Barun Roy: For Tagore's sake

The current turmoil offers a unique opportunity to reinvent and separate Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati

I don’t wish to get into the question of who’s right and who’s wrong, but the recent turmoil at Visva-Bharati, in Santiniketan, West Bengal, is highly disturbing and it diminishes its sanctity as an institution founded by Rabindranath Tagore. The simmering problems that have plagued Visva-Bharati for long and culminated in an ugly showdown between its vice-chancellor and its faculty and employees call for an urgent and convincing intervention by the highest authorities in New Delhi.

But any such intervention, to be effective and meaningful, has to be of a fundamental nature, not confined simply to resolving the immediate crisis. For, it seems, the conflict, which selfish political elements are only too happy to exploit, arises from a failure to understand and accept the institution’s two divergent realities: The ashram and the university.

In Tagore’s time, when activities were limited and had not fully evolved, the two could easily co-exist. In heart and spirit, one supported the other. They can’t any more. The ashram is in decline — to the extent that Vice-Chancellor Rajat Kanta Ray’s penance under the chhatimtala was taken as a sign of his madness — while the university has grown up to be a fully-fledged, modern, all-India institution with a teaching curriculum that hadn’t existed in the past.

Today, the ashram has become a retirement community of a few old students, employees and teachers who have houses there, with no other ambition than to spend the rest of their lives in relative peace, while the university draws students from different parts of the country, and even the world, with different values and objectives. Can these increasingly different realities be pressed anymore into a common straitjacket? Should one’s needs and priorities be confused with those of the other? Should the two traditions and cultures, having different objectives, be mixed?

The current turmoil offers a unique opportunity to reinvent Santiniketan, the ashram, and Visva-Bharati, the university, separate their roles and goals, and re-establish them as a much bigger cultural-educational complex that could be, in prestige and attraction, as important as, say, Harvard, Stanford, or Oxford.

There’s every reason to move Visva-Bharati, the university, to a new location and no reason why new land can’t be acquired for this purpose outside its present confines. Who says the so-called existing Visva-Bharati complex is a sacred diocese that can’t be expanded?

A brand new campus could be planned and designed by renowned national and international architects, along the lines of the best American campuses, with wide-open, landscaped spaces, modern classrooms – both indoor and outdoor as Tagore would have preferred – and all the appurtenances of a thriving educational community. A separate location will allow the university to be better profiled and administered, removing the confusion of identity that often baffles both students and the general public.

The ashram can then be redeveloped as a cultural complex and a fitter memorial to Tagore’s ideals and values, insulated from the pressures and constraints of running a modern institution of higher learning. Patha Bhavana (the school) can stay with it and so can Kala Bhavana (the art school), Sangeet Bhavana (the music school), and all the other bhavanas that have been part of the heritage and broad idea of Visva-Bharati. New bhavanas could be added, like one for the study of folk music that Tagore was so keen to promote. All the old buildings existing from Tagore’s days, like ‘Santiniketan’, the earliest one, and ‘Kanch Ghar,’ the prayer hall, will remain the main features of the ashram.

Above all, the entire Uttarayan complex, comprising the Tagore museum and residences, could be better preserved. On one of my recent visits, I found an ugly yellow tarpaulin sheet covering the roof of ‘Shyamali’, Tagore’s famous mud house, to protect it from the rain. I couldn’t conceive of a worst aesthetic assault on his memory than this. I haven’t seen a worse-maintained museum than Rabindra Bhavana. On the spacious courtyard at Uttarayan, Ramkinkar Baij’s sculptures are unmarked and unidentified. Those on the Kala Bhavana grounds are lost due to bad maintenance. A separate sculpture garden could be developed as a permanent attraction, a permanent art gallery could be built, and exhibition spaces could be created for artists from India and abroad to showcase their works. Strange that Santiniketan doesn’t yet have such facilities. Stranger that it has little to attract value visitors round the year!

Together, Santiniketan could then flourish as India’s global centre of educational and cultural excellence, Tagore’s true Visva-Bharati where he wanted the home and the world to come together in a unique learning adventure. Should we keep Santiniketan/Visva-Bharati as an eternal prisoner of its charter? Should it remain only a small-time destination for middle-class Bengali tourists for whom the only daytime diversion is a visit to the deer park and there’s nothing to do at night?

rbarun@gmail.com