrast to group loyalties, Tagore conceived of the notion of a distinct person that was embedded in the idea of relatedness, permeating his political vision.

The idea of a distinct person was formulated by Tagore through his dissociation with Bengali bhadraloks,537 a group he was born into, and constitutes Tagore’s point of contention with the politics of Bengali nationalist leaders (mostly bhadraloks) during the Swadeshi phase. Tagore’s bhadralok background becomes crucial to discussion of the ashram, especially since Tagore himself drew attention to this connection and as it influenced his politics. The ensuing discussion takes into account Tagore’s disagreement with ‘identity’ and analyses his concept of ‘persons’ to understand its institutionalisation at the Santiniketan ashram. My analysis focuses on Tagore’s addresses to students, in which he urges them to attend to the urgent welfare needs of the village community by stepping away from political mobilisations for the sake of rescuing Bharat Mata (Mother India). It is by undertaking this social responsibility that the students would become ‘universal persons’ and not be confined to their Bengali identity. He urged them, in other words, to abandon their ethnic ‘identity’ for an active ‘personality,’ which they were to develop in his ashram. Taking cognizance of this distinction and its implementation at the ashram, is crucial as it reflects the importance of inter-personal relations in Tagore’s educational mission. The tribalism of ‘identity’ fuelled the politics of nationalism which Tagore detested and instead formulated his notion of ‘personality’ to counter it.

Tagore’s notion of ‘supreme person(s)’

When writing about the ‘revolutionary movements’ into which he was born (See Chapter II), Tagore referred to the movement that was ‘national in scope’ through which ‘our people’ ‘were trying to assert their own personality.’538 But what was this ‘personality’? In a pertinent paragraph from his essay entitled ‘Personality’, Tagore wrote:

…This world taking its form in the mould of man’s perception, still remains only as the partial world of his senses and mind. It becomes completely his own when it comes within the range of his emotions. With our love and hatred, pleasure and pain, fear and wonder, continually working upon it, this world is becoming a part of our personality. It grows with our growth; it changes with our changes. We are great or small according to the magnitude and littleness of this assimilation…

537 This term bhadralok broadly referred to the Bengali middle-class who were English educated and usually government employed. More on this later in the chapter. 538 Rabindranath Tagore, My Life in My Words ed. Uma Das Gupta (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2011), 6

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Therefore, great souls are those whose extension of personality in this world is large, deep and active.539 This excerpt indicates two things—first, it shows how Tagore understood the relationship between the personality of an individual and its impact on the world, and secondly, it reveals his estimate of the influence of ‘great souls’ on the world. Identifying possible hindrances to the realisation of his version of personality, Tagore in the same essay, wrote:

Everywhere in man’s world the Supreme Person is suffering from the killing of human reality by the imposition of the abstract. In our schools, the idea of the class hides the reality of the school children – they become students and not individuals. Therefore, it does not hurt us to see children’s lives crushed, in their classes, like flowers pressed between book leaves.540 Tagore cautions against the crushing of the human under distractions of the unreal. The important question that arises here is whether Tagore adopts or wishes to adopt the role of a ‘great soul’ that he so ardently speaks of, committed to reforming the experience of children under the schooling system of the country—a system where students remained pupils and did not, in his view, flourish into individuals. We note, in the above excerpts, that Tagore has deployed the terms ‘Supreme Person’ ‘great soul’ and ‘personality’ to communicate his idea of a distinct person who did not conform to a particular group or class or ethnicity. As Tagore refers to schooling experience being central to the way in which persons are shaped and in turn create the world around them, it becomes crucial to understand how his idea of ‘persons’ translated into practice, for the students of Santiniketan ashram. I discuss this later in the chapter.

Further in the essay, Tagore reminds that, ‘it is the personality of man, conscious of its inexhaustible abundance which has the paradox that is more than itself, more than as it is seen, known, and used. And this consciousness of the infinite, in the personal man, ever strives to make its expressions immortal, and to make the whole world its own.’541 Tagore’s notion of ‘personality’ or ‘the personal man’, like his wider socio-political vision, emanated from his conception of man as being fundamentally and essentially a social being. Tagore wrote:

We have a greater body which is the social body… we want our own pleasures and license. We want to pay less and gain more than anybody else. This causes

539 Rabindranath Tagore, Personality (London: Macmillan, 1917), 24 540 Ibid., 51 541 Ibid., 21-22

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scrambles and fights. But there is that other wish in us which does its work in the depth of the social being. It is the wish for the welfare of the society. It transcends the limits of the present and the personal. It is on the side of the Infinite. He who is wise tries to harmonise the wishes that seek for self-gratification with the wish for the social good, and only thus can realize the higher self.542 One’s personality is thus inseparable from the ‘social body’ and one’s higher self that transgresses narrow selfish concerns and personal desires. Striving for social good is an end higher than the attainment of individual gains and the path that leads to unification with the infinite. Sunil Chandra Sarkar observed that Tagore had enlarged and enriched the concept of personality beyond all errors of thought, prejudice, and wrong emphasis to harmonise its different elements into a ‘miracle of performance.’543 In Sarkar’s view, Tagore was able to override the chief objections of Western rationalistic thought and find a legitimate place for supra-rational phenomena. I have shown, in Chapter III, how Tagore’s dharmashiksha had brought the Supreme Being within the ambit of human realisation. Here, I argue that the joining of the individual with a higher self also happened as a result of Tagore being able to move away from concerns on ‘identity’ and replacing it with his concept of ‘personality.’

Tagore’s opposition to ‘identity’

In his Presidential Address delivered in 1908, Tagore suggested that the failure of the Swadeshi movement was due to the fault of the Hindu bhadralok class who did not care to be one, either with their Muslim brethren, or with the common folks who constituted the mass of the people.544 Aurobindo Ghose was critical of modern Bengal’s weakness and her bondage to alien rule. He pinned her misfortune to the actions of Bengali men who allowed the alien rulers to draw their minds away from all that was good in them, crippling their capacity of self-help to the extent that they were unable to fulfil every function of human life.545 Both Ghose and Tagore voiced their criticisms against the Bengalis albeit for different reasons. While Tagore detested their apathy towards the masses, Ghose condemned the scale of foreign influence dominating their lives. However, Tagore’s precise criticism of the Bengalis, was expressed through his scepticism in the

542 Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana – The Realisation of Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), 48 543 Sunil Chandra Sarkar, ‘Tagore as Poet Educator’ in S. Radhakrishnan ed. Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume 1861-1961 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961), 248 544 See Susobhan Sarkar, On The Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1979) 545 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘National Unity’ (Baruipur 12th April, 1908.) In Speeches (Pondicherry Ashram, 1969), 70-71

158 following words: ‘Sat-koti santanerey, hey mughdho janani, Rakehecho Bangali kore, manush koro ni.’546 ‘Besotted with seven crore children, you [Mother Bengal] have left them as mere Bengalis, and failed to bring them up as fit human beings.’547 Tagore penned a scathing criticism of Mother Bengal as he was against any kind of national or ethnic identitarianism that was engendered by her and favoured humanity-oriented universalism, instead. In Tagore’s own words: ‘[W]hatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity, when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own.’548 This was the essence of his ‘supreme person’ or ‘personal man’ who was different from a man subsumed by his ‘Bengali identity.’ This prompts the crucial question of how identities formed.

