Remembering Robi: Childhood, Freedom and Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

This essay explores Tagore’s imagination of the child as a national subject through a consideration of his writings on childhood, authority and the free individual in colonial society, and memoirs of his own childhood. Rabindranath rejected, to a considerable extent, the authority of the father as it existed in contemporary bhadralok society. Simultaneously, he rejected the models of schooling and institutionalization, imported from Europe, that threatened native paternalism in some respects, but were aligned with it in others. He put forward, instead, a theory of child-rearing and education that emphasized a freedom that was restrained by a reformulation of nature and society and by love—including love of authority itself. The new Indian child that he imagined embraced the wildness of pedagogies that were identified with England, submitted to ideals (although not necessarily forms) of discipline that could be identified with India, and emerged as free: Indian but not orthodox, modern but not mimic, liberated and individual but also reassuringly social.