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Asian Studies Review

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Education for Tomorrow: The Vision ofRabindranath Tagore

Mohammad A. Quayum

To cite this article: Mohammad A. Quayum (2016): Education for Tomorrow: The Vision ofRabindranath Tagore, Asian Studies Review, DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2015.1125441

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2015.1125441

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AsiAn studies Review, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2015.1125441

© 2016 Asian studies Association of Australia

Education for Tomorrow: The Vision of Rabindranath Tagore

Mohammad A. Quayum

international islamic university Malaysia

Imagination is more important than knowledge.Albert Einstein (Nilsson, 2011)

Let us bring all our power of imagination and create a world.Rabindranath Tagore (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 313)

Introduction

For most of us living outside India and Bangladesh, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is known primarily as a poet. He was once dubbed “a poet of the world” by Mahatma Gandhi

ABSTRACTThis article investigates Rabindranath Tagore’s educational vision, which underpinned the three institutions he set up in India – Santiniketan (1901), Visva-Bharati (1921) and Sriniketan (1922). It argues that this vision is still relevant for the world of today and tomorrow, and that it should be taken into account in designing any educational model for the future. Tagore rejected the modern mechanical learning that focuses merely on cultivation of the individual’s mind, in favour of learning that encourages the creativity, imagination and moral awareness of students. He believed that education should be not for mere “success” or “progress” but for “illumination of heart” and for inculcation of a spirit of sympathy, service and self-sacrifice in the individual, so that s/he could rise above egocentrism and ethnocentrism to a state of global consciousness or worldcentrism. In pursuing this argument, I refer to Tagore’s letters, lectures, interviews and essays, both in Bengali and in English, a body of his short stories, his novel The Home and the World and his allegorical poem “Two Birds”. I also explain his awareness of the educational movements of his time in the West, and draw brief parallels with selected Western luminaries in the field, such as Plato, Montaigne, Rousseau and John Dewey. My contention is that although some may dismiss Tagore’s educational principles as “rickety sentimentalism” in a world that is palpable and real, his ideas of human fellowship, unity and creativity, and kinship for nature seem irrefutable with the rise of multiculturalism and the looming ecological crisis threatening world peace.

KEYWORDSRabindranath tagore; education; santiniketan; visva-Bharati; sriniketan; freedom; nature; imagination; sympathy; humanity; Advitam

CONTACT Mohammad A. Quayum mquayum@gmail.com

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(Quayum, 2006, pp. 35–36), and he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his collection of poetry, Gitanjali (Kripalani, 1962, p. 229). He is also the only poet in history to have the honour of authorship of two national anthems, those of India and Bangladesh, as well as being the inspiration behind a third national anthem, that of Sri Lanka.1

Tagore was a multi-faceted genius; he tried his hand at almost every form of literature – poetry, fiction, drama, letters, lectures, essays – and excelled in them all. Moreover, he was an actor and director, and in 1928, at the age of 67, he suddenly discovered a new interest in an entirely different form of creative expression: painting (Kripalani, 1962, p. 338). Tagore also travelled far and wide, especially after receiving the Nobel Prize; he travelled to Europe and America several times, and visited, among other countries, Japan, China and Singapore.

In the midst of all these activities, Tagore also took up the role of an educationist. He set up a school in Santiniketan (“abode of peace”), a rural place around 100 kilometres from the city of Kolkata (Calcutta), in 1901. This institution was upgraded to a university in 1921, which he called Visva-Bharati (literally, “where India meets the world”). He constantly referred to Visva-Bharati in his letters and lectures as an “International University” (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 265) or a “world university” (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 206). It was established with a logo in Sanskrit, Yatra viswam bhavati eka-nidam, which means, “Where the world meets as in one nest” (Kripalani, 1962, p. 267), and it became a life-long cause for Tagore. Many years after establishing the university, in a letter to Gandhi, he described it as the “vessel which [carries] the cargo of my life’s best treasure” (Alam, 2012, p. 96; Das Gupta, 2004, p. 72). In 1922, Tagore set up another institution, Sriniketan (“abode of pros-perity”), which was intended as Visva-Bharati’s institute of rural reconstruction and aimed to make the villagers “self-reliant and self-respectful” (Das Gupta, 2009, p. 135) through the improvement of their “physical, intellectual and economic condition” (Das Gupta, 2009, p. 135) and thereby, as Tagore poignantly stated in his essay, “The Robbery of the Soil”, “retard [the] process of race suicide” (Das, 1996, p. 871).

In this article, I wish to examine the educational ideals underpinning Tagore’s three institutions – Santiniketan, Visva-Bharati and Sriniketan – and explain why they are still relevant for the world of today and tomorrow, and why they should be taken into account when designing any educational model for the future. In doing so, I will refer to Tagore’s letters, lectures, interviews and essays – in both Bengali and English – as well as a body of his fiction, including several of his short stories, such as “The Postmaster”, “The Parrot’s Training”, “Housewife” and “The Painter”, as well as his most widely read novel, The Home and the World. I will also take a look at his allegorical poem, “Two Birds”. The discussion in this article is different from others in that it is not limited to Tagore’s prose writings but takes into account his fiction and poetry as well; and, secondly, in one section of the article, parallels are drawn between Tagore’s educational vision and those of selected Western lumi-naries, albeit briefly, which we do not come across in any previous discourse on the subject.

