Tagore’s University: A History of Visva-Bharati 1921–1961

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Tagore's University is a history of Visva-Bharati, the world centre of learning and culture founded by Rabindranath Tagore a hundred years ago. The poet's conception entailed several autonomous centres - for Asian studies, the visual arts, music, and rural reconstruction in defiance of the standard notions of a university, Visva-Bharati was set up to break barriers between nations and races by rebuilding in miniature the visva - the world torn apart by World War 1.

The book traces the first four decades of this large experiment in building a cultural community of learning, teaching, and scholarship. It tells the story of exceptional individuals from across Europe, Asia, America, and India who became Tagore's collaborators in a mini-universe of creativity and humane intellection. It reveals why in its heyday Visva- Bharati was so internationally renowned as an extraordinarily attractive institution.

Swati Ganguly explores the many achievements of what Tagore called his "life's best treasure". She also narrates changes in the material life and spirit of the place after Tagore, when it was shaped by the larger forces of a newly independent India. Archives, memoirs, official documents, and oral narratives come alive in this compellingly written and little-known history of an institution that once redefined tradition and modernity.

SWATI GANGULY is Professor, Department of English, Visva- Bharati. Her interests include Rabindranath Tagore, the European Renaissance, feminism, translation, and theatre. She has held a Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, Norwich (1996), and a New India Foundation Fellowship (2011). She has translated short stories by Bengali women writers and co-edited two anthologies of essays on Tagore. Tagore's University, her first monograph, was written in her Santiniketan home, "Nepathya", under the strict supervision of her canine companion Arjun.

WRITING THIS PREFACE means putting formal closure to the research, thinking, and processing that have remained dopen in my head for a very long time-it has been years since I began to conceptualise the project, to now when it escapes my clutches. The sense of a very prolonged engagement with it comes also from long hours spent musing on a balcony over cool summer mornings listening to birdcalls and walks taken in the Santiniketan ashram campus on late winter afternoons. On an easy chair in my study or strolling past the Hindi Bhavana and the Cheena Bhavana towards the playground, I seem to have long been in a reverie that allowed me to move beyond the present into the past.

I grew up in Calcutta, read English Literature at the university, and moved to Santiniketan more than two decades ago when I joined the Department of English, Visva-Bharati, as faculty, and set up home quite close to the ashram campus. I wasn't the privileged insider - I had never been a student in the institution where I was now teaching, but neither was I a rank outsider lacking all formal connection with the institution. My location in-between was fortuitous when it came to writing the present book on the history of four decades of Visva-Bharati. It allowed me to retain possession of my critical gaze even after I had formed an affective bond with the institution and the place.

If the beauty of the campus, with its unique architecture and environmental sculpture, spoke to me silently, written accounts-official documents, articles in newsmagazines, memoirs, and letters -created a buzz in my brain. I recall vividly the physical exhaustion of intellectual labour; it created a blurring of my already myopic vision, and stiffness of back and limbs. Occasionally, as I trudged back wearily from the archive and library, there were moments of epiphany: less than a hundred years ago, Rabindranath Tagore had walked along these paths, stopping to look at a flowering tree or watching cranes fly in an azure sky. Living in his time became part of my existence. People and places came alive in my imagi- nation and this I felt was the only way I could write of the past.

The narrative here - the story of the founding and nurturing of Visva-Bharati - took shape in my mind during these reveries and reflections even before I began writing. Narratives have their own compulsions, creating a desire to probe in directions that did not exist in the "original" scheme. So I would often stop after completing the first draft of a section and go back to hours of reading in the library of Rabindra Bhavana, or rummage through the small but precious collection I had painstakingly built over three years and more.

The excitement and joy of the early phase of my work - when I spent hours reading in libraries and archives, wrote essays which evolved from archival work, and travelled in India and abroad to give talks on Visva-Bharati and Rabindranath Tagore - were unluckily followed by a difficult time during which my father and two beloved cousins passed away, and the Covid pandemic was followed by traumas brought on by certain events in my life which left me humiliated, helpless, and despairing. I survived because I could return to the manuscript of this book, immersing myself in thoughts of a quieter and happier time in the past that took me away from present chaos. As things fell apart, the work became the still centre of my being. I sought consolation in the fact that I taught at the university founded by Rabindranath a hundred years back to provide space for those who wished to pursue learning and creativity in a time of political and civilisational madness. I believe one of my sources of strength was the memory of my early days as a teacher in Visva-Bharati.

THE WORLD, Visva-Bharati is Tagore's university, but the T institution's name has no obvious link to his - and for a reason. Juliet's view of the matter was not Rabindranath Tagore's; for him the name Visva-Bharati was the crystallisation of an ideal - a world centre of learning in India. It was almost certainly a conception and name that had struck him as both Indian and global during a period of crisis - the First World War. "Visva- Bharati" was not just apposite, it precisely expressed an ideal of learning for which Rabindranath wanted material and institutional shape. It alluded to the relationship between visva, the world, and Bharat, the country. Visva-Bharati epitomised his vision of a specifically Indian institution of learning which might contain within itself the magnitude of the world's intellectual and creative aspirations. No other name could smell as sweet.

There are other institutions of learning more closely connected with the poet's name. The Rabindra Bharati University, for ex- ample - which could be roughly rendered Tagore University - was a tribute paid to Rabindranath on the occasion of his birth centenary celebrations in 1961. It was set up in his ancestral home in Jorasanko, Calcutta, with an emphasis on music, the fine arts, and the humanities to suggest that these constituted the core of his genius. Then, in 2010, the Government of India proposed another institution in his honour, a Rabindranath Tagore University dedicated to the liberal arts. This was meant to assume shape as a continuation of grand celebrations for his 150th birth an- niversary in 2011. Though the university was never founded, the proposal remains available in the public domain. A close reading of it reveals that some of the most salient ideas of Visva-Bharati are, without direct reference, embedded in this proposal for a "University of the Future".

Now, a decade later, dark clouds of uncertainty hover menac- ingly over the future of all Indian universities. It is perhaps time to turn to the past to recall the history of an institution which, at century ago, radically rethought the epistemology of the liberal arts, and which included within its ambit Asian and European studies, the visual and performing arts, and the rural economy. A thoroughly cosmopolitan and quintessentially international vision of education and nation, an implicit rejection of the xenophobic and insular nationalism of its own day and ours, came into being more than a hundred years ago with the act of naming a university "Visva-Bharati".

Soon after its founding, Rabindranath remarked in 1919: "it does not follow that by merely founding a University oneself, and keeping it under one's own control, it can be made one's own."2 Was he articulating what he saw as lying at the heart of the relationship between an educational institution and its founder? Was he rejecting the idea of ownership and control and rethinking what it means for an institution to be beholden to its founding father? We know he believed that an institution was, much like a living entity, capable of organic growth, so he was perhaps thinking of his university as taking shape gradually in the direction of ideals formulated at the time of its inception. This then leads to the question of what the ideals were that Visva-Bharati began with.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages