A Poet's School: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Aesthetic Education

Abstract

This paper looks into the dynamics and performatives of Tagore's school which was established in 1901 at Bolpur in West Bengal. He called it Santiniketan. The paper critiques Tagore's notions of pedagogy in relation to the pregnant network linking the students, teachers and their natural environment; further, it investigates how the school has manifested itself as a green discourse and worked itself out within the dialectic of space and place, giving Tagore's ideas and the pragmatics of execution a fresh circulation of understanding. Here, for the first time, Tagore's ideas on education and nature (eco-pedagogy) are elaborately problematised through the intersections of a variety of thoughts and concepts drawn from contemporary ecocritical studies, ecosophy, discourses on nature, culture, and ethics of humane holism and bioegalitarianism.

Notes

¹ See Tagore, ‘Siksha’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol.14 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1992), p.477.

² Rabindranath Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), p.285. This essay was written in 1926.

³ Ibid., pp.285 & 286.

⁴ Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.15.

⁵ Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Problem of Education’, in Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), p.75.

⁶ Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, p.289.

⁷ Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Tapovan’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol.14 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1992), p.384.

⁸ Tapovan, wrote Tagore, is ‘the forest resort of the patriarchal community of ancient India. Those who are familiar with Sanskrit literature know that this was not a colony of people with a primitive culture. They were seekers of truth, for the sake of which they lived in purity but not puritanism; they led a simple life, but not one of self-mortification. They did not advocate celibacy and were in close touch with people who pursued worldly interests’. See ‘A Poet's School’, p.287. See also Tagore, ‘Tapovan’.

⁹ Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, pp.290–91. Italics are mine.

¹⁰ See Rabindrainath Tagore, ‘Ashramer Siksha’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol.14 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1992), p.431. Translation by Tagore.

¹¹ Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, p.299.

¹² Ibid., p.300.

¹³ Himanshu Mukherjee, Education for Fullness (London: Asia Publishing House, 1962), p.296. Willie Pearson was an Englishman and a resident of Shantiniketan.

¹⁴ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p.106.

¹⁵ Ibid., p.118.

¹⁶ See Martin Heidegger, ‘Homeland’ (trans. Thomas F. O'Meara), in Listening, Vol.6 (1971), pp.231–8.

¹⁷ Tagore, ‘The Problem of Education’, p.72.

¹⁸ J. Seed, ‘Anthropocentrism’, in B. Devall and G. Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985), p.243.

¹⁹ For more on this see Doris LaChapelle, Earth Wisdom (San Diego: Guild of Tudors Press, 1978).

²⁰ See Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, p.66.

²¹ Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), p.190.

²² Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p.147. Also see Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 1990).

²³ See M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p.127.

²⁴ See Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, p.97.

²⁵ Ibid., p.3.

²⁶ See J. Habermas, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, in J. Thompson and D. Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates (London: Macmillan, 1982), p.247.

²⁷ This is in deep opposition to the robustly instrumentalist and strongly anthropocentric understanding of nature that Bacon endorsed.

²⁸ Arne Naess (1912–2009) is a Norwegian philosopher who coined the phrase ‘deep ecology’. Greg Garrad writes: ‘The “poet laureate” of deep ecology is Gary Snyder and its philosophical guru is Arne Naess: Naess sets out eight key points of the deep ecology platform in George Sessions's definitive anthology Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (1995). The crucial ones are as follows: 1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent worth). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes; and 4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantially smaller human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires a smaller human population’. See Greg Garrad, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.20–21.

²⁹ See F. Trainer, Abandon Affluence (London: Zed Books, 1985), pp.176–8.

³⁰ Tagore, ‘Ashramer Siksha’, p.431.

³¹ Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, pp.298–9.

³² Ibid., p.295. Italics are mine.

³³ Tagore, ‘Tapovan’, p.354.

³⁴ Tagore, ‘The Problem of Education’, p.71.

³⁵ See Chim Blea, ‘Animal Rights and Deep Ecology Movements’, in Synthesis, Vol.23 (1986), pp.13–14.

³⁶ See Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1972), pp.59–60.

³⁷ E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (London: Abacus, 1974), p.11.

³⁸ M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p.103.

³⁹ Tagore, ‘The Problem of Education’, pp.73–4. Apart from the word ‘Bhuma’ all italics are mine.

⁴⁰ Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Abaran’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol.14 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1992), p.383.

⁴¹ Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, pp.291–2. Italics are mine.

⁴² Tagore, ‘Abaran’, p.343.

⁴³ Ibid., p.344.

⁴⁴ Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, p.292.

⁴⁵ P. Bunyard and F. Morgan-Grenville (eds), The Green Alternative (London: Methuen, 1987), p.71.

⁴⁶ Tagore, ‘The Problem of Education’, p.75.

⁴⁷ Ibid., pp.80–1.

⁴⁸ Albert Schweitzer, ‘The Ethic of Reverence for Life’ [1923], in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds), Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), pp.133–8.

⁴⁹ Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p.122.

⁵⁰ Tagore, ‘Tapovan’, p.357.

⁵¹ Tagore, ‘A Poet's School’, p.291.

⁵² See Augustin Berque, ‘Some Traits of Japanese Fūdosei’, in The Japan Foundation Newsletter 14, No.5 (1987), pp.1–7.

⁵³ Augustin Berque, ‘Identification of the Self in Relation to the Environment’, in Nancy Ross Rosenberger (ed.), Japanese Sense of Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.94.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Tagore, ‘Tapovan’, p.358.

⁵⁶ For greater elaboration see Tu Wei-ming, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

⁵⁷ Tagore, ‘Tapovan’, p.360.

⁵⁸ An elaboration of this idea can be found in my forthcoming book on Tagore and Education where I have written at length on Hegel, Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi and others.

⁵⁹ Tagore, ‘The Problem of Education’, p.79.

⁶⁰ For more information on Tagore's schooling see Rabindranath Tagore, My Boyhood Days (Calcutta: Rupa & Co., 2002); and Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences (Calcutta: Rupa & Co., 2002).

⁶¹ Anne Stenros, ‘Orientation, Identification, Representation: Space Perception in Architecture’, in S. Aura, I. Alavalkama and H. Palmquist (eds), Endoscopy as a Tool in Architecture (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 1993), p.76.

⁶² See Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My School’, in Personality (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1970), p.131.

⁶³ The term is taken from the title of a book by Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996).

⁶⁴ Quoted in Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p.ix.

⁶⁵ See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p.xxxii.

⁶⁶ Tagore, ‘My School’, in Personality (London: Macmillan & Co., 1945), p.136.

⁶⁷ See G. Matoré, L'Espace humain (Paris: La Columbe, 1962), pp.22–3 quoted in E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), p.10.