The poet Rabindranath Tagore was the founder of an institution that we know today as Visva-Bharati University in the twin campuses of Santiniketan and Sriniketan in rural southern Bengal about a hundred miles north west of Calcutta. Starting it as an experimental school in 1901 he added an international university and an institute of rural reconstruction in 1921 and 1922. The making of this institution was central to his national and international concerns throughout his life. It was an education which sought to work for a common humanity, locally and globally, an institution unhindered by the territorially bounded model of the nation-state. It was a striving for India’s entry into the universal even with being a colonized country.
But this endeavour is an unexplored dimension of Rabindranath’s biography. He is celebrated as a literary genius which he certainly was, but is not seriously remembered as an educationist and rural reformer. By his own admission, the work he did for education and rural reconstruction in Santiniketan where he lived for much of his life was vital to him even if it meant living with a dialectical tension or a tension of opposites in his life.
He took up the work by founding his Santiniketan school when he was about forty years of age, till which time he had only been mainly following his literary pursuits. He believed he had no gift for practical work and himself wrote that he was no leader of men nor moral preceptor. Why then did he do it? Even to himself, he was first and foremost a poet — and to the Nationalist leadership of his country, his idea of an inclusive nationalism and his ideas of an alternative education were only a “poet’s fancy”. 1 The exception were Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru who greatly valued his ideas and his secular vision for the country.
I would like to submit that Rabindranath worked on three focused goals in experimenting with his ideas of education and nationalism. First that, education requires a natural field for the growth of scholarly learning; that the purpose of a university is to produce scholarship and to spread it; to do this it was necessary to invite intellectuals and scholars who were devoted to research and discovery and creativity in their fields. A meeting-place of those minds was conceived to be the right venue for a true university.
Rabindranath firmly believed that in every nation education is intimately associated with the life of the people; but, for us in modern India, the colonial education was applied only to turning out clerks, lawyers, doctors, magistrates, munsiffs and policemen, which were the few favourite professions of the newly English educated Indian middle class. That education did not reach the majority of Indians like the farmer, the oil-grinder, the potter, because our colonial universities had not been a growth from the soil; they were like “parasites feeding on foreign oaks”, he wrote.2
He argued that a truly Indian school must from the very beginning implement its acquired knowledge of economics, of agriculture, of health and all other everyday sciences in the surrounding villages; then alone can that school become the centre of the country’s way of living. This was the viswakarma approach of his Visva-Bharati institutions at Santiniketan and Sriniketan, or the approach of total activity. Rabindranath held that the Indian National Congress followed a faulty policy of petitions and pleas for favours from the colonial government, which he critiqued as the “politics of begging”. He recommended instead the need to plunge into constructive work by taking responsibility for one’s own state and society, “swadeshi samaj”, both as individuals and as collectives, so that the change could be brought about.3
Rabindranath was convinced that all those goals could be approached through a new and alternative education to address three main issues: societal, pedagogic, and the need to connect with the gateways of learning, nationally and internationally. Even with being totally opposed to imperialism and the West’s display of greed and violence, his approach was that of a balanced appraisal of Western civilization in which he found much to admire. Similarly, even with his love for his own state and society he criticized the hierarchical and static elements of its culture. He was concerned not just with the cultural domination that grew out of colonial hegemony but equally with the cultural domination that had evolved from his country’s own past which had resulted in a divisive force between city and village which had got worse in early modern India due to the rise of a somewhat dehumanized professional class.
In the summer of 1901 Rabindranath moved with his family to his father’s ashram in Santiniketan. Santiniketan was discovered as a serene spot in the early 1860s by Maharshi Debendranath who was travelling in the area to visit a friend and fellow landlord of the Sinha family of Raipur in the district of Birbhum in southern Bengal. Moved by the peace of the empty countryside dotted only by some tall palm trees, Debendranath bought twenty bighas of land there in 1863. He had a guest house built on it in 1866 which he named Santiniketan, abode of peace.
Debendranath also established a Trust Deed for Santiniketan in which he provided for a hall of prayer, an annual village fair, and a school. This was the school Rabindranath founded in 1901 as the first step in implementing his idea of a new and alternative Indian education. Rabindranath had no previous experience of leading a school. But he had confidence in himself, and he had profound sympathy for children. What weighed on his mind, he wrote, was the ‘unnatural pressure’ of the system of education ‘which prevailed everywhere’. 4
He described the Santiniketan school as ‘an indigenous attempt in adapting modern methods of education in a truly Indian cultural environment’. 5 The idea was in protest against the soulless schooling introduced by the colonial rulers, soulless because they were not a growth from the soil.
Notes
1. Aditya Odedar. Rabindra-bidushan Itibritta, Calcutta, 1986, pp.10, 27-8, 52, 54, 59.
2. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My School’ in Personality, Reprint, Calcutta, Rupa, 2002, p.41.
3. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Call of Truth’, in The Mahatma and the Poet, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, New Delhi, The National Book Trust, 1997), p. 103.
4. Rabindranath Tagore, Talks in China, ed. Sisir Kumar Das (Calcutta, Visva-Bharati, 1999), pp. 67-72.
5. Rabindranath Tagore, Subtitle, in pamphlet titled Visva-Bharati, (Santiniketan, 1929).
Image courtesy : Rabindra Bhavan Archive, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan
Jibansmriti archive Blog
Joint editor : Arindam Saha Sardar Curator & president, Jibansmriti Archive
Biyas Ghosh secretary, Jibansmriti Archive.
Chief assistant editor : Moumita Pal
Editorial board members : Pramiti Roy, Ankush Das & Sujata Saha.
Vol. 1, No. 3, 7 July 2025