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Elective English—III

Notes
Example: When Gandhi used the catastrophic Bihar earthquake of 1934 that killed a
huge number of people as further ammunition in his fight against untouchability—he identified
the earthquake as “a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins,” in particular the sin of
untouchability. Tagore protested vehemently, insisting, “It is all the more unfortunate because
this kind of unscientific view of phenomena is too readily accepted by a large section of our
countrymen.”
Similarly, when Gandhi advocated that everyone should use the charka—the primitive spinning
wheel—thirty minutes a day, Tagore expressed his disagreement sharply. He thought little of
Gandhi’s alternative economics, and found reason to celebrate, with a few qualifications, the
liberating role of modern technology in reducing human drudgery as well as poverty. He also
was deeply sceptical of the spiritual argument for the spinning wheel: “The charka does not
require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly,
using the minimum of judgment and stamina.”
Many of these issues remain deeply relevant today, but what is important to note here are not
the particular views that Tagore advanced in these—and other such—areas, but the organizing
principles that moved him. The poet who was famous in the West only as a romantic and a
spiritualist was in fact persistently guided in his writings by the necessity of critical reasoning
and the importance of human freedom. In addition, those philosophical priorities that influenced
Tagore’s ideas on education and his belief that education is the most important element in the
development of a country. In his assessment of Japan’s economic development, Tagore separated
out the role that the advancement of school education had played in Japan’s remarkable
development—an analysis that would be echoed much later in the literature on development.
He may have been exaggerating the role of education somewhat when he remarked that “the
imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the
absence of education,” but it is not hard to see why he saw the transformative role of education
as the central story in the development process.
Tagore devoted much of his life to advancing education in India and advocating it everywhere.
Nothing absorbed as much of his time as the school in Santiniketan that he established. He was
constantly raising money for this unusually progressive co-educational school. It was one of the
early co-educational institutions in India. After learning that he had been awarded the Nobel
Prize in literature, Tagore told others about it, or so the story goes, in a meeting of a school
committee discussing how to fund a new set of drains that the school needed. His announcement
of the recognition apparently took the eccentric form of his saying that “money for the drains
has probably been found.”
In his distinctive view of education, Tagore particularly emphasized the need for gathering
knowledge from everywhere in the world, and assessing it only by reasoned scrutiny. As a
student at the Santiniketan school, I felt very privileged that the geographical boundaries of our
education were not confined only to India and imperial Britain (as was common in Indian
schools then). We learned a great deal about Europe, Africa, the USA, and Latin America, and
even more extensively about other countries in Asia. Santiniketan had the first institute of
Chinese studies in India; my mother learned judo in the school nearly a century ago; and there
were excellent training facilities in arts, crafts, and music from other countries, such as Indonesia.

Tagore also worked hard to break out of the religious and communal thinking that was beginning
to be championed in India during his lifetime—it would peak in the years following his death
in 1941, when the Hindu-Muslim riots erupted in the subcontinent, making the partitioning of
the country hard to avoid. Tagore was extremely shocked by the violence that was provoked by
the championing of a singular identity of people as members of one religion or another, and he
felt convinced that this disaffection was being foisted on common people by determined
extremists: “interested groups led by ambition and outside instigation are today using the
communal motive for destructive political ends.”

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