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Visva-Bharati: The Transnational Centre of Education

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Rabindranath Tagore

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Abstract

Tagore started a school in 1901 and in 1918 he wrote, ‘…the Santiniketan School should form a link between India and the world…the epoch of narrow nationalism is coming to an end…. The first flag of victory of Universal Man shall be planted there’. This was the beginning of Visva-Bharati that finally encapsulated the school and university with its many programmes and courses under one unique integrated system. The university was a logical progression in his philosophy of education. The central idea of the university was for the east to offer to the west the best of its wealth and take from the west its knowledge. This was indeed a novel idea as the country was yet to have its own full-fledged universities. Tagore envisioned the university as the seat for research that would generate and also dispense knowledge. Tagore established the university in Santiniketan where he had founded his school. He wanted the university to offer education that was enmeshed with the Indian way of life so that knowledge grew out of the culture, society, history, literature, geography, economy, science and flora and fauna of the country. From this sense of nationalism, we see Tagore evolving into an internationalist based on equal terms of fellowship and amity between the east and the west. He shared his quest for such a centre of learning with the ideas of several noted international pedagogues. Tagore saw world problems and national interests as interrelated, and he felt that internationalism was the inner spirit of the modern age.

Yatra visvam bhavatyekanidam

The motto of Visva-Bharati; literal meaning of the Sanskrit phrase is ‘Where the world makes its home in a single nest’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rabindranath Tagore (henceforth RNT), An Eastern University, The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume 2, (henceforth EWRT2), p. 557.

  2. 2.

    RNT’s letter to Rathindranath, 11 October 1916, Chithipatra, Volume 2, pp. 55–56. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation, remarks, ‘Anyone who has been to Los Angeles or the west coast of the United States would know that the idea was born in an appropriate place’. 2011, p. 112.

  3. 3.

    RNT, ‘My Educational Mission’, The Modern Review, June 1931.

  4. 4.

    RNT, ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’; ‘An Eastern University’, Creative Unity, EWRT2; Address on the occasion of the formal inauguration of Visva-Bharati (1919) in Visva-Bharati, Rabindra Rachanabali, (henceforth RR), Volume 14, pp.; Letters between Rabindranath and Jadunath Sarkar, Bikash Chakravarty, Byahata Sakhya: Rabindranath O Jadunath Sarkar, 2011; ‘The Visva-Bharati Ideal’, RNT and C.F. Andrews, Visva-Bharati, 1923; RNT ‘Yatrar Purvakatha’, Rabindra Rachanabali, (henceforth RR), Volume 14, 1991, pp. 268–270.

  5. 5.

    RNT, ‘The Visva-Bharati Ideal’, RNT and C.F. Andrews, Visva-Bharati, op. cit. pp. 9–10.

  6. 6.

    Swati Datta, ‘Rabindranath Tagore and the Centre of Indian Culture’, The Visva-Bharati Quarterly, (henceforth VBQ), Volumes 17 & 18, Nos. 3, 4, 1 & 2, October 2008–September 2009, pp. 3–17.

  7. 7.

    RNT, ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’, op. cit. p. 482.

  8. 8.

    Ibid, p. 469.

  9. 9.

    Ibid, p. 469.

  10. 10.

    RNT, ‘Religion of the Forest’, Creative Unity, op.cit. p. 512.

  11. 11.

    RNT, ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’, op. cit. p. 469.

  12. 12.

    RNT, ‘An Eastern University’, pp. 556–557.

  13. 13.

    RNT, ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’, op. cit. p. 469.

  14. 14.

    RNT, ‘The Problem of Education’ 1906, Towards Universal Man, 1961, Bombay, Asia, pp. 67–82.

  15. 15.

    Ibid, p. 469.

  16. 16.

    The school originally named Brahmacharyashram was renamed Patha Bhavana in 1925 by which name it is known today.

  17. 17.

    ‘RNT, ‘Visva-Bharati Ideal’, op. cit. pp. 4–9.

  18. 18.

    Ibid, pp. 10–20.

  19. 19.

    There were many indigenous communities in India as far as we can go back in history, while it is also a fact that many communities have entered India from outside and made it their home.

