IP_ Tagore Issue - Final.indd - high commission of india mauritius

to be reared and cultivated,and must address the issuesthat are the concern of manand the nature around him.That is why they must have thecooperation of the land, thewater and the sky of the spacearound, and be linked to thechange of seasons.That education did not mean‘rote’ learning, memorizationand reproduction is clear fromhis opening paragraphs of thebook titled Visva-Bharati: ‘Theeducation that encouragesrepetition is not the educationof the mind, because thatcan be taken care of evenmechanically!’ (Translation bythis author). Truly, mechanicalreproduction cannot be the aimof an educated aggregate as theideal education requires us todiscover or uncover the truth,and express that according toone’s own abilities. He talksabout constraints here as aparticular nation may havevarious constraints withinwhich one would be able toexpress a scientific truth or anobservation. Tagore is confidentthat India has always beenA ceremonial procession at Santiniketan. Indira Gandhi is seen (fourth from right) as a student of Visva-Bharati during 1934-35Mit freundl. Genehmg: Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust, New DelhiStudents of Patha-Bhavana with a visiting scholarat the forefront of crackingdifficult knowledge puzzles, andthinking about solutions to thecrisis of the world.But then, Tagore also lamentsthat when India had crackeddifficult problems of knowledge,it had a mental unity, butthat now it’s ‘mind’ has gotdivided in terms of caste, class,language and religion. Hewarns that disruption of one’sintellectual organ or snappingoff one’s sense-organs vis-à-visthe rest of the body can renderone useless or motionless,whereas it is a known factthat only when we join allten fingers that our hands canform a cup – either to offer‘anjali’ or to accept anythingthat is offered as a gift. It isnot surprising that he wouldinvite the best of European andAsian scholars in his universitywhile gathering some toweringpersonalities in his time asfaculty members under eachdiscipline. This facilitationof making them interact, hethought, would automaticallylead to new ideas and newknowledge.He, therefore, says that weneed to develop a systemthat draws from civilizationalhistories of ‘Vaidika’ (‘Vedic’),‘Pauranika’, ‘Bauddha’(‘Buddhist’), ‘Jaina’, ‘Muslim’(‘Islamic’) traditions ofeducation, and discover ourown pathways to prepare thenew generations and helpemerge men and women withappropriate leadership qualities.He says – if you do not knowyourself in detail and in aninvolved manner, you cannotbuild an ‘India’ by aping andcopying others. You can do soonly by learning to convergevarious traditions, or else – wecould at best build a secondratesystem that depends on‘transfer’ of knowledge andtechnology.Tagore had argued that inthe West, each country andits culture as well as societyhad found its own goals andobjectives based on whichthey had decided what kind ofeducation system was needed.But in our country, ratherthan the life or ‘jiivana’, itis the livelihood or ‘jiivikaa’that assumed the prime placein education planning. Whilelivelihood or employmentrelated to what we lacked andwhat we needed (‘abhaava’and ‘prayojana’) , the aim oflife is much higher – it seeks toachieve a fullness, a completion– a kind of semantic that ismuch higher than mundaneaspects of employability,which would be achieved anyway as we go along the truepath of education. To thatextent, we must differentiatebetween the “higher” aim,i.e. liberty, freedom, civility– and “lower”, or “incidental”aim – employability, skill andtechnical capability (Visva-Bharati, 1919). In Tagore’sscheme of things, therefore, itwas always the case that manand emancipation of the humanbeing occupied his centralconcern.◆The author holds the Tagore Studies Chairand is the Director of Rabindra Bhavanaat Visva-Bharati. An eminent poet andplayright, he was the Director of the CentralInstitute of Indian Languages at Mysore.INDIA PERSPECTIVES VOL 24 NO. 2/2010 108 INDIA PERSPECTIVES VOL 24 NO. 2/2010 109