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Does Visva-Bharati needs to go back to the roots?


Sustaining attainments of a community are as important as that of a university which helps them to survive and proceed for advancement. Tagore, the founder of Visva-Bharati and creator of Rural Reconstruction vision was to put stress on creativity and discovering own perspective to be driven in intellectual and mundane affairs.

He was not keen on the Western way of looking at things of our country and wanted to find out Indian perspective through education and experimentation not bound in alien idioms. This attitude was also maintained by him when it came to uplifting the rural population in and around Santiniketan. Self-sustenance and self-reliance are central in his thoughts. Tagore always nurtured the idea that members of a community need to help each other to sustain and improve life.

His founding of Sriniketan experiment in 1921-22 in the Surul and making surrounding villages prosper through cooperation based on own strength in skill, culture and social bonding with Rural Reconstruction programme as enablers was a marked departure from the prevalent notion of development. Its main aim was to awake the villages to find solutions to their problems by themselves rather than blindly following someone else. We can say that he propagated ‘action research’ and ‘self-reliance’.

Right now, Visva-Bharati stands as a key public university in India. It has many more departments than it had in the beginning and student strength is about 10,000. It has fifty villages under its extension and development programmes. The question today is how far Visva-Bharati has been able to fulfil the objectives of Tagore. Most of the departments are working on projects that come from outside and have obligations to the funding agencies’ ideology. That does not prosper towards new experimentation in pedagogy and practice on own terms.

It is due time to think about breaking away from the hackneyed and start involving the students further to form a better the community within and around Visva-Bharati needs to go back to its roots to practice and propagate self-reliance through self-awakening.

Rabindranath Tagore


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