My premise is that Tagore was opposed to mechanical learning that is focused merely on cultivating the mind or intellect of the individual and imparting knowledge in a systematic way, like the training of a parrot (as Tagore penetratingly portrays in his story “The Parrot’s Training”), without taking into account the full personality of the individual, his or her surroundings, and the total human context. He believed that education should not only “instruct” but also “inspire”; it should not simply impart knowledge in an abstract way, but also encourage the individual to be creative, imaginative and morally aware. Education should not be for mere “success”, “progress” or “pride of power”, but rather for “illumination

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of heart” and for experiencing “the joy of existence”. Above all, education should aim to inculcate the spirit of sympathy, service and self-sacrifice in the individual, so that he or she could extend his or her “love far and wide across all barriers of caste and colour” (Das, 1996, p. 409) and embrace the world and humanity in a spirit of oneness or Advitam, rising above egocentrism and ethnocentrism to a state of global consciousness or worldcentrism. In this context, in a lecture entitled, “To Teachers”, delivered in China in 1924, Tagore explained:

Education must enable every child to understand and fulfil this purpose of the age, not defeat it by acquiring the habit of creating divisions and cherishing national prejudices. There are of course natural differences in human races which should be preserved and respected, and the task of our education should be to realise unity in spite of them, to discover truth through the wildness of their contradictions. (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 216)

In an interview in 1919, entitled “On Some Educational Questions”, Tagore further explained:Education is, in a real sense, the breaking of the shackles of individual narrowness… The highest aim of education should be to help the realisation of the unity, but not of uniformity. Uniformity is unnatural… A sound educational system should provide for the development of variety without losing the hold on the basic or spiritual unity. (Das, 1996, p. 748)

In both cases, Tagore’s emphasis is on creating unity between people, but to do so without imposing uniformity. On the one hand, he regarded unity or fellowship as something that helps to establish peace and harmony in society, which were so scarce during Tagore’s time – a time that witnessed the two World Wars. This perspective is still valid in the twenty-first century, when racial, national and religious hatred is prevalent. Uniformity, on the other hand, robs the individual (and by extension, the nation) of his or her uniqueness, his or her inherent talents, and forces him or her to mindlessly imitate the dominant patterns in society. Since lighting the torch of compassion and human camaraderie is one of the most important aspects of Tagore’s educational vision – together with the individual freedom of the learner, kinship for nature or ecological awareness, and celebration of imagination or creativity – I return to discuss this in more detail later.

Objectives behind Tagore’s Educational Mission

At this point, however, let me explain why Tagore took up his educational mission. He was not a trained educationist, and lacked, as he confides in a letter to Elmhirst, “expert knowledge and … skill” (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 312) in educational matters. He did not even receive adequate formal education. He attended school for only eight years, from the age of five to thirteen; then, being bitterly disappointed by the way teachers treated their students and the way education was imparted in the classroom, he chose to opt out of the system altogether. Thus, criticising the Indian education system of his time, in “To Teachers”, Tagore explains:

In this critical period [childhood], the child’s life is subjected to the education factory, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within the bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead. We are born with the God-given gift of taking delight in the world, but such delightful activity is fettered and imprisoned, muted by a force called discipline which kills the sensitivities of the child mind which is always on the alert, restless and eager to receive first-hand knowledge from mother nature. We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstorms on flowers… We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man’s most cruel and wasteful mistakes. (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, pp. 214–215)

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It was to rectify these weaknesses in the Indian education system, which robbed children of their natural freedom and their right to a free interaction with nature by cutting them off from their surroundings and forcing them into a “cage where education was provided from outside as birds are fed” (Das, 1996, p. 504), that Tagore took up his mission. For him it was a “crusade” (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 213), as he affirmed in a letter to (Sir) Patrick Geddes, “to emancipate children’s mind[s] from the dead grips of a mechanical method and a narrow purpose” (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 292). In the same letter, Tagore wrote, “I merely started with this one simple idea that education should never be dissociated from life” (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 291).

In other words, the overall objectives behind Tagore’s educational mission were two-fold. Firstly, he wished to reform the Indian education system, which he found in a totally decadent state, often imitative of the colonial system and cut off from the realities of Indian life and culture – a system that was “lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe”, wherein children were treated as no better than objects, or as prisoners in the hands of authoritarian pedagogues who were determined to rob their pupils of their vigour and liberty in exchange for stale, mindless, mechanical learning. Secondly, he aimed to transform the system into one that would, to quote Cenkner, “bring about a happy synthesis between the individual and society and [help] to realize the essential unity of the individual with the rest of humanity” (1976, p. 62).

Basic Principles of Tagore’s Educational Vision

The three basic tenets of Tagore’s educational vision are: freedom for the learner, creation of an environment that enables the student to develop a healthy kinship with nature, and cultivation of the pupil’s creativity or imagination. Tagore considered freedom an important aspect of education because it allowed children to learn subconsciously and intuitively. It taught them to take the initiative on things they liked and so made them more responsible and self-reliant. According to Tagore, children’s minds must be allowed to be curious, to wonder and to experience new things and new surprises rather than to go through the same monotonous experience in the classroom every day, which would deaden their sensitivity. By forcing children to obey a dull routine imposed on them by a tyrannical adult teacher, we crush their creativity, “their inherent power of gathering facts for themselves” (Das, 1996, p. 506), and “kill [the] spirit of liberty in their mind, the spirit of adventure”, which are “abso-lutely necessary for the intelligent growth of the mind” (Das, 1996, p. 506). Thus, children should be given not only the freedom of “unrestricted space and movement” (Das, 1996, p. 507), but also “unrestricted human relationships” (Das, 1996, p. 507) and an unfettered relationship with nature. “So in my institution I try to make provision for … three respects of freedom,” Tagore asserts in his essay “The Schoolmaster” – “freedom of mind, freedom of heart and freedom of will” (Das, 1996, p. 508).

