Keya Sarkar: Between a wall and a fence

Social conversation in Santiniketan for the past month or so has centred on pretty much one subject: the wall. “Is it blocking your gate completely?” “Have they started digging on your side?” “How high is it now?”, and so on.

For the uninitiated, a decision was taken somewhere between the time a high-level committee headed by Gopal Krishna Gandhi was set up to look into the sorry state of affairs at the Visva Bharati University (VBU) and the Centre’s decision to propose Santiniketan as a world heritage site. The decision was to mark boundary of the VBU area.

Since Tagore had a very different idea of what his university would be, Santiniketan encompassed orchards, water bodies and even some tribal villages. All residents of Santiniketan had a vague idea of what land belonged to VBU but there was never any formal demarcation.

Today, the institution he founded more than 100 years ago has changed beyond recognition. Many houses have been built on land neighbouring the campus and much of the free land along the imaginary campus border has been encroached upon by squatters.

So, the decision of the university authorities to demarcate its boundary is not in question. It is the implementation that would make Tagore wince.

In this normally sleepy town, the roar of tractors bringing in sand, the whirr of the cement mixers, the sound of labourers digging the soil are as unpleasant.

There were rumours that building of 25 kms of wall was sanctioned for the ghetto-isation of Visva Bharati. Contractors lost no time in calculating the money to be made and bids were delivered and tenders granted.

Unfortunately, the inmates of Santiniketan who were used to working in a far more leisurely style took far longer to wake up to the reality of a 6-7 foot high wall zigzagging through areas which earlier did not even have a barricade. Worse, many legitimate neighbours of the university would have the wall blocking their front gate or have their road transformed into a lane through which cars or fire engines would have difficulty manoeuvring.

Although a little late in the day, many VBU alumni who now live across the globe pitched in with their lobbying, unwilling to come back to a place known and revered for its openness, changed beyond recognition.

Everyone, however, agreed on the need for barricades. They felt a wire fence would be the best since it would not completely obliterate Tagore’s idea of nature being the best educator.

But there was opposition from workers who stood to gain from the “wall industry”. And the authorities who have been given the task of building the wall argue that a fence would need much more maintenance and security which they cannot afford.

Amid all these debates, one old-world lady protested in a truly novel way. She bought copies of “Achalayatan”, a work by Tagore which talks of how institutions are stifled and deadened by rules, and distributed these to various VBU departments that are connected with the building of the wall!