Rabindranath Tagore (May 7,1861- August 7, 1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore. Rabindranath was the fourteenth child of his parents. His brothers and sisters were poets, musicians, playwrights and novelists and the Tagore home was thus filled with musical, literary and dramatic pursuits. When Rabindranath was 12, his father took him to Santiniketan, the meditation centre established in 1863. During their brief stay there, Devendranath gave his son lessons in Sanskrit, astronomy and the scriptures that formed the basis of his reformed religion. After these lessons were over, Rabindranath was free to roam among the fields and forests. This routine continued when father and son journeyed on and stayed at Dalhousie in the Himalayan foothills. After lessons in Sanskrit, English literature and religion, the would-be poet explored the mountains and forests. Life in close proximity to nature was unknown to him in the urban surroundings of Calcutta. The close and affectionate contact between teacher and pupil that he felt when his father taught him was also completely absent in Calcutta. It was this childhood experience of the willing pupil enthusiastically following lessons given by his father in the manner of a noble teacher among agreeable surroundings that guided Rabindranath in establishing a school at Santiniketan in 1901.
In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities, he managed the family estates, a project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He also started an experimental school at Shantiniketan, where he tried his Upanishadic ideals of education. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way. He spoke publicly on ‘The Vicissitudes of Education’5 in which he made a strong plea for the use of the mother-tongue. His first experiments in teaching also date from this period. He started his own school in Seliadah, the headquarters of his estate, to which he sent his own children to be taught by teachers in various subjects, including an Englishman to teach them the English language. He also started organizing co-operatives, schools and hospitals in the villages of his estates and tried to introduce improved farming methods. All these efforts for rural reconstruction went on while he pursued his creative writing. Tagore called this the period of his Sadhana—preparation, reflection, austerity and self-education for an active social life. He lived either at Seliadah or on his houseboat on the river Padma, visiting villages, talking to people and listening to their problems. Tagore’s later educational experiments arose from this experience. Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution and the mind behind the National Anthem of India.
Influences
Apart from the three remarkable Englishmen who were Tagore’s collaborators, namely C. F. Andrews, William Pearson and Leonard Elmhirst, numerous other scholars came to Santiniketan at the poet’s invitation to participate in the teaching programmes.22 Tagore disowned being influenced by any of the well-known educationists. It was not any new theory of education but the memory of his schooldays that led him to establish his residential schools. ‘I established my institution in a beautiful spot away from the town where the children had the greatest freedom possible under the shade of ancient trees. Through contact with nature, by making them aware of community relations and with the help of literature, festivals and religious teaching, he tried to develop the souls of his children. But this turned out to be not quite enough, so he introduced work education as ‘a joyous exercise of our inventive and constructive energies that help to build up character.’24
Education and Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore went to school almost 150 years ago and it is both interesting and tragic to note how his experiences were not vastly different from those of the average school going child of today. Barring a few lucky handfuls, generations of children have undergone the same drudgery of dull text books, uninterested teachers, rote learning, examinations and mindless discipline that Tagore endured.
The descriptions of his skirmishes with the education system a century and a half ago, ring true till this day:
In the usual course I was sent to school, but possibly my suffering was unusual, greater than that of most other children. The non-civilized in me was sensitive: it had a great thirst for color, for music, for the movement of life. Our city-built education took no heed of that living fact. It had its luggage van waiting for branded bales of marketable result.
The relative proportion of the non-civilized and civilized in man should be in the proportion of water and land on our globe, the former predominating. But the school had for its object a continual reclamation of the non-civilized.
In Tagore’s view, the higher aim of education was the same as that of a person’s life, that is, to achieve fulfilment and completeness. There was a lesser aim, that of providing the individual with a satisfactory means of livelihood, without which a person would not be able to satisfy his/her basic requirements and thus fail to achieve either of these two aims.
Tagore’s concerns with education were a constant theme throughout his life and surfaced in his writings, speeches, debates, and in the establishment of Santiniketan and Sriniketan. His contributions as an educationist are prolific and profound and exploring them can be the work of a lifetime.
Where The Mind Is Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
This poem in this selection has been taken from his English ‘Gitanjali’. Tagore had a very deep religious caste of mind and profound humanism. He was both a patriot and an internationalist. In the poem, ‘Where The Mind Is Without Fear’, Tagore sketches a moving picture of the nation he would like India to be. Where everyone within the fold of the brotherhood is free to hold up one’s head high and one’s voice to be heard without having any tension of fear of oppression or forced compulsion….
References:
Rabindranath Tagore – Biographical . nobelprize.org
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/tagore-bio.html
Jha, N (1999). Rabingranath tagore. PROSPECTS: the quarterly review of education. Pp (n.a).
http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/tagoree.PDF
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