Tagore suggests that teachers should not behave in a way that frightens or intimidates the children, as this quashes their sense of freedom and natural curiosity, without which no proper learning can take place. “It is through [the] tyranny of the adult mind that the children everywhere are suffering” (Das, 1996, p. 505), Tagore laments. Instead of being strict disciplinarians, teachers should be like friends and playmates, or like “gardeners” looking after “the tender young shoots of the human soul” (Tagore, 1992, p. 431), so that their stu-dents can experience the same love and kinship at school that they generally experience at

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home. The best learning takes place in an atmosphere of trust and benevolence, rather than one of apathy and undue harshness. Teachers should realise that in spite of their difference of age, “like wayfarers [they] are travelling the same path together [with their students]” (Das, 1996, p. 507), and that in order to educate children they have to have sympathy and empathy with them, and not worry too much about their “dignity as grown-up persons and as learned men” (Das, 1996, p. 507). As Tagore asseverates in “The Schoolmaster”, “An immense amount of sympathy and understanding and imagination are needed to bring up human children… He who has lost the child in himself is absolutely unfit for this great work of educating human children” (Das, 1996, p. 509).

In this regard, Tagore wrote a penetrating story about an evil school teacher who, instead of being a compassionate educator, actively seeks the destruction of his students’ “moral fibre”. The title of the story is “Housewife” (Ginni) and it narrates the way a Year 3 school teacher, Shibnath, treats his young, fledgling students. He is so fierce and ruthless that children often view him as Yama, the Hindu god of death. He also has a calculated way of erasing the self-worth of his students; he often gives them nicknames to pin them forever to a certain stereotype or a weakness in their personality. One of his students, Ashu, is stu-dious, respectful and dedicated, but occasionally comes to class late. The teacher punishes him mercilessly for this tardiness, in a way that is intended deliberately to humiliate Ashu before his friends. One afternoon, when it is raining heavily, Shibnath, on his way home, takes shelter in the car shed of Ashu’s house and unexpectedly witnesses Ashu playing at holding a dolls’ wedding with his little sister. Ashu is embarrassed by this and runs away inside the house, abandoning his game. The next day, the teacher, without caring a bit for the sensitivity of the child, narrates the story to the class and dubs Ashu “Housewife” in the presence of all his classmates. The child, Ashu, is emotionally devastated by this, and as his friends start ridiculing him with his new derisory nickname, the teacher, who is most unconcerned, returns to the staff room and sets about eating his meal. Such teachers, Tagore suggests, are not only unfit for teaching, but are, in fact, a scourge on society.

Free interaction with nature, where children can play with birds, swim in the water and climb trees, is an important aspect of Tagore’s educational model. “To alienate our sympa-thy from the world of birds and trees is a barbarity which is not allowed in my institution” (Das, 1996, p. 627), Tagore proffers in his essay “The Educational Mission of the Visva-Bharati”. That is why the poet established his institution in a beautiful spot, surrounded by nature and away from the hustle and bustle of city life. In Tagore’s thinking, nature is the best teacher; it has something to teach everyone. Education is about forming habits; therefore, we must form habits that are inclusive of nature and that celebrate nature as our habitat. Cutting our children off from nature is like cutting them off from the spirit of the universe, because, in Tagore’s worldview, nature is where God dwells. In this regard, he was influenced by the Upanishadic teachings of Hinduism that view God as both immanent and transcendent, living in but also, paradoxically, beyond nature – an outlook that also permeated the literary imaginations of writers such as Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, and Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman in America. Thus, to make his students aware of the beauty and resourcefulness of nature, Tagore would often take them on tours through nearby forests and even conduct his classes in a natural setting. He used to sing to them on the changing aspects of nature with its changing seasons.2 This was Tagore’s way of resisting the prevailing materialism of his time, which saw nature as nothing more than a resource for gathering and holding and for profit and plunder. He believed that the West

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was using science as a vehicle of its greed and for profit-hunting, and was victimising nature in its relentless quest for money and material things. By contrast, Tagore was interested in, as he explained in his essay “Construction versus Creation”, the “immaterial in matter” (Das, 1996, p. 403), and wanted his students to see that nature had much more to offer than a mere haven for material wealth.

Tagore regretted that with the imposition of colonial education in India, Indians had begun adopting the Western attitude to nature. He believed that Indians had always seen nature as a benevolent force, as part and parcel of the one grand design of God. In the Ramayana and Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, there is no sense of duality between nature and man-kind. The two work in cooperation rather than in competition with one another. In the Ramayana, for example, all of the forces of nature come to the aid of Rama in his battle against the evil king, Ravana. It is because of this sense of unity with nature that a tradition of forest hermitage (tapavana) developed in India, and Tagore preferred that India should adopt this as its educational model rather than following the Western paradigm, which has always considered nature as a hostile force to be controlled, conquered and dominated. Even in the plays of Shakespeare, the greatest of Western playwrights, the sense of alienation from nature is evident. It is not that Shakespeare did not see the beauty of nature; he did. But since his sensibility was rooted in the Western tradition, he approached nature in a spirit of binarism or dualism. Therefore, in his plays such as King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth, the wicked forces of nature are emphasised, while in The Tempest, in the words of O’Connell, “man struggles with nature and longs to sever connection” (O’Connell, 2010, p. 69). In his essay “The Religion of the Forest”, Tagore rejects this Western view of estrangement from nature, or fall from paradise, which he sees as the sole reason for the West’s endless quest for technological advancement and building of protective urban centres. He argues:

…the highest purpose of the world is not merely living in it, knowing it and making use of it, but realising our own selves in it through expansion of sympathy; not alienating ourselves from it, but comprehending and uniting it with ourselves in perfect union. (Alam, 2012, p. 102)

To this effect, in “My School” he further comments, with a touch of regret about the state of modern education:

We have come to this world to accept it, not merely know it. We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed. From our very childhood habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weaned away from nature and our mind and the world are set in oppo-sition from the beginning of our days. Thus the greatest education for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead. We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar. His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates… Child-nature protests against such calamity with all its power of suffering, subdued at last into silence by punishment. (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 219)

In a beautiful fable, “The Parrot’s Training”, Tagore shows the fatal consequences that can arise from this orthodox education system, which deprives children of their right to interact with nature and learn freely from the book of nature. The story is about a bird that can sing, hop and fly, but cannot recite the scriptures and lacks manners. One day the king decides that the bird should be educated, as ignorance is a burden to his kingdom. So he asks his nephews to make arrangements for the bird’s education. The nephews consult the pundits

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and decide that the bird should first be put in a cage, as its habit of living in nests is the main barrier to its learning. A gold cage is made, scribes are brought in to prepare manuscripts, people are hired to maintain the cage, security is employed and slowly the whole education department gets involved in the act. All of these people are making a lot of money in the name of educating the bird, but the bird remains confined in a cage, trapped and tortured. The pundits begin to educate the bird with a “textbook in one hand and a baton in the other” (Dutta & Robinson, 1999, p. 330). The king comes to check on the progress of the bird but is so taken in by the fanfare around it that he forgets his actual purpose. Then eventually one day the bird dies and the king’s men declare that the bird’s education is complete. When the bird is brought to the king, he pokes it with his finger and feels satisfied with the rustling sound of the book leaves stuffed inside the bird. The message Tagore conveys here is loud and clear: by taking them from their natural surroundings in the name of education and forcing them into a regime of rote learning in a confined space, children are effectively being deprived of their true potential in life and rendered into a state of passivity, inanity and even death – if not literally, at least in a moral and spiritual sense.

Here, two other short stories that deal with Tagore’s attitude to modern education are worth mentioning: “The Postmaster” and “The Painter”. “The Postmaster” is a story about a young postmaster who is sent to a village for his first posting. He has a bachelor’s degree but his education has not prepared him for the realities of life. He therefore fails to inter-act with the people in his new setting, remaining unduly vain about his education and his urban upbringing. He also fails to appreciate his natural surroundings. Although the postmaster occasionally writes poetry about nature, it is by no means sincere, as his heart persistently longs for the city life. He also fails to relate meaningfully to the only person who has in a sense become like his family, his maid Ratan. Thus isolated, lonely and weak, the postmaster falls sick, applies for a transfer and leaves the village. At the moment of his departure, a ray of light penetrates his mind and he feels the urge to take Ratan with him, but in an instant he shuts that thought out with cynical reasoning: “separation and death are a recurrent fact of life. What is the point of going back? Aren’t we all solitary on this earth?” (Quayum, 2011a, p. 7). This is an example of the people that modern education produces – people who are callous, insensitive and incapable of feeling; they are not capable of adapting themselves to their social or natural surroundings, and remain trapped in their narrow, egocentric selves, full of selfishness and self-indulgence. In this regard, in a lecture at the Rammohan Roy Library in Calcutta, to explain the objectives of his Sriniketan institute, Tagore lamented that while India needed an active intercourse between its urban and rural people, the bhadraloks or urban elites “[were] finding it increasingly onerous to spend time in the villages”, only because they saw the villagers as “chotolok, meaning, literally, small people” (Das Gupta, 2009, p. 139, p. 140).

Like the postmaster in the above story, Govinda in “The Painter” is a vain and egocentric individual, who has sold his soul to modern materialism. He sees money and profit as his sole guiding principles in life. His nephew, Chuni, enjoys art and painting, but a ruthless utilitar-ian, Govinda sees such profitless activities as wasteful, and forces the little boy to memorise dates and facts from history, which he thinks will help the child to become successful and wealthy in the future. In other words, Govinda received the education that is provided in modern society, which is much concerned with, to use a phrase from Wordsworth, “getting and spending”, or becoming rich and powerful in society; it is also about manipulation of nature, and amassing wealth and property – but, in the process, Govinda has lost his basic

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human qualities. He knows nothing but profit, production, self-gratification and “brute greed” (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 209) – far from an education of sympathy, empathy, enlightenment, “heroism of suffering and sacrifice” (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 209) and a recurrent synthesis of the myriad forces of life, all of which Tagore envisioned in his educational paradigm.

In his allegorical poem, “Two Birds”, Tagore again demonstrates the crippling effects of modern education on children; modern education encourages strict discipline, routine and confinement as opposed to spontaneity and freedom, and analytical thinking and rote learning over creativity and imagination. The poem is rendered in the form of a dialogue between two birds, which were once “friends” but are now separated by their circumstances – one still lives in nature as a bird should, but the other is captive in a cage. Here is an extract from the exchanges between the two birds, the free bird and the tame bird, from Tagore’s own translation of the poem:

The tame bird was in a cage, the free bird was in the forest,They met when the time came, it was a decree of fate.The free bird cries, ‘O my love, let us fly to the wood.’The cage bird whispers, ‘Come hither, let us both live in the cage.’Says the free bird, ‘Among bars, where is there room to spread one’s wings?’‘Alas,’ cries the cage bird, ‘I should not know where to sit perched in the sky.’