In colonial Bengal, the raging debate was around the formation of a specific Bengali middle-class identity i.e. of the bhadralok and the ambivalence of its composition as well as the heterogeneity of its character.549 S.N. Mukherjee describes bhadraloks as:

[M]en who held a common position along some continuum of the economy, acquired high status through English education or administrative service or some other secular channel, and shared a common lifestyle, became members of the bhadralok class. In their lifestyle the bhadralok imitated the English officials and the Mughal nobility, without sacrificing high caste social values. Many caste groups like the weavers who acquired high bhadralok status, imitated both high class and high caste lifestyle.550 It is important to note that, certain common attributes such as common lifestyle, English education, and administrative jobs went into the creation of Bengali bhadralok. Tithi Bhattacharya observes the role of wealth as a marker of the bhadralok identity. Wealth, she mentions, was delinked from money and became ‘denotative of a whole world of culture, politeness, and respectability, bhadra (genteel) as it were.’551 Though money was an essential factor in making someone ‘bhadra’, it

546Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Bangamata’ (1895 B.S.) in Sanchayita (Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, 1982), 284. Here, I have used Sumanta Banerjee’s translation of the poem. Banerjee (2011): 51 547 See Sumanta, Banerjee, ‘Rabindranath - A Liberal Humanist Fallen among Bigoted Bhadraloks’ EPW 46, No.24 (June11-17, 2011): 51-59 548 Rabindranath Tagore, Letters to a Friend (New Delhi: Rupa, 2002), 111 549 See Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Rabindranath – A Liberal Humanist Fallen among Bigoted Bhadraloks’ EPW 46, No. 24 (June, 2011): 52 550 S. N. Mukherjee, ‘Daladali in Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century’ Modern Asian Studies 9, No. 1 (1975): 62-63 551 Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture Class, Education and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (New Delhi; OUP, 2005), 83. Also see, Anindita Ghosh, ‘Revisiting the ‘Bengal Rennaisance’: Literary Bengal and Low-Life Print in Colonial Calcutta’ EPW 37 No.42 (October 2002).

159 was ‘exterior to the semiotics of the discourse itself.’552 Education and chakri (the bondage of an office job) became the hallmarks of Bengalis entering the bhadralok fold. This education ‘does not mean the knowledge of English or any particular language, but the cultivation of understanding, the improvement of the moral sense and of good and correct principle. It is not ‘the art of speaking any language correctly’, but the ‘science of the mind, dependent on no particular pursuit.’553 These characteristics were quintessential in distinguishing the bhadralok from the chhotolok who were outside the bracket of English education and office employment. However, in the eyes of the ‘manly Englishmen’, the Bengali bhadraloks attested with the particular characteristics of their group, were considered ‘effeminate.’ What emerges from the bhadralok’s difference with the unsophisticated chhotolok and their effeminacy when compared to the coloniser, is a crucial point regarding the construction of identities. We observe that these identities are created in opposition to the other—at times the colonial other, and at other times, the unpolished ‘indigenous other.’

Sengupta notes that ‘in colonial Bengal,’ education, and more specifically English education, ‘was also the means through, and the grounds upon which a, specifically ‘‘modern” native society was being delineated by bhadralok reformers.’554 The initiatives of bhadralok reformers culminated in the consolidation of Bengali identity around the characteristic features of the Bengali jati—their language, region, culture—promoting a ‘national feeling’ among them. A sense of self, derived from ethnic solidarity did not appeal to Tagore as we saw him criticising Mother Bengal precisely for these reasons. Thus, while the Brahmo Samajists relied on institutional social reforms to forge a collective sense of self and Bankim invested in upholding the tenets of Hindu faith as a means to resolve the crisis of ‘the self,’ Rabindranath supported a synthesis of universalism and humanism shorn of any commitment to organised religion.555 Tagore detested a sense of self that emerged from shared characteristics of people and was forged by maintaining a strict binary between the self and the other. He accorded primacy to humanity and attempted to dissolve the

552 Ibid., 553 The Reformer, 19th September 1831, cited in Benoy Ghosh, ed. Selections from English Periodicals of Nineteenth Century Bengal Vol 5. (Calcutta, Papyrus, 1978), 47-48 554 Parna Sengupta, ‘Teaching Gender in the Colony: The Education of the “Outsider” Teachers in Late-Nineteenth Century Bengal’ Journal of Women's History 17, Number 4, (Winter 2005): 33 555 See Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic The Political Foundations of Modern India (United States of America: Harvard University Press, 2012).

160 tendencies of separateness and otherness altogether, in order to enrich ‘one’s tradition through hermeneutic absorption and assimilation.’556

Tagore’s endeavour was facilitated by the fact that he did not tread this charted terrain of formulating Bengali identity and instead proposed the idea of a personality, knowing full well the complexity of its interpretation. In 1917, Tagore wrote:

I know I shall not be allowed to pass un-challenged when I use the word ‘personality,’ which has such an amplitude of meaning. These loose words can be made to fit ideas which have not only different dimensions, but shapes also.557 Tagore was aware that the notion of ‘personality’ did not communicate the range of meanings he wished to ascribe to it. Hence, he uses different terms (discussed above) to convey the idea of a distinct person whose appeal was universal. To further clarify what he meant by personality, Tagore wrote:

I believe in a spiritual world – not as anything separate from this world – but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must always feel this truth that we are living in God. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, … in the ineffable beauty of nature which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality.558 Tagore’s idea of personality combines the ‘social’ being with the ‘spiritual.’ He takes personality away from the plane of the immediate concerns of identities built around the difference between the self and the other and places it in the realm of ultimate motivation of finding the infinite within the finite. The question that arises however, is: what was Tagore’s specific critique of identity and its brand of politics which led him to formulate an alternative with ‘personality’ at its core?

Tagore’s distance from his ‘bhadralok’ background

Tagore was averse to the tribalism of identities which found expression in his dissociation from the bhadraloks (a group he was born into) and the brand of politics they endorsed. In 1939, Tagore wrote:

556 Saranindranath Tagore, ‘Tagore’s Conception of Cosmopolitanism: A Reconstruction’, University of Toronto Quarterly 77, No.4 (Fall, 2008): 1078 557 Rabindranath Tagore, Personality (London: Macmillan, 1917), 22 558 Ibid., 154-55

