Rabindranath Tagore was rather skeptical about whether Visva-Bharati, his institution in Santiniketan, could be appropriately termed a ‘university’. On 24 April, 1921 in a letter to his friend William Rothenstein he wrote: ‘I made use of the word “University” for the sake of convenience…It is unfortunate.’ Visva-Bharati, he wrote, ‘must be known not by a definition, but by its own life growth.’ Tagore did not want his institution to conform to the stereotype of the conventional ‘university’. Through Visva-Bharati he envisioned not only an alternative mode of education, but also a unique way of life.

A hundred years ago, on 22 December 1918, the foundation of Visva-Bharati was laid during a special ceremony in Santiniketan. Classes began a few months later, in July 1919. Eventually, Visva-Bharati was formally inaugurated on 22 December 1921. The centenary of Visva-Bharati’s inception should be commemorated through a serious revaluation of the ideas and values that it supposedly stands for.

Tagore had founded his Brahmacharyashram, his experimental ashram school, in Santiniketan in 1901. By the middle of the second decade of the century, he felt the need to broaden the scope of his pedagogic experiment. It was hardly a coincidence that Visva-Bharati was founded immediately after the First World War (1914-18) and after the publication of Tagore’s polemical lectures on nationalism in 1917. The violence unleashed by the war had intensified his deep distrust of aggressive nationalism and its politics of conflict and exclusion. One of Visva-Bharati’s key objectives was to initiate a process of interaction and mutual cooperation among diverse cultures and communities.

In The Centre of Indian Culture (1919), an essay that can be read as a manifesto for Visva- Bharati, Tagore wrote: ‘We must prepare the grand field for the coordination of the cultures of the world, where each will give to and take from the other’. In New York in 1930, Tagore remarked that he wanted Visva-Bharati to become ‘a great meeting place for individuals from all countries’. In the 1920s and 30s the arrival of scholars and creative persons from various parts of the world added a truly international dimension to the Santiniketan community. Visva-Bharati’s official motto aptly encapsulated its central objective. It was a Vedic text meaning ‘where the world meets in one nest’.

Significantly, the unity that Tagore had envisioned did not imply uniformity or loss of individuality. During his visit to Ceylon in 1922 he explained his idea of ‘true universalism’: ‘The true universal finds its manifestation in the individuality which is true. True universalism is not the breaking down of the walls of one’s own house, but the offering of hospitality to one’s guests and neighbours’. In his Bengali essays and speeches on Visva-Bharati, Tagore stressed that for India it was necessary to access and assimilate the knowledge produced by others. At the same time, he insisted that India needed to rediscover its own cultural resources and share those resources with the world. He was aware that within the contemporary colonial system of education, Indians were becoming passive consumers of western knowledge and culture. He believed that by participating in the production of knowledge and by sharing its intellectual and cultural resources with the world, India could regain its self-respect and earn the respect of the world. In The Centre of Indian Culture he writes: ‘Until we are in a position to prove that the world has need of us and cannot afford to do without us, that we are not merely hangers-on of the world-culture ~ beggars who cannot repay ~ so long must our sole hope lie in gaining others’ favours’. In 1921 Tagore widened the scope of his institution by articulating his plans for an ‘Eastern University’ whose task would be to synthesize and rejuvenate the cultures of Asia.

Not surprisingly, subjects related to Indian and Asian cultures and languages figured prominently in the curriculum chosen by Visva-Bharati. Kshitimohan Sen and Vidhusekhar Sastri, two distinguished scholars who had been Tagore’s close associates for a long time, played a key role in the process of introducing courses in Indian and Asian cultures and languages.

Interestingly, in the 1920s a number of renowned scholars came from Western countries to teach these subjects and to undertake research. They included Sylvain Levi, the French Orientalist; Moritz Winternitz, the Sanskrit scholar who came from Prague; and the Orientalists Guiseppe Tucci and Carlo Formichi from the University of Rome. In 1937, the Chinese scholar Tan Yun- Shan helped establish Cheena Bhavan, a centre of Chinese studies. In 1939 Hindi Bhavana was established with the aim of encouraging cultural interactions among various parts of India through the study of Hindi language and literature.

Tagore believed that a vigorous consciousness of one’s own cultural inheritance could actually pave the way for a syncretic approach to other cultures. In his essay ‘The Way to Unity’ (1923) he wrote — ‘… The mind, which has … matured in the atmosphere of a profound knowledge of its own country and of the perfect thoughts that have been produced in that land, is ready to accept and assimilate the cultures that come from foreign countries’.

Through Visva-Bharati, Tagore had wanted to introduce an education system that could effectively combine an emphasis on India’s cultural heritage with a cosmopolitan vision. In The Centre of Indian Culture he wrote: “All the elements in our own culture have to be strengthened, not to resist the Western culture, but truly to accept and assimilate it.” Visva-Bharati was meant to be not only a ‘Centre of Indian Culture’ or an ‘Eastern University’ but also an international institution that aimed to promote mutual cooperation between the East and the West. To his friend C.F. Andrews, he wrote that Visva-Bharati’s mission was ‘to make the meeting of the East and West fruitful in truth’.

During the 1920s a number of European languages and literatures began to be taught at Visva-Bharati. Syed Mujtaba Ali, who was a student of Islamic Studies in the early 1920s, writes that he got opportunities to study an eclectic range of subjects including Hindu Vedanta philosophy and Italian literature. This eclecticism was based on a willingness to accept cultural plurality and to discover the affinities that existed among diverse cultures.

Visva-Bharati was founded during a crucial phase in the history of the modern world. It was Tagore’s response to the problem of nationalistic chauvinism and violence. Through his experimental institution, he introduced his idea of ethical education that stressed the value of unity, inclusivity and cooperation. The idea holds true in today’s world where divisive ideologies are on the rise again.

(To be concluded)

(The writer is a Tagore Researcher and Assistant Professor of English, Gushkara College, Birbhum in West Bengal)