The free bird cries, ‘My darling, sing the songs of the woodlands.’The cage bird says, ‘Sit by my side, I’ll teach you the speech of the learned.’The forest bird cries, ‘No, ah no! songs can never be taught.’The cage bird says, ‘Alas for me, I know not the songs of the woodlands.’

Their love is intense with longing, but they never can fly wing to wing.Through the bars of the cage they look, and vain is their wish to know each other.They flutter their wings in yearning, and sing, ‘Come closer, my love!’The free bird cries, ‘It cannot be, I fear the closed doors of the cage.’The cage bird whispers, ‘Alas, my wings are powerless and dead’. (Radice, 1987, p. 31)

It is obvious that the caged bird has lost its innate powers to sing and fly, and can merely whisper in the “speech of the learned”. It is thus cut off from its true self as well as from the world around it. This disconnection from the self and the universe is what modern education is essentially causing, thus making human beings feeble creatures, unable to comprehend the meaning and joy of existence. Education should help us to connect, not only with the forces within the self – i.e. thought, senses, emotion and the spirit – but also with the super-personal world outside. It should not only cultivate knowledge but also imbue a sense of beauty and truth, so that the individual can dissect the various ingredients of a rose but also appreciate the beauty that is there in the flower.

This capacity to connect and bring things together in harmony is what Tagore describes as creativity or imagination, which, as in the quote from Einstein that I use as an epigraph to this article, is more important than knowledge, and which Tagore considers to be one of the basic tenets of his educational vision, as ever helpful in creating a new and better world for us. In this regard, in his essay “The Schoolmaster”, Tagore explains:

[Imagination] is more valuable to us … than gold or bank notes or anything else… We forget this value of the individual creative power because our minds become obsessed with the artifi-cial value which is made prevalent in society by other people’s valuation of a particular manner of living, a particular style of respectability. We force ourselves to accept that imposition and

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we kill the most precious gift that God has given us, the gift of creation, which comes from his own nature.

God is creator, and as His children we, men and women, also have to be creators. But that goes against the purpose of the tyrant, of the schoolmaster, of the educational administration, of most of the governments, each of whom want the children to grow up according to the pattern which they have set for themselves. (Das, 1996, p. 509)

Tagore himself experienced this power of imagination, creation or connection for the first time when he was just a little boy. He was learning to spell and read, and suddenly, one day, disconnected words in his book came together as he came upon the rhyming phrase jal porey/pata norey (the water falls/the leaf shakes) in his spelling book. The rhythm of the words moved him, and he could instantaneously visualise the actual movement of water falling on a leaf and shaking it in a quick motion. This power to see and feel helped to fill the gap between his intellect and feelings, as well as his own self and the larger world around him, and the lesson therefore became both enjoyable and fulfilling. Tagore explains:

I was no longer a mere student with his mind muffled by spelling lessons. The rhythmic picture of the tremulous leaves beaten by the rain opened before my mind the world which does not merely carry information, but a harmony with my being. The unmeaning fragments lost their individual isolation and my mind revelled in the unity of vision. (Tagore, 1966, p. 95)

Tagore advocates that Buddha was a great teacher because he could tap into the secret of the universe and use it to revitalise the world, going beyond ecological and cultural barriers. His message was one of love, unity and togetherness, not of violence and conflict. He brought people of different races and languages together, “not in a clash of arms or in a conflict of exploitation but in co-operation of life, in amity and peace” (Das, 1996, p. 402); and “This was a creation” (Das, 1996, p. 402), Tagore affirms in “Construction versus Creation”. In his novel The Home and the World, Tagore goes on to compare Buddha to Alexander and conclude that it was Buddha who conquered the world with his symphony of love, and not Alexander, who was motivated by belligerence and a selfish passion for power. Thus, Tagore’s protagonist and doppelgänger in the novel, Nikhil, declares in an emotional out-burst, expressing the conviction of his creator:

It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander – this is untrue when stated in dry prose – oh when shall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages of printed books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotri? (Tagore, 1915/1985, pp. 134–135)

The Function of Education: Creating Human Fellowship and Unity

Tagore saw Buddha as a model because, like Buddha, he wanted to liberate humanity from the hypnotic hold of money and matter and bring them back to a moral fold that would help them to overcome their narrow prejudices based on language, race, religion, or the latest evil, nationalism. Tagore dismissed nationalism as “an epidemic of evil” (Tagore, 1916/1976, p. 9) that breeds jingoism and national chauvinism, often resulting in war and aggression, by creating a binary of “self ” and “other”.

Modern education does not open up the minds of children to readily accept people from other cultures, religions or nations. In fact, the opposite is often true, and this has made the world a hostile place for many. Science has turned the world into a global village; it has brought us closer, but because science has technological might but no moral power, it is not

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capable of resolving the issue of prejudice, which remains outside its domain. Therefore, the end result of coming closer, without a sense of togetherness and compassion for fellow human beings, is a persistent clash of cultures, religions and nations, in which, ironically, science has taken the side of evil by multiplying our power to kill. In this regard, Tagore explains:

When races come together, as in the present age, it should not be merely the gathering of a crowd; there must be a bond of relation, or they will collide with each other.

Education must enable every child to understand and fulfil this purpose of the age, not defeat it by acquiring the habit of creating divisions and cherishing national prejudices. There are of course natural differences in human races which should be preserved and respected, and the task of our education should be to realise unity in spite of them… The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 216)

Tagore is critical of the excessive dependence of modern education on technology and science, because he believes that while science has a significant role to play and has helped us to attain phenomenal progress in the present age, it is not capable of answering all of the issues in life, since a human individual is, in the words of Nikhil in The Home and the World, “infinitely more than the natural science of himself ” (Tagore, 1915/1985, p. 61).