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I had a bad reputation, moreover of being rich and what is worse, of being a poet. Aggrieved, I wondered – where then are those competent persons who were neither rich nor poetic? ... For long years I did not attempt to bring my work before the public. Had I done so, my immature work would have merited neglect.559 Being born as a bhadralok had implications for Tagore. He considered his richness and poetic pursuits as markers of ‘incompetence’ and the reasons for his infamy. Scholars have ascribed a marginal identity to Tagore for his subject position of belonging to the Tagore family, uncannily similar to the way in which elites are viewed among the high-born genteel folk of Calcutta. The prosperity of this urban, high-caste family provided to Tagore circumstances that were by contemporary standards, immensely comfortable in a highly refined and rarefied cultural atmosphere.560 Tagore’s background interests us insofar as it impacted the ways in which he related to himself and responded to the circumstances of his birth in the Tagore family and the ways in which this reaction was central to his political ambitions. Being mindful of the implications of his descent, Tagore said, ‘I have again to confess that I was brought up in a respectable household, and my feet from childhood have been carefully saved from all naked contact with the dust. When I try to emulate my boys in walking barefoot, I painfully realise what thickness of ignorance about the earth I carry under my feet. I invariably choose the thorns to tread upon in such a manner as to make the thorns exult.’561 Tagore’s reference to the nakedness foot and its relationship with the ruggedness of the earth is used to explain the marginality of the luxurious life which thrives on the principle of over-protectiveness of its children. By way of a corrective to his own experiences, Tagore in his ‘limited’ capacity tried to provide for his son, circumstances that were different from his own. With regard to the admission of Rathindranath Tagore to the Santiniketan ashram at the age of thirteen, Rabindranath observed,

Yet, being an individual of limited resources, I could do very little for my son in the way of educating him according to my plan. But he had freedom of movement: he had very few of the screens of wealth and respectability between himself and the world of nature. Thus, he had a better opportunity for a real experience of this universe than I ever had.562

559 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Sriniketan’ Translated by Amiya Chakravarty, VBN VII, No.8 (February, 1939): 59 560 Brian A. Hatcher, ‘Father, Son and Holy Text: Rabindranath Tagore and the Upanishads’ Journal of Hindu Studies (June 2011): 4 561 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My school’ Lecture delivered in America published in Personality (London: MacMillan, 1933) url: http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/tagore_myschool.html. 562 Ibid.,

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The Tagore family that was counted among the forerunners of a cultural heritage had its unique features stamped on its members. For instance, the boys of the Tagore family displayed certain qualities such as coming to school in horse-driven carriages accompanied by domestic helps. They dressed in the attire of payjama (pair of loose cotton pants) and spoke in a refined language which were seldom to be found among the regular city boys. The characteristic features donned by the Tagore family boys were interpreted by the commoner as a blatant exhibition of wealth. Their payjamas were seen primarily as a Musalmani costume by Bengali Hindu boys, their use of horse- carts weighed heavily against them and they faced isolation and taunting at the hands of their peers.563 The influence of such experiences that Tagore encountered as a child cannot be discounted as he was classified as ‘extraordinary’ and faced exclusion from his peers which was possibly one of the reasons why young Rabindranath went absconding from school.

The unpleasantness of the memories of his schooldays features in different pieces of Tagore’s writings. From his Reminiscences we get an insight into the ordeal of his school life:

The next thing I remember is the beginning of my school-life. One day I saw my elder brother, and my sister’s son Satya, also a little older than myself, starting off to school, leaving me behind, accounted unfit. I had never before ridden in a carriage nor even been out of the house. So, when Satya came back, full of unduly glowing accounts of his adventures on the way, I felt I simply could not stay at home. Our tutor tried to dispel my illusion with sound advice and a resounding slap: ‘You’re crying to go to school now, you’ll have to cry a lot more to be let off later on.’ I have no recollection of the name, features or disposition of this tutor of ours, but the impression of his weighty advice and weightier hand has not yet faded. Never in my life have I heard a truer prophecy.564 Historians have warned against the use of memory as a reliable tool for historical analysis, as the act of forgetting is also an undeniable aspect of memory which is used as a means of coping with the unpleasantness of the life experiences.565 With Tagore, however, one is able to overcome this difficulty to some extent as he does not seem to be forgetting the experience of his schooldays and reference to that memory keeps resurfacing as evidence which the historian can recover from different pieces of his writings (the chapter opens with one such quote from a different source than the one used here).

563 Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani Vol 1(Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1961), 31. Translations mine. 564 Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences (London: Macmillan Co., 1917), 3 565 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition’ Economic and Political Weekly 31, No. 32 (August 10, 1996): 2143-2151.

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About Santiniketan, which aimed at an education that was not divorced from life and nature but attuned to the needs of human beings, helping them realise their freedom and building their personalities, Tagore wrote:

Now I know more clearly than ever before that Shantiniketan belongs to all the world and we shall have to be worthy of this great fact... and Shantiniketan must be saved from the whirlwind of our dusty politics.566 Tagore’s proclamation that Santiniketan belongs to the world is an extension of the logic behind the development of ‘persons’ that Tagore envisaged. Tagore’s distance from his bhadralok background was a reaction to his upbringing in an elite household. The latter signified a denouncement of not only his own class belonging, but any class belonging, and to the narrowness of regional or national identities as such. To preach universal humanism, Tagore endorsed the idea of ‘personality’ embedded in these values and which opposed the bhadralok mode of ‘doing politics.’ Tagore’s experiences of being born as a bhadralok were fundamental in shaping his stance towards the nationalist leaders of Bengal, especially during the Swadeshi phase. Tagore differed from the latter, who under the influence of Bankim’s writings resorted to the imagery of the nation as the ‘mother’ and gave in to the process of rediscovering their masculinity to combat the charges of ‘effeminacy.’ The proliferation of secret societies in Bengal training young men as revolutionaries and the violence-ridden anti-partition agitations symbolised a prominent strand of the politics endorsed by the bhadraloks. The ‘effeminate Bengali’s’ resistance to the colonisers emanated from their understanding of the ‘masculine Englishman,’ as the ‘other.’567 It followed from their association with the particulars of their group characteristics and their difference from the foreign rulers. Tagore contested the element of separation and supported the formation of unique persons who would, on the one hand, be actively involved their surroundings at a micro-level and on the other hand be associated with the infinite and the divine at the macro-level (recall the discussion of human-divine association in Chapter III). National identities which occupied a middle-ground between the micro and macrocosms, did not appeal to Tagore. The point is clarified by Tagore’s advocacy of putting his idea of ‘personality’ into practice at Santiniketan ashram.

566 Rabindranath Tagore to C.F. Andrews. Letter dated October 3rd 1920. Source: Andrews Files at RBA. 567 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995).

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Institutionalising ‘personality’ at the Santiniketan ashram

Rathindranath Tagore recounts, ‘[T]alented young men hardly ever came to us, but whatever their intellectual attainments, a few months at the Asrama stamped every student with a character which easily marked him off from the crowd. This kind of character building to my mind, has been a real contribution of Santiniketan to our country.’568 Rathindranth’s observation about the Santiniketan ashram building individuals of character, echoes his father’s vision. Rabindranath Tagore vouched for an assertive collective individualism as opposed to atomistic individualism in order to get away from ethnic identities which he despised. The aspect of ‘character building’ which Rathindranath identified was an important component of ‘personality’ that his father wanted to develop at the ashram. Scholars have conflated Tagore’s notion of ‘personality’ with his persona and observed that ‘Santiniketan has a personality of its own. It emanates from its core Rabindranath.’569 Another scholar explains what constituted the core of that personality when he writes that the ‘personality of the poet reflected a divine humanity which inspired both students and colleagues.’570 Tagore’s purpose, however, was to institutionalise his distinctive interpretation of ‘supreme persons’ at his ashram.

