No one contested the hegemony of Gandhi’s holiness more benignly than Tagore. If Gandhi was a man ‘fulfilling promises at the cost of one’s life,’ Tagore was ‘a prisoner of clay chains’.
Tagore wouldn’t embrace Gandhi’s hero-worship nationalism and his binary of Do or Die. A universalist, Tagore refused to buy glass for the price of diamonds. He wouldn’t settle for anything but a world free of parochial boundaries.
The nature of their disagreements is most stark in their views about the spinning wheel.
While Gandhi regarded it as an important educational tool for self-sufficiency and dignity of labour, Tagore the romanticist, believed that not only did charkha make little economic sense, “it did not require anyone to think, one simply had to turn the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using minimum judgement and stamina.”
Visva Bharati Not A Vishwa Vidyalaya
It was for his kind philosophy of learning and liberation that Tagore decided not to use the word Vishwa Vidyalaya to describe the educational abode he founded in Santiniketan. Rather, he chose to call it ‘Visva Bharati,’ a term more expansive than a ‘university.’ That his humble ashram later became a formally affiliated institution, a central university is a different question.
His objection was not semantic, but fundamental. Nothing could be taught, he believed, but only learnt. He respected an individual’s faculties and believed that there couldn’t be a strict timeline for education, unlike modern institutions. The world began talking of personalisation of learning much later, in Tagore’s Visva Bharti, the courses were designed and provided without any consideration for overall demand.
Illustrious Institution
Tagore’s little co-ed school on his father’s Brahmacharya Ashram took flight after his Nobel Prize win. It brought both funds to finance the scaling-up of the school into a university-kind space, and greater self-clarification for Tagore as he travelled on invites throughout the world.
Tagore began envisaging the Visva Bharti as a global centre for culture, a space where the West converges with the East. At the heart of the institution were nature and the arts, both of which, in Tagore’s beliefs, were quintessential for the development of intellect.
There has never been a more prestigious university in post-independence India. With the unique distinction of being founded by a Nobel Laureate, Visva Bharati provided an organic alternative to what learning could be.
No other institution has yet been able to rival the world renowned alumni of Visva Bharati, from Amartya Sen to Satyajit Ray, to Satyendra Nath Bose. Even, one of India’s former Prime Ministers, Indira Gandhi, had a brief stint as a student at Santiniketan.
No Longer a Prestigious Institution
One cannot stop but wonder what happened to Visva Bharati, why did it fade away from our collective imagination. Why does Tagore’s abode happily celebrate a lowly nineteenth rank in Indian government’s National Institutional Ranking Framework? Why is it no more the prestigious place for learning that it used to be?
One explanation has to do with what got buried with Tagore — his opinion about the formalisation of Visva Bharti. While the university was envisioned as a revolt against the idea of institutionalised learning, it turned out quite differently. Tagore never went to any university himself and was thus uninformed of the structures and order that determine the working of any institution.
The poet’s romantic ideals of wilderness and fluidity were devoid of practical realities. The poet finds his true inspiration, wrote Tagore, ‘only when he forgets he is a schoolmaster.’ He indeed had to invent new idioms to distinguish Visva Bharati.
It was some ten years after Tagore’s demise that the Visva Bharati became a Central University and “an institution of national Importance” by an Act of Parliament, in 1951.
Of course, the status brought funding, accreditation and recognition to Visva Bharati at a time when it would have been difficult to survive without Tagore. But whether this new status turned out to be an apogee or nadir is a tough question.
It transformed the Visva Bharati from Tagore’s centre of learning to a state institution. Thus, began the dilution of the philosophy of learning, as championed by Tagore.
Surely, many radical characteristics were retained, enough to cosmetically differentiate it from other public institutions. But the essence had changed. There were fixed courses, grading policy, standard examination system, centrally (often politically) appointed heads and bureaucratic management.
Slowly, the outlier fell in line with other institutions as the autonomy of functioning, structure, and academic design were eroded by successive changes through legislations.
State support for the university came at the loss of Visva Bharati’s individuality. During the national movement, Tagore had identified a very similar disaster with Gandhian politics. He felt the struggle was guided not by a moral awakening of the patrons of the movement, or their valour and will to oppose foreign rule — but by blind faith in the leadership of a god-like character. It was an effective way to achieve a high end, but a hollow and fragile one.
Failure of an Experiment
Unfortunately, Tagore’s Visva Bharati fell victim to his own diagnosis. The moral and physical existence of the university was so much dependent on Tagore, that it couldn’t develop a sustainable model. Perhaps, time defeated any such noble intentions even if Tagore harboured them.
There are lessons fledgling institutions and organisations must learn from Tagore’s experiment. Formalisation of relationships and ideas can be challenging. All philosophies suffer jolts with time, thus an over-reliance on personality cults can be severely dangerous. A certain degree of rigidity is statutory in the maintenance of ideas, no matter how liberal and inclusive they may be.
By becoming what its founder despised, Visva Bharati may seem to have failed Tagore. But wasn’t it Tagore who said, “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us!”
(Akshat Tyagi is the author of ‘Naked Emperor of Education’. He tweets at @AshAkshat. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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