Tagore’s answer lies in looking to life from a moral point of view and in understanding that in spite of our differences we are all part of an organic whole. Children should be made to understand this, and be exposed to different cultures in a positive way while they are still young, so that they can see the differences in cultures, not in a spirit of antagonism but in a spirit of cooperation and mutuality, and realise that underneath all the differences, the same spirit pervades in each one of us; we all belong to a single family of the human race, made up of many small groups and races that complement and enrich one another. While we should not sacrifice our separate cultural identities, we should also not remain totally confined in them. Thus, while one remains a Bengali, Chinese or Scot, one may still stake a claim on Dante, Petrarch or Shakespeare, because these writers did not write for any par-ticular race but for all mankind. In a speech at his university, Visva-Bharati, to shed light on this idea, Tagore rhetorically asked:

Should my joy of learning and appreciating literature stop with Bengali literature because I am born a Bengali? Have I not been born to the world? Are not the creations of every philosopher, every poet, every scientist as much for me as anybody else? Should that realisation not make me proud of my place in the world? (Das Gupta, 2004, p. 67)

Tagore really saw this as part of his educational mission when he set up his university. In “An Eastern University”, Tagore explains that he established Visva-Bharati so that it could be a “meeting ground”, where people

can work together in a common pursuit of truth, share together our common heritage, and realise that artists in all parts of the world have created forms of beauty, scientists discovered secrets of the universe, philosophers solved the problems of existence, saints made the truth of the spiritual world organic in their own lives, not merely for some particular race to which they belonged, but for all mankind. (Alam, 2012, p. 98)

In a lecture broadcast on New York radio on 10 November 1930, Tagore further stated that his primary objective in setting up the university was to free the students “from all racial and national prejudice” (Das, 1996, p. 627) and create “the ideal of the spiritual unity of all

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races … an ideal of brotherhood where men of different countries and different languages can come together” (Das, 1996, p. 628). Tagore’s vision of education pivoted on this basic principle of unity in diversity or “unity in harmony” (Tagore, 2003, p. 78), or what Martha Nussbaum (1996) and Saranindranath Tagore describe as a form of “cosmopolitanism” in which “a person [is] situated in one nation but, nonetheless, has to share the world with citizens of other countries” (Tagore, 2003, p. 81); or, in which the individual embraces his/her own culture but still acts as a responsible “citizen” of the world.

Tagore adopted a two-fold approach to realise this particular mission. He would routinely send the young students out to serve their poor neighbours who were from different castes and religious communities. This would induce them to overcome their prejudices and adopt a spirit of service, sympathy and sacrifice at an early age. He would also seek to bring scholars from all over the world to the university so that the students could be exposed to different cultures, customs and value systems, and learn from people who were different from them and yet shared a common human identity. He believed that there was much to learn from all cultures, as much from the different Asiatic communities as from the West. Thus, he introduced a chair of Islamic Studies at his university in 1927, and Persian Studies in 1932 (Quayum, 2011b, p. 85). This enabled the students, who were mostly from the Hindu community, to learn more about Islamic and Persian traditions and prepare them to live in cooperation and harmony with fellow Muslims and other minority groups in their neigh-bourhood. To strengthen ties between China and India, the two great civilisations of the East, he also founded a Cheena Bhavan (Chinese Hall) and a Chinese Studies Department in 1937, to which Tan Yun Shan, a Chinese from Singapore, was invited for the official opening. Tagore wanted Visva-Bharati to be a meeting place of all the great religions of the world – Buddhism, Vedic and Puranic Hinduism, Jainism, Islam, Christianity, Taoism and Zoroastrianism – so that the students could learn from each and enrich their minds through a synthesis of all the religions, and thus develop a global consciousness or a worldcentric and cosmopolitan outlook.

Tagore followed an open curriculum policy that “permitted initiative, experimentation, and originality, as well as encouraged teachers and students to get involved in the process of evolving an effective curriculum” (Samuel, 2010, p. 350). In addition to teaching the regular academic subjects such as language, literature, science, philosophy, religion, mathematics, history and social studies, the university’s curriculum also included fine arts, music and dance, and extracurricular activities “such as social works, gardening, student government, excursions, and celebrations of different cultures and religious festivals” (Samuel, 2010, p. 350; Bhattacharya, 2014, p. 66). Even Sufism was taught, by someone called Gurdial Mallik, who also taught English literature (Bhattacharya, 2014, p. 66) – all in order to create an atmosphere encouraging open-mindedness and individual development to the utmost, and cementing the individual’s relationship with the totality of society and existence.

Tagore was fiercely critical of Western militarism, chauvinism and materialism, its ten-dency to rob and exploit the weaker nations through its technological might, and its colonial enterprise in the name of national security and national advancement, which systematically destroyed the economies and cultures of the colonised nations; yet he knew that the West had much to offer that could complement and enrich the Eastern way of life. Therefore, he advocated a “true” meeting of the East and the West, forsaking the concept of binarism advanced by his contemporaries such as D. H. Lawrence3 and Rudyard Kipling.4 One of the clauses of his university’s constitution states, “To seek to realize in a common fellowship