Rabindranath Tagore advocated the development of students as individuals, as separate entities, and did not support them being merely pupils under a school system that crushed their uniqueness. The distinctiveness of individuals that Tagore upheld was to be seen in their ordinary pursuits which he considered to be the hallmarks of extraordinariness. ‘If we were called upon by the foreigner to produce the specimen—men of our race,’ Tagore said,

we would not present him with a senior scholar who can find the eightieth differential coefficient of ninety five variables; nor him who can reproduce all the plays of Shakespeare, annotations inclusive, from his memory, nor the deep-read official who varies the monotony of his cutchery labours with dissertations on the originality of the Vedas; but the men who cause an indigo factory to be raised and mustard plants in full flower grown on the levelled land in one night, who, under the British Indian Government can make their names exercise a talismanic effect on millions at a time, and who live a life encumbered with a load of trouble and anxieties and hazards a thousandth part of which would impel an ordinary man to

568 Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1958), 16 569 Adrinne Moore, ‘A Poet’s Dream: Impressions of Santiniketan of a visitor from Abroad’ In Amal Home ed. The Calcutta Municipal Gazette Tagore Memorial Supplement (Sept 13, 1941): 10-11 570 William Cenkar, The Hindu Personality in Education Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo (Delhi: Manohar, 1972), 69

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suicide. These are the legitimate aims of a system of national education which aims to restrict a people’s knowledge to mere books or to the individual affairs of men.571 Tagore digressed from the aim of the national education which was to produce men who were strikingly similar to each other, shaped by bookish knowledge and divorced from the human enterprises as they unfolded at the level of the samaj. The remarkability of Tagore’s ‘persons’ lay in the virtuous relations they share with each other within their samaj.572

The ‘imposition of the abstract’ which Tagore observes as ‘killing’ the human (see pg. 160) was to be found in the nationalist politics of Bharat Mata (Mother India).

Image permission pending

Image 4: Bharat Mata painted by Abanindranath Tagore in 1905. Source: The Outlook Magazine online edition (February 2019).

The historical context in which Abanindranath Tagore573 painted the illustrious image of the Bharat Mata in 1905 was characterised by the political unrest unleashed by the partition of Bengal. She was modelled on the everyday Bengali woman depicted as a goddess with four arms and a delicate halo over her head. There was no indication however of this deity as being the goddess of the

571 Rabindranath Tagore, Undated Manuscript file (RBA). 572 The idea of virtuous relations among people in the samaj is strikingly similar to ideal of the guru-pupil bond that Tagore envisaged. See Chapter IV for details. 573 Abanindranath Tagore was the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. He was born in 1871 at the Jorasanko residence of Tagores’.

166 nation as even the artist initially called her Banga Mata (Mother Bengal) and Bharat Mata only later.574 Sumathy Ramaswamy argues that iconography of women was central to the imagination of an independent nation and the popularity of Bharat Mata used as a mobilising artefact inaugurated a new nationalist aesthetic.575 Bankim’s Bande Mataram resorted to the image of a goddess who was human incarnated to fulfil the mundane purpose of fighting injustice. Her universal appeal, like that of the Bharat Mata, is curbed by her partiality towards her own people.576 Hindu nationalist ideas of Bankim, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Aurobindo Ghose that wielded enormous influence, had subordinated the ‘scientific-geographic’ to the ‘anthropomorphic-sacred’, privileging the ‘maternal-divine’ over ‘mapped images’ of the national territory.577 While for men education and salaried employment played a preeminent role, for women, the altered structure of the family, introduction to education, and the iconic valorisation of womanhood as representative of the nation provided the backdrop against which the process of self-fashioning took place (recall Chapter I where the agenda of social reform and education of women is discussed). The nationalist politics of worshipping the mother goddess as the embodiment of the nation constitutes the backdrop of Tagore’s 1905 address to his students:

In our youthful days we were so swayed by the terms Bharat Mata and Bharat Lakshmi, that they engulfed our imagination totally. We did not clearly think about where the mother actually was but were simply engrossed in reading and discussing Byron’s prose and Garibaldi’s biography intoxicated with the thought of having understood patriotism to its fullest. The way in which an intoxicated man values his poison over the vitals like food, so were we so deeply impressed by the idea of the country’s welfare that it took precedence over the country…578 Tagore uses the terms Bharat Mata and Bharat Lakshmi (another likening of the country to the Goddess of wealth) – a different avatar. In disagreeing with the prevalent conceptualizations and renderings of the terms, Tagore sticks to using the terms Bharat Mata and Bharat Lakshmi to dismiss their use. What captures our attention is Tagore’s enigmatic phrase where the ‘country’s welfare’ takes precedence over the ‘country’, which to him, meant a project, where being a patriot was more important than having any constructive plan of action for the welfare of the country.

574 See See Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation Mapping Mother India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 575 Ibid., 576 Kaviraj (2014), 133 577 Ramaswamy, (2010), 136-137 578 Rabindranath Tagore ‘Chatrader Prati Sambhasan’ Baisakh 1312 B.S. (April-May 1905), 27. Translations mine.

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Tagore’s frontal attack was on the abstract idioms and symbolic representations of a nation as a mother and a goddess parading as real while denying the concrete social realities of the country. On the necessity of getting accustomed to and familiarising oneself with the palpable realities of the country, Tagore added,

No matter how grand the idea is, the only way to realize it is to apply it within a concrete bounded territory. Even if the idea is really weak in terms of its depth and richness it still should not be deprived of that space. The only way to arrive at a deductive understanding is to begin inductively. Bharat Mata is not sat on a grand throne in an inaccessible peak of the Himalayas playing a melancholic veena, she resides in our villages where the ponds have dried up and where malaria and plague have left people helplessly begging for medicine and mercy. The Bharat Mata that has been painted in the texts of sages and seers is the one we pay our devotion to but the Bharat Mata who toils day and night and starves herself to send her son to an English school so that he could be well established in a world characterised by the chaos of ‘employability.’579 Tagore substantiates the body of the Bharat Mata by locating her in the immediate realities, in the distress of the everyday village life marked by disease and poverty yet, keeping alive the hopes of being integrated into the civil social space of people who were English-educated and employed. He simultaneously takes away from the visual imagery of the mother goddess sat on her inaccessible throne in the Himalayas, and the melancholic tune of her veena. He implores the students to be devoted to the mother who toils and starves to nourish the family and not the one who appears in the pages of texts in her glorified avatar. Tagore urged students to take upon themselves the responsibility of the country despite its present incompleteness, immaturity and vulgarity.

Our voyage today is to fight against the inherent self-enmity, to strike at the roots of ignorance that has been acquired over centuries, we need to rescue ourselves from the shackles of darkness, build our strength which in turn would become the basis of building meaningful relationship with others. Failure to do so would mean that our equations will be fraught with the evils of debt and beggary and suffocated with such elements.580

579 Ibid. Translations mine. 580 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Chhatrasambhasan’ (5 Falgun, 1343, B.S.) (1936) In Shiksha (1944), 259

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Reflecting on the lessons from the past, Tagore drew from his own experiences as a student and as a youngster in the Tagore family to uphold before students the qualities he believed to be inherent in human nature and appealed to them for a tangible course of action.

