Rabindranath Tagore
Introduction:
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali Poet, short story writer, song composer, playwright and a painter who was born into a prominent Calcutta family known for its socio -religious and cultural innovations in the 19th century Bengal Renaissance.
Family
Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather Dwarakanath was involved in supporting medical facilities, educational institutions and the arts . He also fought for religious and social reform and the establishment of a free press.
Tagore’s father Debendranath Tagore was a religious reformer of his time who encouraged a multi-cultural exchange in the family mansion — Jorasanko. Within the joint family, Tagore’s 13 brothers and sisters were mathematicians, journalists, novelists, musicians, artists, leaders in theatre , science and new art movement.
The tremendous excitement and cultural richness of his family allowed Rabindranath to absorb and learn subconsciously at his own pace, giving him a dynamic open model of education, which he later recreated in his school Shantiniketan.
Travels:
Between 1878 and 1932 Tagore set foot in more than 30 countries on 5 different continents meeting several notable personalities such as William Butler Yeats, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, George Bernard Shaw, H.G Wells to name a few. He spent long periods out of India, lecturing reading from his work in Europe, USA and East Asia.
Works:
Rabindranath Tagore published works include-
i. Notable plays such as Chitrangada(1892)
ii. Novels like Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire(1916). Tagore’s novels in Bengali are less well known than his poems and short stories.
iii. Short-stories such as Kabuliwala(1892) and Atithi(1895).
iv. Poetry collections such as Manasi (1890), Sonar Tari (1894) and Gitanjali (1910).Manasi written in 1890 showed the making of a genius, it contained some of his best known poems and social and political satire.Gitanjali, contains his English prose tanslations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections. W.B. Yeats had written the preface to its English translation.
v. More than 2000 songs in Bengali.
vi. In the late 1920s Tagore picked up painting in his 60s and produced works that won him a place among various contemporary artists.He is regarded as the outstanding creative artist of Early 20th Century India. Tagore’s poems and songs are virtually untranslatable, which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali Society.
Politics:
Tagore rebelled against strongly nationalist forms of the independence movement, and he wanted to assert India’s right to be independent without denying the importance of what India could learn from abroad
He urged the masses to avoid victimology and instead seek self-help and education, and he saw the presence of British administration as a “political symptom of our social disease”. He maintained that, even for those at the extremes of poverty, “there can be no question of blind revolution”; preferable to it was a “steady and purposeful education”
Education philosophy:
The social and cultural involvement of his family played a strong role in the formulation of Rabindranath’s educational priorities. His grandfather Dwarakanath was involved in supporting medical facilities, educational institutions and the arts . He also fought for religious and social reform and the establishment of a free press.
Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor which the family visited for knowledge. He believed that proper teaching does not explain things, instead proper teaching stokes curiosity.
In his earlier years Rabindranath Tagore began writing verses when he returned to India after incomplete studies in England in 1870s.
In Tagore’s philosophy of education, the aesthetic development of the senses was as important as the intellectual–if not more so–and music, literature, art, dance and drama were given great prominence in the daily life of the school.
There are four fundamental principles in Tagore’s educational philosophy; naturalism, humanism, internationalism and idealism. Shantiniketan and Visva Bharathi are both based on these very principles.
He insisted that education should be imparted in a natural surroundings. He believed in giving children the freedom of expression. He said, “Children have their active subconscious mind which like a tree has the power to gather its food from the surrounding atmosphere”. He also said that an educational institution should not be “ a dead cage in which living minds are fed with food that’s artificially prepared. Hand work and arts are the spontaneous over flow of our deeper nature and spiritual significance”.
According to him, “Education means enabling the mind to find out that ultimate truth which emancipates us from the bondage of dust and gives us wealth not of things but of inner light, not of power but of love. It is a process of enlightenment. It is divine wealth. It helps in realization of truth”.
The aim of education is to bring about perfection of man by dispelling ignorance and ushering in the light of knowledge. It should enable us to lead a complete life — economic, intellectual, aesthetic, social and spiritual.
The main objective of his school — Shantiniketan was to cultivate a love for nature, to impart knowledge and wisdom in one’s native language, provide freedom of mind, heart and will, a natural ambience, and to eventually enrich Indian culture.
For Tagore, religion was an ideal. His ‘Visva Bharathi World University’ stood for his nobility of soul.