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of study the meeting of East and West and thus ultimately to strengthen the fundamental conditions of world peace through the free communication of ideas between the hemi-spheres” (Bhattacharya, 2014, p. 64). It was because of this that he chose not to participate in Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement against the British. He believed that in spite of the British atrocities in India, there was more to gain from cooperation than from conflict with them, as conflict would result in more and more violence, and breed prejudice, antagonism and narrowness of mind on both sides. He said, “We of the Orient should learn from the Occident … to say that it is wrong to cooperate with the West is to encourage the worst form of provincialism and can produce nothing but intellectual indigence” (Kripalani, 1962, p. 294). Promulgating his idea of East–West synthesis, and rejecting Western materialism and Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement against the British in the same breath, Tagore further stated in a letter to Charles F. Andrews, dated 5 March 1921:

You know that I do not believe in the material civilisation of the West, just as I do not believe the physical body to be highest truth in man. But I still less believe in the destruction of the physical body. What is needed is the establishment of harmony between the physical and the spiritual nature of man, maintaining of balance between the foundation and superstructure. I believe in true meeting of the East and the West. Love is the ultimate truth of soul; we should do all we can not to outrage that truth, to carry its banner against all opposition. The idea of non-cooperation unnecessarily hurts that truth. It is not our hearth fire, but the fire that burns out our hearth. (Dutta & Robinson, 1999, p. 172)

Tagore’s Educational Vision: Links and Parallels with the West

Perhaps it should be pointed out here that, although essentially an original thinker, Tagore was aware of the educational movements of his time, in both Europe and America, which obviously contributed to the enrichment of his ideas and assisted him in finding the best answers to the problems faced by the modern education system, not just in India but in society at large. For example, he was in contact with the well-known German education-ist, Paul Geheeb, and visited his school, Odenwaldschule, in 1927. In 1926, Tagore was in contact with Maria Montessori, an Italian physician and educator whose educational approach continues to be used in many public and private schools around the world, and regretted that her method could not be extensively followed in the Indian government sys-tem because it was considered too expensive (Bhattacharya, 2014, p. 70). He also shared the reformist zeal of both the Swiss pedagogue, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and the founder of the Kindergarten movement, Friedrich Fröbel; indeed, as Ottonello points out, the school that Tagore founded in Santiniketan in 1901 was one of the first schools in the New School Movement that swept the world in the twentieth century (Bhattacharya, 2014, p. 71).

In addition to his awareness of the developments of his time, we notice certain parallels between Tagore’s ideas and those of Western luminaries, from Plato, Montaigne and Locke to the “poster-child” of the progressive education movement, John Dewey, and its “parent” Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It may not be possible to explore these similarities in full here, owing to lack of space; however, one notices that Tagore’s concept of “total education” or education for the development of both body and mind, and his view regarding the moral function of education – that it should focus more on the fulfilment of the self than on profit and power, and that it should aim to inculcate a sense of truth, virtue, service and justice in the individual – are principles shared by all the philosophers named above. Like Tagore,

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Plato emphasised that education should foster “courage, moderation and justice”, and that both music and physical activity should play an important role in the education of “noble puppies” in his Republic, so that they could grow up to be physically sturdy but also be soft at heart and act gently towards their fellow citizens (Dillon, 2004).

Montaigne’s educational prescription for children in his essay “Of the Education of Children” also demonstrates a certain commonality with Tagore’s vision. For example, like Tagore, Montaigne advised that education should make children virtuous and conscien-tious, or “wiser and better” (Frame, 1958, p. 118), so that they could learn to “surrender and throw down [their] arms before truth as soon as [they] perceive it” (Frame, 1958, p. 114). Secondly, Montaigne was critical of rote learning and coercive teaching methods, as was Tagore, and he similarly recommended freedom, curiosity and discovery as the best ways of educating children, so that students would not feel like, to quote from Montaigne, “slave[s] and captive[s] under the authority of their [teachers]” (Frame, 1958, p. 111). Moreover, like Tagore, Montaigne urged that children should be exposed to nature and to cultures different from their own so that they could better comprehend the diversity and magnitude of the world and “[embrace] the universe as [their] city, and [distribute their] knowledge, [their] company, and [their] affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot” (Frame, 1958, p. 116).

Tagore’s enthusiasm for nature is certainly suggestive of Rousseau’s recommendations in Emile (first published in 1762), in which the young protagonist is taken away from the corruptive forces of city life to the countryside, allowing him to learn in the company of nature and to find harmony with the totality of existence, similar to the way that Tagore rec-ommends achieving unity with nature, humanity and the universe, as an ultimate objective of education. Tagore also shares common ground with Dewey, whose concept of democracy, which requires people to “habitually keep in view the interests, concerns, and aspirations of others, even as they attend to their own” (Hansen, 2002, p. 267), sounds similar to Tagore’s ideology championing sympathy, empathy and fellowship among human beings. Besides, both Tagore and Dewey were of the view that teachers should act as guides for their students, and should aim to facilitate the best learning environment rather than focusing “directly on learning” (Hansen, 2002, p. 267) and imposing their ideas and ways on pupils.

These broad similarities with such leading intellectuals of the Western tradition rein-force Tagore’s position as a global or cosmopolitan thinker who was willing to “establish a living relationship between the East and the West” and create a “great federation of human beings” (Samuel, 2010, p. 351). It also makes his educational ideals emblematic of the voice of humanity against the forces of materialism and cold-blooded utilitarianism that are sweeping the planet.

