Title: A History of Sriniketan: Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering Work in Rural Reconstruction
Author: Uma Das Gupta
Publisher: Niyogi Book’s ‘Paper Missile’ imprint
Pages: 234pp
Black and white, 59 photographs and 6 illustrations
When talking about Rabindranath Tagore, most of the time he is defined as a poet, playwright, painter or teacher, he is never introduced as a man who worked with people for their well being, or as a social reformer.
This new book, ‘A History of Sriniketan: Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering Work in Rural Reconstruction’ by Uma Das Gupta examines how Tagore pioneered in rural reconstruction in terms of Sriniketan which is a wing of Visva-Bharati International University at Santiniketan.
Beginning
At his time, Bengali villages were mostly neglected and villagers were at a destitute state as they were always economically dependent on someone else. On the other hand, they also did not make any attempt to overcome their helplessness. Because of this, the poor man forever became poor.
Tagore saw this reality when he first went to live in his family’s agricultural estates in East Bengal during the 1890s. Then, he was the manager of those estates, and got his first exposure to the countryside and its stark miseries.
The experience gave him new insights into the village life, and also played a seminal role in turning him into a man of action. As a result, he began to think that India could never have real freedom or happiness unless villagers became independent and self-reliant.
So, it was for this task he started Sriniketan in 1922.
Establishing Sriniketan
In that, he first sent his eldest son, Rathindranath Tagore, to the USA, to study agriculture. There he studied for three years, and returned well qualified to help him. Tagore was reluctant to work with people who did not have any similar scientific training. Then, he invited Englishman Leonard Knight Elmhirst, the internationally known agriculturist, to come and stay in Sriniketan for a year.
He was a man who had devoted himself to English village problems. And also, there was a parallel effort to revive the traditional rural arts and crafts as a means of creativity and economic recovery.
How about office building? When Tagore was in England in 1913, he bought a large house on the edge of the village of Surul, about two miles from Santiniketan. He got it transformed as the headquarters of the new village work or Sriniketan.
A home of welfare and beauty
Selecting the word Sriniketan as the name of this place is also interesting. Marjorie Sykes, a teacher of the Visva-Bharati in 1939-1942, explains this in her book titled ‘Rabindranath Tagore’, as below: “The word ‘Sri’ contains the idea of prosperity, of welfare resulting from activity and growing into healthy beauty. The name Sriniketan, therefore, reveals Rabindranath’s hopes and ideas. He wished to make the village centre ‘a home of welfare and beauty’.”
Tasks in Sriniketan
The main thing in Sriniketan is how Tagore started the field work in it. There, he, first, built a farm on one side of the area in it. The farm helped the farmers of the district to introduce improved crops which could be grown successfully on their soil.
Then, he started a health and medical services department at Sriniketan and carried out its services through Health Co-operative Societies in the villages, which was much helpful for the people.
Next, he built an education department there. To help students further, Tagore also established a training school for teachers where the course is specially planned to give the students both a knowledge of village problems and some practical experience of village work.
Thereafter, he opened a school of crafts in Sriniketan, which is called Shilpa-Bhavana. This gave a full training on crafting for villagers, and it helped them to earn their own living in the future.
For instance, the carpentry section in it made the furniture and all the wood works for houses. The weaving section made sarees, carpets, towels, and many other useful things. Book-biding was taught and leather objects such as sandals and purses were also made. And the pottery section made cups, jugs, teapots and so on. Shilpa-Bhavana later opened a shop in Kolkotta to help people to sell their self-made items.
Importance of the book
However, Tagore’s work in ‘village reconstruction’ at Sriniketan is not as widely known as his work at Santiniketan.
So Das Gupta, in this book, examines Tagore’s effort to inspire deprived sections of rural society to self reliance and to make them economically independent through Sriniketan or the centre for rural reconstruction.
The idea of Tagore was, in fact, pioneering in its times. Especially, he could improve the condition of the peasantry by using scientific methods of cultivation through laboratory experiments where the expert and the peasant collectively participated, which was entirely new. In 1922, while addressing the Visva-Bharati-Sammilani, Tagore said:
“It is hard to imagine a life as cheerless as in our rural areas. I could see no way out. It is far from easy to do something for people who have cultivated weakness for centuries and do not know what self-help is. Still I had to make a start”.
This shows what a difficult path Tagore took through Sriniketan. So history of those great endeavours should be recorded, and Uma Das Gupta has done it tremendously.
“Rabindranath referred to his rural work as his ‘life’s work’. This study here on Sriniketan’s history intends to document the work of rural reconstruction and examine its pioneering features of integrated thought and action,” writes the author in the introduction of the book.
“Tagore’s independent thinking gave him the courage of conviction to work alone with his ideas of rural reconstruction outside the nationalist movement.
He was not one to accept that all improvements had to wait for our country’s political independence,” Gupta further writes.
The publishers note on the book is also important:
“He (Tagore) perceived a future for India at par with the rest of the world in terms of both education and industrialisation, which could happen only with the uplift of the rural population.
Uma Das Gupta documents poet-turned-reformer Tagore’s efforts in this direction in ‘A History of Sriniketan’, and we are proud to publish this for our beloved readers,” says Trisha Niyogi, CEO and Director, Niyogi Books.
Who is this author?
The author of this book, Uma Das Gupta, is not just a writer, but is a historian and professor who was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Oxford. Her post-doctoral research has been on Rabindranath Tagore and the history of the educational institutions he founded at Santiniketan and Sriniketan, 1901–1941. Das Gupta retired as Professor, Social Sciences Division, Indian Statistical Institute, and she was Head of the United States Educational Foundation in India for the Eastern Region.
Recently, she has become a National Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IAAS), Shimla, and a Delegate of Oxford University Press, India. Gupta’s critically acclaimed publications include “Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography”; “The Oxford India Tagore: Selected Essays on Education and Nationalism”; “A Difficult Friendship: Letters of Rabindranath Tagore and Edward Thompson, 1913–1940” and “Friendships of ‘Largeness and F reedom’. Andrews, Tagore, and Gandhi, An Epistolary Account, 1912–1940”.
This book is written by an ideal person who has more than enough knowledge to elaborate on Rabindranath Tagore’s pioneering work in rural reconstruction.