Even a millionaire’s son has to be born helplessly poor and to begin his lesson of life from the beginning. He has to learn to walk like the poorest of children, though he has means to afford to be without the appendage of legs…Wealth is a golden cage in which the children of the rich are bred into artificial deadening of their powers.581 Tagore’s experience of a life that was comfortable and a company that was culturally refined were often the reasons for his discomfort and he channelled such experiences in ways that could alter their impacts. He hinted that overcoming obstacles in the path of awakening the youth to their social realities was integral to the development of their personalities. These obstacles recorded by Tagore were,

…the tradition of a community which calls itself educated, the parents’ expectations, the up-bringing of the teachers themselves, the claim and the constitution of the University, were all overwhelmingly arrayed against the idea I cherished.582 With respect to the students who came to the ashram, Tagore notes that they were physically ravaged by disease and sickness and exhibited slavish mentality, shunning from the prospect of doing any kind of work that was directed towards common good without any promise of direct benefit for themselves.583 However, Tagore claimed that within a very short while a marked difference was noted in the attitude of the boys who began displaying the spirit of sacrifice and comradeship. ‘It was the active healthy life which brought out in a remarkably quick time all that good in them, and the accumulated rubbish of impurities were swept off.’584 The evidence of physical and mental change in the ashram students that appeared in the first issue of the Santiniketan Patrika (1919) edited by Jagadananda Roy, contains the insights into what caused the transformations. The visible signs of physical strength that the boys had gained as pupils of the ashram is demonstrated in the following excerpt: ‘In 1919, a student of the ashram, Dwijendranath Mukhopadhyay brought back the winning shield from a physical exercise competition held at Siuri.

581 Tagore, ‘My School’ In Personality (London: Macmillan, 1917), 121 582 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘A Poet’s School’ In Rabindranth Tagore: Pioneer in Education Essays and Exchanges Between Rabindranath Tagore and L. K. Elmhirst (London: John Murray, 1961), 59 583 Ibid., 584 Ibid., 60-61

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Two silver medals and four other prizes from the same event went to the credit of the ashram boys. The fact that the ashram boys were trained in a ‘spirit of comradeship’ can be seen in their efforts at reaching out to those in need.’585 The same Patrika reported that the students of the ashram had inaugurated a ‘Jal-satra’ (water shelter) under the shade of a banyan tree on the road adjacent to the ashram to offer water and shelter for rest to the tired pedestrians treading the path in the heat of the scorching summer sun.586

Thus far, we have not observed a direct correlation between Tagore’s ideas of personality and the physical wellness of his students. However, we do know (from a discussion in Chapter IV) that their health was a prime concern for Tagore and he paid considerable attention to their diet. One can infer, therefore, that he wanted his pupils to be individuals who would be physically equipped to help others, be mindful about their relationship with their samaj, and not be swayed by the appeal of abstract ideas. Relations as integral to personality is discussed next.

Relational personality: Tagore as an exemplar

That ‘persons’ as Tagore envisaged them, were essentially ‘relational’ is best expressed by the man himself who ‘in taking up the role of an educator, had not ceased to be a poet-seer.’587 It was Tagore’s ‘reputation’ as a poet, that he most strongly associated with and this is succinctly captured in his opinion about himself:

I have, it is true, engaged in a series of activities, but the innermost me is not to be found in any of these. At the end of the journey I am able to see, a little more clearly, the orb of my life. Looking back, the only thing of which I feel certain is that I am a poet.588 The fact of him being an educator, a culturally predisposed individual, Asia’s first Nobel Laureate or a contributor to the socio-political contingencies of twentieth-century India seem to be sidelined in his eyes to the reality of his being a poet. The certainty of being a poet that Tagore attaches to

585 See Jagadananda Roy edited Santiniketan Patrika 1, No. 1 (1919). The information is contained in the section under the heading ‘News’. 586 Ibid., 587 Sunil Chandra Sarkar, ‘Tagore as Poet Educator’ in S. Radhakrishnan ed. Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume 1861-1961 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961), 248 588 Rabindranath Tagore, 1931. Cited in Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: OUP, 2004), 73

170 himself despite being engaged in a multitude of other activities was reinforced by Tagore’s social milieu.

The occasion of Tagore’s fiftieth birthday, was reported by The Bengalee daily as ‘A Red Letter Day in Bengali Literature’, on which day his countrymen paid homage to ‘the poet.’589 The event held at the Town Hall, Calcutta on the 28th January 1912, saw the most extensive congregation of Bengalis—men, both young and old—women, students from schools and colleges, writers, authors, poets for a demonstration that had no connection with political, social or religious matters. However, what lent distinction to the event was that the outpourings of gratitude, joy and love towards the poet and was heavily laden with ‘religious devotion’ to him.590 The closing sentence of the address delivered by Ramendra Sundar Trivedi on behalf of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad would aptly summarise the nature of that obeisance to the one who was regarded as a great poet:

For fifty years your motherland has nursed you in her lap with affection, and speaking on behalf of those who worship that enchantress of the world, the Sahitya Parisad of Bengal pray to the Father of the Universe for your long life. Great Poet, may Sankara grant you victory.591 Tagore was a living witness to such adulations conferred on him as a poet at fifty, when his experiment at Santiniketan had crossed its first decade. Celebrating Tagore as a poet suggests that his countrymen, honoured him, first and foremost, for his poetic genius. Despite these popular perceptions, Tagore offered pertinent reminders that his work was to attain the perfection of ‘truth’ to unite with all ‘in an infinite bond of love.’592 ‘Man’, wrote Tagore, ‘is born into a world which to him is intensely living, where he as an individual occupies the full attention of his surroundings.’ He then grows up and loses himself ‘in the complexity of things, separates himself from his surroundings, often in a spirit of antagonism.’ This diversion from truth costs him heavily and ‘civil war’ breaks out between ‘his personality’ and ‘the outside world’ which finds resolution only in the realisation of the ‘simplicity’ of the ‘perfect truth’ i.e. his ‘union’ with it. 593 The surroundings that Tagore talks about consisted of a number of components namely: the natural

589 See ‘The Fiftieth Birthday Celebration’ in The Calcutta Municipal Gazette (September 13, 1941): iv. Emphasis mine. 590 See ibid., 591 Ibid., ix. Emphasis mine. 592 Rabindranath Tagore, Personality (London : Macmillan, 1917), 139-40 593Ibid.,

171 surroundings of the ashram, the socio-political reality of his country, the people who he worked with at Santiniketan, his students, and those who revered him as a great poet of Bengal. The ways in which Tagore interacted with them are crucial to understanding the idea of personality that he wrote about and deliberately embodied.