There he writes, ‘In education, the most inspiring atmosphere of creative activity is important. Primary function of the institution must be constructive; scope must be for all kinds of intellectual exploration. Teaching must be one with culture, spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, economic and social. True education is to realize at every step how our training and knowledge have an organic connection with our surroundings”.
Tagore says, “We should know that the great task of our institution is to provide for the education of the mind and all the senses through various activities”.
Referring to religion, Rabindranath Tagore likens an educational institution to ‘a wide meeting place where all sects may gather together and forget their differences’. In the memorandum of association of the Visva Bharati, Tagore writes the objectives as, “To study the mind of man in its realization of different aspects of truth from diverse points of view, the culture of Visva Bharati is the culture of man and its keynote lies in the truth that human personality is not a mean trifle, it is also the Divine personality”.
He also lays emphasis on the learner’s contact with nature. Apart from physical activity, nature teaches a man more than any institution. Educational institutions should realize the importance of this fact and inculcate co-curricular activities to good effect.
Tagore believes that, one of the main aims of education is to prepare the individual for the service of the nation and education stands for human regeneration, cultural representation, harmony and intellectualism. Educational institutions should build on the power of thinking and imagination in an individual and help turn herself/himself into a self-sustained building block of human society and a creative canvas of nation on the whole.
To quote Tagore: “A day will come when the unvanquished man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost heritage”.
Shantiniketan and Visva-Bharati:
In the year 1901 Tagore founded a school in rural Bengal at Shantiniketan, where he blended the best in Indian and Western traditions. This later came to be known as Visva-Bharati University in 1921.
Tagore employed a brahmacharya system: gurus gave pupils personal guidance emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Teaching was often done under trees. He staffed the school, he contributed his Nobel Prize Money and his duties as steward-mentor at Santiniketan kept him busy. In the mornings he taught classes, in the afternoons and evenings he wrote the students’ textbooks. He fundraised widely for the school in Europe and the United States between 1919 and 192.
He dedicated forty years of his life to his educational institution at Santiniketan, West Bengal. Rabindranath’s school contained a children’s school as well as a university known as Visva-Bharati and a rural education Centre known as Sriniketan.
Rabindranath did not write a central educational treatise, and his ideas must be gleaned through his various writings and educational experiments at Santiniketan In general, he envisioned an education that was deeply rooted in one’s immediate surroundings but connected to the cultures of the wider world, predicated upon pleasurable learning and individualized to the personality of the child. He felt that a curriculum should revolve organically around nature with classes held in the open air under the trees to provide for a spontaneous appreciation of the fluidity of the plant and animal kingdoms, and seasonal changes. Children sat on hand-woven mats beneath the trees, which they were allowed to climb and run beneath between classes. Nature walks and excursions were a part of the curriculum and students were encouraged to follow the life cycles of insects, birds and plants. Class schedules were made flexible to allow for shifts in the weather or special attention to natural phenomena, and seasonal festivals were created for the children by Tagore. In an essay entitled “A Poet’s School,” he emphasizes the importance of an empathetic sense of interconnectedness with the surrounding world
In keeping with his theory of subconscious learning, Rabindranath never talked or wrote down to the students, but rather involved them with whatever he was writing or composing. The students were allowed access to the room where he read his new writings to teachers and critics, and they were encouraged to read out their own writings in special literary evenings. In teaching also he believed in presenting difficult levels of literature, which the students might not fully grasp, but which would stimulate them. The writing and publishing of periodicals had always been an important aspect of Jorasanko life, and students at Santiniketan were encouraged to create their own publications and put out several illustrated magazines. The children were encouraged to follow their ideas in painting and drawing and to draw inspiration from the many visiting artists and writers.
Tagore’s educational efforts were ground-breaking in many areas. He was one of the first in India to argue for a humane educational system that was in touch with the environment and aimed at overall development of the personality. Santiniketan became a model for vernacular instruction and the development of Bengali textbooks; as well, it offered one of the earliest coeducational programs in South Asia. The establishment of Visva-Bharati and Sriniketan led to pioneering efforts in many directions, including models for distinctively Indian higher education and mass education, as well as pan-Asian and global cultural exchange.
Legacy
He introduced Indian Culture to the West following which in the year 1913 Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to receive the Noble Prize for Literature.
Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar.
May 7 1861, his birth anniversary, is celebrated by groups scattered across the globe in the form of Kabipranam.
