Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator

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For forty years, the most creative of modern Indian cultural leaders, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poured his energies and talents into a complex of educational initiatives at Santiniketan and Sriniketan in rural Bengal. This passionate labour of love by Rabindranath is now reconstructed and examined in depth by cultural historian Kathleen O'Connell. Based on extensive use of published and unpublished documentary sources and interviews with surviving students and associates, the resulting book is thus biographical in its exploration of the evolution of Tagore's creative genius. It also represents a systematic account of the growth and modifications of the Santiniketan project in relation to contemporary historical influences, Indian and global. Fundamental to the book is her exposition, analysis and evaluation of Rabindranath's conception of education in meaning, goals and methods and its relevance to the contemporary world.

Kathleen M. O'Connell teaches courses on South Asia at New College, University of Toronto, Canada. Her interest in Rabindranath Tagore and the Bengali cultural and literary tradition began when she did her M.A. in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She began researching Tagore's educational experiment at Santiniketan during the late 1970s when she and her husband Joseph along with their two children spent a year in Santiniketan, and the children studied in Patha-Bhavana. Her publications include numerous articles on Tagore's educational theory and practice; Bravo Professor Shonku, translation (Bengali to English) of three stories by Satyajit Ray; 'Rabindranath Tagore: Facets of a Cultural Icon' (special issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly Vol. 77 no. 4 (fall 2008) and Rabindranath Tagore: Reclaiming a Cultural Icon (Kolkata:Visva-Bharati, 2009), both jointly edited with Joseph T. O'Connell.

Dr. Kathleen O'Connell has invited me to write a foreword for her monograph, Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator. This is an undeserved honour because I am not a specialist on Rabindranath's voluminous literary output or his educational experiments. And I am more than pleased to oblige because I hold Dr. O'Connell in very high regard as a scholar and an educationist and also consider the poet's work and thought in the field of education to be of profound relevance to our times.

Dr. O'Connell is one of a not very numerous band of scholars who have spent many years in Bengal in a humble quest to understand the complex culture and very difficult literary tradition of the region. And she has also devoted her professional career to teaching the language and literature of Bengal in a part of the world, Canada, where the subject would have remained entirely peripheral to the cultural concerns of its people but for the devoted efforts of the O'Connells, husband and wife.

I was delighted to learn that Visva-Bharati had decided to publish her monograph. This was a most welcome news for a variety of reasons. Dr. Kathleen's work is of exceptionally high quality, in the depth of research on which it is based and for the elegance of her presentation as also her analytical skills. It traces the evolution of Tagore's educational ideals, from the puritanical model of ancient Brahminic gurukul in sylvan settings, through an emphasis on joyous approach to learning in tune with a keen awareness of the environment to the grand ambition of a universalist intellectual cultural agenda, an institution where the world would meet as birds from many lands might in a nest with place for all.

The relevance of these experiments is worth emphasizing. In Rabindranath's own country the central purpose of higher education to-day is high earning, preferably in service to multi-nationals who can afford to pay it. In the world at large, including the great universities of the West, the student now is frequently described as a customer.

Hence education is a commodity on sale and its ultimate justification, creation of wealth. If that noble task helps destroy the environment, and eventually the human species, the latter's survival has to be balanced against the all important demands of profitability. Formation of skills relevant to such tasks rather than education as the term has been understood until now becomes the central object of the whole exercise. Only a few old fogies continue to believe that development of the human personality is the purpose of education. Those who are even more benighted attribute a centrality to joy and a happy awareness of nature in the programmes for training young minds. The poet was a leader of educational thinking built around such obsolete beliefs.

I hope that Dr. O'Connell's study will revive an awareness that his ideas are even more relevant today than they were in his life time. They belong to the genre which may help our species survive. More, they may help us achieve richer and fuller lives. I wish this monograph every success. And let me record here my gratitude to Kathleen O'Connell for writing it and to Visva-Bharati for their decision to publish it.

A good reason for giving serious consideration to the educational theory and practice of Rabindranath Tagore is the fact that such a prolific personality would devote forty years of his life to establishing an alternative form of education, aimed at promoting social and environmental harmony in conjunction with the unfolding of the creative personality. This study-which examines the general relationship between the evolution of Tagore's educational experiment at Santiniketan and the growth of his own life-finds its theme in a statement by Rabindranath in which he wrote:

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.

From such a statement, it becomes clear that Rabindranath considered the genesis of his educational work to be integrally linked with his own personal development and thought as a whole-and this is the general approach taken within this study. Its scope is a broader historical and psychological one than those which have preceded it, with more emphasis upon the chronological evolution of the school-particularly during the first decades and its relation to Tagore's thought and personal experiences. Rabindranath did not write a systematic educational treatise, as did many of the other well-known educators, and his reflections on education are found scattered throughout his work. His only collection of educational essays Siksa contains twenty three Bengali essays. His other writings are scattered through various books, pamphlets, and letters, which it has been estimated would comprise five volumes. Fortunately, there are several bibliographies to turn to: Pulinbihari Sen's bibliography published in the 1947 Visva-Bharati Quarterly educational number, and the more recent Rabindranath Tagore: A Bibliography compiled by Katherine Henn, which includes several hundred educational entries. As well, there is Himangshu Bhushan Mukherjee's valuable study Education for Fulness, which provides a scholarly and comprehensive analysis of Tagore's educational writings in English and Bengali, as well as a description of his educational work.

Two of the earliest descriptions of the school are to be found in Ajitkurmar Chakravarty's Brahmabidyalay, written in Bengali in 1911, and W.W. Pearson's Shantiniketan, written in English in 1916. Other important studies include Sasadhar Sinha's Social Thinking of Tagore, Sunil Chandra Sarkar's Tagore's Educational Philosophy and Experiment, and more recently, Uma Dasgupta's History of Santiniketan and Sriniketan.

There has been surprisingly little written on Tagore's educational thought in North America. William Cenkner's The Hindu Personality in Education provides a comparative study of Tagore, Gandhi and Aurobindo, and Stephen Hay's Asian Ideas of East and West discusses the Eastern aspect of Visva-Bharati. There have been various articles and several theses which focus on certain aspects of Tagore's educational thought, but they do not provide a comprehensive overview of his educational work or relate it to historical and personal developments. This study represents the first Canadian Ph.D. on Tagore in English, and it is indebted to the above resources. As well, it has utilized available Santiniketan syllabi and bulletins, new archival and biographical material, personal interviews and greater reference to Tagore's literary and philosophical writings to present a more complete and integrated perspective on his educational priorities in relation to his life and thought.

Chapter One discusses how the history of the Tagore family during the Bengal Renaissance shaped Rabindranath's early environment at Jorasanko and influenced his basic educational orientation. It details how Rabindranath's grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, supported social and political change, befriended Rammohun Roy, and helped shape the Indian liberal press and English Indian educational system. The role of Rabindranath's father, Debendranath, also is examined, especially his involvement in the Brahmo Samaj and the development of a new Indian cultural identity as well as his efforts in developing vernacular education.

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