Tagore’s self-identification as a poet did not deter the harmonious reconciliation of the multiple roles he played as he worked with each, not in isolation but unison. For instance, being recognised as a poet of fame (with the award of Nobel Prize in 1913) did not dissuade Tagore from excitedly writing about the progress of his Santiniketan boys. In 1918, Tagore wrote, ‘the boys are learning with deep interest and making steady progress which is a very rewarding experience for me. The next three days are set for poetry lessons beginning with Shelly and West Wind today, my students are thoroughly enjoying.’594 In 1915, the ‘great poet of Bengal’ who was also the founder of the Santiniketan ashram wrote:

Though I am a poet and foolish in most things I have some insight in human nature…We become cruel, and our ideals become mere abstractions when we look upon our friends and human beings as agents for carrying out the ideals which we consider as the best…Of course Shantiniketan school has its ideals which though not rigidly definite are definite enough to guide us. But differences of reading they permit, and divergence of methods to a great extent they allow…We are quite at liberty to disapprove some of the actions of our friends but it should be the very last thing to distrust their good faith.595 Tagore accommodated with ease the variety of ways in which his ideas and ideals were put to practice insofar as the ashram was concerned. He believed in the sincerity and good faith of men who were associated with the Santiniketan project and approved of the difference in their methods and views, pinning his faith on the institutional practices he devised. The ritual practices of the ashram, for instance, were so designed that the pupils and their gurus experienced a familial connection with the divine and also found mukti within the hierarchical bonds that tied them. So crucial was the aspect of training the minds of people in the idea of ‘personality’, which he cherished that towards the end of his life, in 1939, Tagore expressed his anguish of leaving the task unfinished during his lifetime. He noted: ‘Financial difficulties have prevented me from fully

594 Rabindranath Tagore to P.C. Mohalanobis. Letter dated 6 Aswin, 1326 B.S., (1918). Source: The Prasanta Chandra and Rani Mahalanobis Collection at RBA. 595 Rabindranath Tagore to W. W. Pearson, Letter dated on May 16, 1915. Source: RBA.

172 applying my ideas but it also takes time to train up the minds of workers. My own time will probably have ended before that happens, but I must leave my ideas explained.’596

Tagore shared his agony and ecstasy, his affection as well as his discomforts regarding the ashram, with those at Santiniketan who became his ‘family.’ In two consecutive and undated letters that were written to Nepal Chandra Roy, Tagore showed signs of disillusionment with his ashram project, signalling his discomfort in interacting with the new students who had joined the Shiksha Bhavan (college). ‘On many an occasion’ wrote Tagore, ‘I have of my own accord, permitted laxity, and not worried about it. Many a time, I have interrupted lessons for the purpose of entertainment, but at that point our children belonged to us, but things have changed with time, I painfully realize... The restlessness among current boys has made me scared.’597

Being perturbed by the untoward developments at the ashram, did not divert Tagore’s attention from the wellbeing of his colleagues. Tagore wrote to Andrews, ‘Do not try to come now however strong you may feel – for financial difficulties are just as bad as disease germs in their insidious attacks on our health.’598 Tagore’s affection and closeness to his companions in the Santiniketan mission can also be discerned from the endearing names he assigned to them based on the character of the person or the nature of their job. A clear example of this tradition is observed when Tejeschandra Sen, who was entrusted with the responsibility of naturally beautifying the Santiniketan premises was named as Tarubilashi (meaning one who exhibits unconditional fondness and attachment to plants) on successfully converting a place of residence into a place of beauty.599 Tagore’s primary objective was imparting quality education to the pupils in the ashram. As it was a matter of priority for Tagore, even in the face of fierce financial distress, new teaching staff were appointed to raise the standard of teaching.600 In 1915 two thoroughly qualified B.Sc.

596 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Sriniketan’ Translated by Amiya Chakravarty, Visva Bharati News (VBN) Vol. VII No.8 (1939): 61 597 Rabindranath Tagore to Nepal Chandra Roy. Undated letter. Source: RBA. Translations mine. As a close associate of Rabindranath, Nepal Chandra joined the ashram in 1910 having taught elsewhere before. He taught English and History to the students and remained at Santiniketan till his retirement in 1936. 598 Rabindranath Tagore to Andrews. Letter dated June 24, 1915. Source RBA. 599 Sudhendu Mondal, Debiprasanna Chattopadhyay, Santiniketan Ashram theke Bidyasram (Kolkata: Deep Prakashan, 2006), 48 600 Rathindranath Tagore offers some insight into the financial situation of the ashram in its earliest years, suggesting that it was the time when the annual allowance for the school drawn from the Santiniketan trust stood at Rupees 1800. Rabindranath’s private monthly income at that point was barely Rupees 200. The endavour to provide free education to students along with food and lodging without charging fees constituted an additional

173 teachers were appointed in the place of Anil and Nagen Aich and one Sarat Babu. Cheap materials that were being used due to paucity of funds and lack of energy and discrimination were sought to be corrected so that the best could be done for the boys.601

That Tagore was uncomfortable with the extraordinary circumstances of his birth in a family of elites and agonised by the adulations he received on account of his poetic contributions has been discussed above. It is also observed that the fame accompanying the Nobel Prize that was awarded to Tagore, caused him anguish as to W.W. Pearson Rabindranath writes, ‘My friend there has been a load of oppression upon my mind since I have got the news of the great honour conferred on me. The noise it had created has frightened me and I know from now I shall have to walk my way through the pressure of a persistent crowd. I can assure you I am more in want of your sympathy than congratulation.’602

Tagore’s investment in the Santiniketan project, as borne out by the discussion in this chapter, demonstrates his preoccupation with the ashram—its ordinary concerns, the day to day matters which affected the institute and the wellbeing of those who lived and worked there. Being a compatriot to his pupils at the ashram was, for Tagore, the opportunity to embrace ordinariness to dodge the adulations and accolades that were bestowed on him. By cultivating meaningful and virtuous bonds with people at his ashram, Tagore embodied the relatedness that permeated his notion of ‘personality.’ About his association with and attachment to the people involved in the Santiniketan project, he stated in a letter to Andrews dated July 7th, 1915:

Haven’t I confessed elsewhere that renunciation is not for me and that my freedom is to be moving from bondage to bondage… for the time being it seems to me that I want absolute freedom from activities… but really it is freedom to create new forms for new ideas.603 Despite Tagore’s activities that concerned writing and travelling it was the Santiniketan ashram that he kept coming back to. It was his home. In the issue of Visva Bharati Bulletin published in October 1936, the description of the atmosphere of Santiniketan read thus:

strain on the existing sources of money. See Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1958), 46 601 See Tagore’s letter to Pearson from Calcutta dated 16th June 1915. Source: RBA. 602 Rabindranath Tagore to W.W. Pearson, Letter dated 18th November 1913, Bolpur. Source: RBA. 603 Rabindranath Tagore to C.F. Andrews, Letter dated July 7, 1915. Source: RBA.