  20. 20.

    Sylvan Levi, quoted in Wilhelm Halfbass, India and Europe, 1988, Albany, SUNY cited in Kathleen M. O’Connell, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet as Educator, 2nd Edition, 2011, p. 264.

  21. 21.

    RNT Visva-Bharati, 1919, RR, Volume 8.

  22. 22.

    RNT, ‘An Eastern University’, op. cit. p. 558.

  23. 23.

    Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rabindra Jivani, Volume 3, 5th Edition, 2008.

  24. 24.

    The constitution was drawn up by Prasanta Mahalanobis (later the founder of the premier Indian Statistical Institute) and Tagore’s nephew, Surendranath Tagore cited in Kathleen M. O’Connell, op. cit. p. 269.

  25. 25.

    RNT, Address to Asramik Sangha, Praktani, Santiniketan, Visva-Bharati, 23 December, 1921.

  26. 26.

    A detail about the Tan family in Santiniketan—during the 1962 war between India and China, the Tan family had to report to the Police headquarters in the district capital regularly and yet the family did not leave Santiniketan.

  27. 27.

    Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Santiniketan—Visvabharati, Volume 1, 1962, Kolkata, Bookland Pvt. Ltd., pp. 255–256.

  28. 28.

    For details, see H.B. Mukherjee, Education for Fullness: a Study of the Educational Thought and Experiment of Rabindranath Tagore, 2013, India, Routledge, pp. 194–195.

  29. 29.

    RNT, The Centre for Indian Culture, op. cit. p. 489.

  30. 30.

    Ibid, p. 490.

  31. 31.

    Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, op. cit. p. 196.

  32. 32.

    For details on the friendship between Rabindranath and Jadunath Sarkar, see Bikash Chakravarty, 2010, op. cit.

  33. 33.

    A copy of the article kept in correspondence files, serial number 131 entitled Paul and Edith Geheeb, Rabindra Bhavana Archives, Visva-Bharati (henceforth RB).

  34. 34.

    Letters between Tagore and Geheebs, correspondence files, serial number 131 entitled Paul and Edith Geheeb, RB.

  35. 35.

    Ibid.

  36. 36.

    Peter Cox, ‘The Dartington Connection’, Naresh Guha (ed.) VBQ, Volume 50, Numbers 1–4, May 1984–April 1985, pp. 122–128.

  37. 37.

    H. B. Mukherjee, op.cit. pp. 419–420.

  38. 38.

    Jose Paz Rodriguez, ‘Tagore and his Relationship with the European New School Movement: Santiniketan, Odenwaldschule and Institution Libre de Ensenanza’, VBQ, New Series, Volume 11, Number 1: April–June 2002, p. 3.

  39. 39.

    For detailed discussion on this see Fakrul Alam, ‘Luminous with Vision: Rabindranath Tagore, Thoreau and Life-centred Education amidst Nature’, Rabindranath Tagore and National Identity Formation in Bangladesh: Essays and Reviews, 2012, Dhaka, Bangla Academy.

  40. 40.

    RNT letter to Andrews 1921.

  41. 41.

    RNT, ‘Ma ma hingsi’, Santiniketan, RR, (1914), Volume 8, 1988, pp. 675–677.

  42. 42.

    RNT, ‘Siksha Sanskar’, Siksha, RR, Volume 6, 1988. In this essay, Tagore displays a fully cognizant awareness of the history of the eclipse of Irish education overshadowed by the English language after the attack by England in the dark ages. Those areas of Ireland not touched by war and occupation continued to pursue the paths of knowledge in the Irish language though in occupied Ireland, the native language was discarded as the language of the defeated.

  43. 43.

    Lt. Col. Yeats Brown, Visva-Bharati News, February 1936.

  44. 44.

    Sten Konow, ‘Visva-Bharati and its Ideals’ in Modern Review, February 1925.

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  1. Visva-Bharati University, Sriniketan, West Bengal, India

    Kumkum Bhattacharya

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Bhattacharya, K. (2014). Visva-Bharati: The Transnational Centre of Education. In: Rabindranath Tagore. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00837-0_4

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