Conclusion

One might be tempted to dismiss Tagore as a “foolish poet” (Chakravarty, 1961/2003, p. 207) and his ideas on education as “rickety sentimentalism” (Das, 1996, p. 404), and think that his concepts of love, fellowship, creativity and unity have little relevance to a world that is palpable and real. But Tagore was an exceptionally farsighted genius. He knew the consequences of relentless plundering of nature and natural resources by the profit- mongers of the world, in the name of progress and advancement. Only now do we realise that the world is faced with an ecological crisis as a result of the widespread destruction of

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the environment and the ecosystem. Only now are we talking about depletion of the ozone layer and its related greenhouse effect as a result of urbanisation and massive industrial growth, about industrial and nuclear waste and the burning of fossil fuel; but Tagore in his native sapience could envision the disaster that would befall the planet without an active sympathy and kinship with nature, more than a hundred years ago. Therefore, he advised that we should encourage and educate our children to love and respect nature, instead of alienating them from it, so that they could realise that nature is an integral part of ourselves, and not merely a storehouse of resources to be transformed into cash at will, and that our continuity as a species depends entirely on maintaining the ecological balance in nature and survival of our planet.

We are also told by sociologists such as Paul Hirst (2001), and even by the late Pope John Paul II, that the slow depletion of the ecosystem as a result of persistent manipulation and exploitation of nature and “widespread destruction of the environment” (John Paul II, 1990) is likely to have an adverse effect on world peace, which is already “threatened … by the arms race, regional conflicts and continued injustices among peoples and nations” (John Paul II, 1990). These are “moral problems” arising from a lack of “respect for life”, nature, the envi-ronment, “and above all for the dignity of the human person” (John Paul II, 1990). Perhaps one way of redressing the crisis would be to incorporate Tagore’s ideal of education, with its sound moral basis rooted in the principles of unity of all creation, sympathy, service, imag-ination, creativity and solidarity of the human race, in tomorrow’s educational paradigm. Without restoring our moral sensibility, and approaching education from an ethical point of view, in which respect for life and creation, and dignity of the human individual, act as guiding principles for any economic, industrial or scientific progress, we are perhaps destined for doom, through either some natural calamity or a cataclysmic act of self-destruction.

Yet even if the consequences are not so dire, as Tagore in his optimism would like us to believe,5 we should still forsake our present condition of being a walking “stomach” or a walking “brain” (phrases Tagore used in “Construction versus Creation”, Das, 1996, p. 406), and restore our full human condition by putting our hearts at the centre, so that we can be more imaginative, creative and sympathetic to our fellow human beings. Perhaps Tagore’s educational ideals of creativity, service and sympathy have become even more urgent now as, with the constant movement of people across national borders, the world has become a global village; people of different nationalities and cultural-religious backgrounds, with their different habits, practices, customs and value-systems, are now living together, side by side, in many places of the world. Given this proximity of cultures, one way to avoid conflict, and find stability and peace, would be to eradicate our narrow prejudices against the cultural “other” and have respect for all human beings, regardless of their caste, colour, gender, language or religion. This will help us to break away from, as Tagore would have us believe, the “giant planet of greed with its concentric rings of innumerable satellites” (Das, 1996, p. 404) that has kept us confined to the material world, and find our fullness and balance, restore our sense of “responsibility for oneself, for others, and for the earth”, and rediscover “that greater and higher fraternity that exists within the human family” (John Paul II, 1990).

The inclusion of Tagore’s principles in tomorrow’s educational models will certainly help to mitigate the weaknesses in the current education system, by making students more aware of the importance of human fellowship, creativity and kinship with nature, and helping them to realise that there is much more to education than merely acquiring knowledge and becoming rich and successful in adult life; rather, true education brings enlightenment to

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the individual’s soul, and enables him or her to experience unity with the rest of humanity and appreciate the joy of existence.

Notes

1. In addition to being the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, Tagore is also considered an inspiration behind the national anthem of Sri Lanka. In The Times of India, for example, it is stated that, “Inspired by Tagore, his student Ananda Samarakoon wrote and composed the Sri Lankan anthem in 1939–40. It was adopted as the island nation’s anthem around 1952, though political turmoil has seen it altered over the years”.

2. In order to enhance kinship with nature, Tagore also introduced the “Briksha Ropana” (Planting Trees) ceremony in 1928, as part of the Rain Festival, at which Tagore planted trees and encouraged his students to each adopt a tree. This was, in his words, “A ceremony of the replenishing of the treasury of the mother by her spendthrift children” (Mukherjee, 1962, p. 235).

3. For a discussion of Lawrence’s view of the East, see Kripalani (1962, p. 278) and Quayum (2006, pp. 21–22).

4. Responding to Kipling’s axiom, “Oh, the East is East, and the West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, in his “The Ballad of East and West”, in “East and West” Tagore wrote: “When we think of it, we see at once what the confusion of thought was to which the western poet, dwelling upon the difference between East and West, referred when he said, ‘Never the twain shall meet’. It is true that they are not yet showing any real sign of meeting. But the reason is because the West has not sent out its humanity to meet the man in the East, but only its machine. Therefore the poet’s line has to be changed into something like this: Man is man, machine is machine, And never the twain shall wed” (Dutta & Robinson, 1999, p. 212).

5. In spite of all that he saw in his life – the two World Wars, and relentless violence between the British and Indians on the one hand, and Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent on the other – Tagore never gave up his hope for humanity. In an example of his unremitting optimism about the future of mankind, he wrote in a letter to his son, Rathindranath Tagore: “I have to found a world centre for the study of humanity there [Santiniketan]. The days of petty nationalism are numbered – let the first step towards universal union occur in the fields of Bolpur. I want to make that place somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography – the first flag of victorious universal humanism will be planted there” (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 179).

Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this article was presented as a plenary lecture at the “Education for Tomorrow” conference at the Singapore Management University in October 2013. I would like to thank the anon-ymous reviewers of the article appointed by Asian Studies Review, as well as the journal’s Language and Education Editor, for their valuable comments on it, which have helped to improve the work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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