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It is a quiet spot in the middle of open country with wide plains stretching to the horizon on all sides. Under the wide and starry sky, there is peace to be found for the restless spirit of Man…one can walk miles across open country with nothing to obstruct the view except here and there neat Santal village surrounded by its few cultivated fields, and on the distant line of the horizon a group of tall palm trees standing like the warning fore-fingers of the guardian spirits of the place raised against all thoughtless curiosity of outside intrusions. The active presence of the Poet – Rabindranath Tagore is in residence here. He is at home to the students and his presence is always made real to them through his songs, poems, articles, plays, talks and occasional class teachings.604 Tagore’s influence on his students in the capacity of a teacher was only occasional, as reported by the bulletin, but his presence imbued the space of the Santiniketan complex. By this I mean the numerous residences that the poet built for himself made his presence literal and all-pervasive within the ashram he had set up. The Notun Bari (a simple thatched cottage) was the first structure built for the residence of the poet and his family in 1902. Prior to this, Maharshi Debendranath established the Santiniketan Griha (house) and the Mandir or the glass temple (between 1858-63 and 1890 respectively). Dehali was built in 1904 and Rabindranath lived here for a while. However, keeping in tune with his frequent need to shift locations, Tagore had a continuous addition of residences to his name between the years 1919-1941. Konark was the first among these structures, built for the seclusion that Tagore sought for his own work. Shyamali was the next experimental house and had a low-cost structure built to serve as a model house for the villagers. Punascha, meaning ‘postscript’, was built next to the east of Shyamali where most of Tagore’s paintings were created. Udichi was the last house built for Rabindranath while Udayana was the biggest building where Tagore spent his last days. The last five buildings mentioned are located in the Uttarayan complex, an enclave of Tagore’s residences, occupying the Northern end of the ashram.605 Ironically, one observes that while Visva Bharati was founded on the motto Yatra Visvam Bhavatyekanidam (where the world makes a home in a single nest), the ashram premise strictly and spatially remained Rabindranath’s nest – his home and hearth. For Rabindranath, ‘the permanent significance of home is not in the narrowness of its enclosure, but in an eternal moral idea. It represents the truth of human relationship; it reveals loyalty and love for the personality of

604 See Visva Bharati Bulletin No.4 (October 1936): 4. Emphasis mine. 605 For the details of the houses built, I have referred to the UNESCO website. https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5495/. Facts and dates have been cross checked from: Sebanti Sarkar, ‘Tagore Heritage Restored’ The Telegraph (6th February, 2011) and Prarthita Biswas, Jayanta Mete, ‘The Architectural Style of Shantiniketan’ Journal of Education & Social Policy 1, No.2 (December 2014): 82-85

175 man’606—it was Santiniketan where Tagore’s ‘personality’ found its home. Understandably therefore, the Santiniketan ashram as well as the people associated with it were very dear to Tagore.

Rathindranath Tagore wrote about his father, ‘His ever-changing moods were a constant strain on his closest associates…It was therefore difficult even for those who were nearest to him, to know the reasons which made him act in a particular way. The delicacy of his own feelings, especially with personal matters, and his extreme solicitude for the feelings of others, often led him to adopt devious means of hiding his real intentions.’607 An illustration of this can be found in Tagore being vocal about his displeasure with this custom of ‘pranam’ (touching feet as a mark of respect) and also the reference to him as Gurudev. To Pearson he wrote:

You have got into some conventional habits, such as calling me ‘Gurudev’ and making ‘pranam’ to me. Drop them. For I know there are occasions when they hurt you and for that very reason are discourteous to me. You know I never care to assume the role of a prophet or a teacher; I do not claim homage from my fellow- beings, I only need love and sympathy and I am merely a poet and nothing else.608 Not only did these practices continue at the ashram under Tagore’s watch but the custom of pranam was, in fact, institutionalised through the constitution of the ashram that Tagore drafted. However, these inconsistencies were not impediments but central to the making of unique persons and distinct individuals at Santiniketan. The attributes of such persons were conveyed by Tagore’s notion of ‘personality’ and exemplified by him.

Conclusion

This chapter analyses Tagore’s idea of ‘personality’ that he wrote about by using different terms in different pieces of writing. He institutionalised the idea at Santiniketan by urging his students to refrain from falling prey to abstract ideas of the nation symbolised through the Bharat Mata. Tagore instructed them to get acquainted with the living realities that surrounded them and perceive the issues of poverty, sickness, ignorance and death as the real enemies that needed to be fought. Denouncing the tendencies of group identifications rooted in a distinction between the self and the ‘other’ which fuelled nationalist politics around ethnic identitarianism, Tagore symbolised his conceptualisation of ‘personality’ by proactively engaging with individuals at the ashram and

606 Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (London: Macmillan,1922), 165 607 Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Kolkata: Orient Longman, 1958), 148 608 Rabindranath Tagore to Pearson, Letter dated December13, 1920. Source: RBA.

176 the society through his educational qua political mission at Santiniketan. By donning the cap of the First Nobel Laureate of Asia to being the ‘loving Gurudev’ for his students at the ashram with equal ease, Tagore reconciled individuality and subjectivity with the impulses of the community. As noted by Charles Taylor, an individual subject cannot be saved as long as it sees itself as an isolated atom as there are some things which are important beyond the self. These things have significance for a fulfilling life and a total and fully consistent subjectivism would tend towards emptiness.609 Although Taylor’s work belongs to a much later time and was written in a different socio-political milieu, it remains an important reference as it resonates with what ‘personality’ meant for Tagore. It was a clamour against the atomism of individual identities, which lay at the basis of forging a separatist nationalist identity, distinct from the Universal Person who is central to Tagore’s scheme. ‘Persons’ become universal through their relations with others in the society. This was the objective behind creating ‘personalities’ at the ashram which stood in contrast to narrow ways of drawing a sense of self as Bengalis, as bhadraloks, or as sons and daughters of Bharat Mata. The significance of Tagore’s idea of personality lies in its dissociation from the politics of mass mobilisations around abstract ideas. Tagore detested any kind of communalism: ethnic, religious, national, class-based, so on and so forth. ‘Identity’ for him was an identification with a particular people, central to the politics of projecting an Indian identity to challenge the apparent superiority of its western counterpart. Santiniketan ashram represents Tagore’s educational vision and political aim of sculpting man’s personality which emanates from his specific experiences of being born into the bhadralok fold and his denouncement of the same.

609 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), 507

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Concluding Remarks

I opened the thesis with a quote from Tagore urging people to accord Santiniketan ashram its ‘due.’ He spoke about the ‘long arduous path; leading to the ashram, characterised by ‘a woeful struggle against unrelenting adversity.’610 While soliciting support for the ashram from others, Tagore himself grew disillusioned with the educational possibilities of the school, which he saw as ‘everyday becoming more and more like so many schools and colleges elsewhere in the country: borrowed cages that treat the students’ mind as captive birds…’611 The contradiction in Tagore’s approach to Santiniketan prompts the question: what was it about the Santiniketan for which Tagore wanted it to be recognised? And why, in the face of such relentless adversities, did he commit himself to the assiduous task of setting up an ashram inspired by the ancient Vedic ideals when he was one of the most prominent literary figures in Bengal?

For one, as this study has shown, what needs to be recognised is the fact that Santiniketan was not only a school, but a deeply political project which embodied Tagore’s political philosophy and therefore was of crucial importance to him. But more broadly, it would be helpful to consider Tagore’s place within the nationalist movement of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century India and the vantage point from which he claimed recognition for his ashram. Radharaman Chakrabarty is of the view that ‘Tagore’s encounter with the cross-currents of the national movement would show for certain that he had been ploughing a lonely furrow.’612 The nature of anti-colonial resistance in India was such that it accommodated a voice like Tagore’s, who, despite being the ‘great poet of Bengal’ and the founder of a ‘fanciful experiment at Santiniketan’, could be recognised for his alternative politics. What facilitated the process was the advent of humanist and liberal ideologies of Europe which exposed the generation of English educated Indians to new aesthetic sensibilities and created an intellectual milieu where Tagore’s views found a place. Despite the nationalist’s preoccupation with the project of replacing the British state with a structurally and conceptually similar but an indigenous one, Tagore’s views on samaj as the

610 See footnote 1. 611 Rabindranath Tagore, Letter to L.K. Elmhirst dated 19th December, 1937. See footnote 53. 612 Radharaman Chakrabarti, ‘Tagore: Politics and Beyond’ In Thomas Pantham and Kenneth Deutsch ed. Political Thought in Modern India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), 181

178 alternative to the nation (articulated through his essays on education and politics) found representation in leading journals in Bengal at the time.

Secondly, Tagore envisioned the Santiniketan ashram with the village at its core, as the miniature model for India, which was inspired and influenced by Brahmoism, a neo-Hindu reform movement for social change. Historically, the efforts and achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth- century social reformers in India have been seen as distinct from the political project of attaining self-rule. However, the social reform initiatives were not limited to the objects of changing legislation through social action, and spread into a myriad of proto-political activities. Thus, it would be a historical misjudgement to treat the efforts of social reformers, from Ram Mohan Roy to Vidyasagar to Phule in moderating the influence of traditionalism on the Indian mind, purely as bringing about social change. Such activities aimed at freeing educated Indians from the clutches of orthodoxy and ‘superstition’, preparing them for just and fair political negotiations with colonial legislators. Tagore’s ashram represented this trend quite centrally, i.e. of treading the middle ground between social and political currents of the nationalist movement. It was Tagore’s samaj- centric politics vying with the nation-centric politics that warrants our attention.

Thirdly, as Tagore wrote, ‘the only thing of which I feel certain is that I am a poet,’613 it must be acknowledged that Tagore’s poetic imagination found expression within the arena of his ashram where education was not a baneful experience but thrived through the day to day learning and living in communion with fellow students. The creative individuality of Tagore found representation in the performing arts, music, and painting lessons as well as the celebration of seasonal festivals that were central to his ashram’s pedagogy, revealing his intent to engender creativity among pupils. So, was it this creativity as opposed to conforming to conventions of government education and employment that Tagore wanted posterity to acknowledge? It is well known that the two world wars had facilitated the reception of Tagore’s verses in the West and he was typecast into ‘a sage from the East’ who critiqued Western nationalism for its domination and aggression. As Tagore’s humanitarian spirit received attention and appreciation, Visva Bharati, founded on the motto ‘where the world meets in a nest’, also came into the limelight. As The Sunday Observer reported, ‘Visva Bharati arouses stronger passions not because it is a central

613 Rabindranath Tagore, 1931. Cited in Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: OUP, 2004), 73

179 university but simply because Tagore founded it.’614 However, Tagore’s western admirers dwindled in the face of his critique of European nationalism and became increasingly disenchanted with their own acclaim of Tagore as the ‘Sage Poet from the East.’ Neither did the Western reception of Tagore as a spiritual sage do justice to capturing the gamut of socio-political activities that Tagore engaged in, nor did Visva Bharati retain the admiration it once received on account of him being its founder. It now stands as one of the many central universities in India and is perhaps not the most coveted among them.

Lastly, the central categories of swadeshbhakti, mukti, and persons around which Tagore formulated his political philosophy to be practised at the ashram were crafted in opposition to their structural and more popular alternatives i.e. nationalism, swaraj, and identity. Tagore’s keywords were developed without a sense of fixity or permanence but emanated from a wider conceptual frame of reference that was ‘universalised in the age of imperialism’ and ‘underwent transformation in the context of a history of interaction with already-existing concepts.’615 As I have shown, these categories were speculatively interpreted by Tagore and experimentally implemented at the ashram with a distinctive set of contextually attested meanings. They were worked out through inconsistencies, compromises, and contradictory pulls and pressures (it is important here to recall the caste issues, the absence of girls and the inadequate teaching staff at Santiniketan). Also, Tagore deliberately chose to articulate his political ideas in Bangla, being careful not to impose Western vocabulary and concepts. Although I have been able to access Tagore’s writings in their original language, the impression that ‘due to the barrier of language,’ the ‘specific impact of his writings’ was of less importance than Tagore’s general impact in the ‘cultural world’ is unavoidable.616 One might assume that Tagore’s multivalent political concepts with context specific meanings, would not warrant recognition from a mass of Tagore’s readers who view him primarily as a man of verse. Speculatively, therefore, historians and political philosophers would be the ones acknowledging Santiniketan’s imperative in Indian educational and political scene, while generations of Tagore admirers would continue reading and reciting

614 See The Sunday Observer, ‘Visva Bharati – A Crisis of Identity’ (Bombay, 2nd May, 1982). 615 Peter Van Der Veer, ‘Spirituality in Modern Society’ Social Research: An International Quarterly 76, Number 4 (Winter 2009): 1097-1120 616 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya has identified this in his book, Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009), 239

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Tagore’s poems, singing his songs and performing his dance dramas, without much regard for his ashram.

I have outlined here certain possible ways of responding to Tagore’s plea of according his ashram its due. However, when it came to himself, the picture was quite different as borne out in the 1926 song that Tagore composed in Bangla, imploring that he remain anonymous and obscure. Its words, ‘Shei Bhalo Shei Bhalo, Amare na hoy na jaano’617 literally translate to: ‘It is better that I remain unknown.’ Future generations, however, had it quite different from what Tagore intended. Upon Tagore’s death at the age of eighty, Kalinath Roy618 penned an obituary noting that ‘death in the case of a man whom the world would not willingly let die can always be said to be premature.’619 Kalidas Nag, Tagore’s student, mentions that while the poet continued to attract thousands of earnest youths who adored him, as school boys at Santiniketan they worshipped Rabindranath as they had the opportunity of coming closer to him and building a personal relationship.620 Rather than glorify Tagore as a genius, it is important to understand him as a real individual in a complex historical context. The Santiniketan project involved numerous failures as well as successes and was marked by moments of agony as well as ecstasy. Acknowledging this complexity allows us to reach a more nuanced understanding of Tagore and his experimental educational project.

Taking cognizance of the intricacies of Tagore’s working context is crucial for dispelling the notion that Tagore was a demigod, worthy of worship and uncritical adoration. This thesis has presented an account of the ashram, drawing on its history and putting that chronicle in conversation with Tagore’s writings to establish that the education mission at Santiniketan was in essence political. The ways of remembering that ‘lonesome endeavour’ is, of course, open to debate.

617 Rabindranath Tagore composed this song in 1926. I am indebted to Mr. Rajat Ghosh at the Rabindracharcha Bhavan at Kalighat for the reference. 618 Kalinath Roy (1878-1945) was the editor in chief of the newspaper The Tribune published from Lahore since 1911 until his death in 1945. 619 Kalinath Roy, ‘The Immortal Bard’ The Calcutta Municipal Gazzette, Tagore Memorial Supplement (September, 1941), 45. Another contributor in the same volume, Satya Vrata Mukherjea, wrote an essay titled ‘Tagore The Immortal’, 30-32 620 Kalidas Nag, ‘The Fountain of Youth’ in Ibid., 33

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