In our globalized age when higher education is on a dangerously slippery slope with government highhandedness creating distress among teachers and students alike, when academic and creative freedom is up against walls of indifference and hate, it is heartening to hear Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore delivering his first lecture in English in Madras on 9 February 1919. In ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’ lecture, he raised the question “what should be the ideal of education in India. Instead of holding my listeners’ minds in suspense till the very end, let me briefly give the answer in the beginning…
On each race is the duty laid to keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part in the illumination of the world. To break the lamp of any people is to deprive it of its righ – tful place in the world festival. He who has no light is unfortunate enough, but utterly miserable is he who, having it, has been deprived of it, or has forgotten all about it. “India has proved that it has its own mind, which has deeply thought and felt and tried to solve according to its light the problems of existence. The education of India is to enable this mind of India to find out truth, to make this truth its own wherever found and to give expression to it in such a manner as only it can do. In order to carry this out, first of all the mind of India has to be concentrated and made conscious of itself and then only can it accept education from its teachers in a right spirit, judge it by its own standard and make use of it by its own creative power…
The next point is that, in education, the most important factor must be the inspiring atmosphere of creative activity. And therefore, the primary function of our University should be the constructive work of knowledge…Education can only become natural and wholesome when it is the direct fruit of a living and growing knowledge.” On 27 March 1919 Gurudev also delivered this lecture at the Empire Theatre, Calcutta. ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’ may be read as one of the finest expositions of Swadeshi intellectual thought, in fact, historians and scholars have un – derlined the ‘internationalism’ and the stupendous growth of projects where ‘knowledge for nationalist ends’ were evident.
Moreover, the Swadeshi movement was spread in time across three decades, quite clearly from 1903 to the early 1920s and even beyond; seeking to assert indigenous autonomy, social constructivism and cultural productivity at one level, directly challenging the British Empire. At another level, there were knowledge affiliations which went beyond the confines of geography, and this trajectory of intellectual thought gives the Swadeshi movement a place on the global map of international movements which have continued to impact generations of Indians not merely those living in Bengal. When Kris Manjapra, now Stearns Trustee professor of history and global studies at Northeastern University, USA, was contributing an article to the Economic and Political Weekly (20 October 2012), he titled it as ‘Knowledgeable Internationalism and the Swadeshi Movement, 1903-1921’.
The Harvard-educated professor, working at the intersection of global history and critical study of race and colonialism, looked at the Swadeshi movement as one where “productive nationalism emerged with the partition of Bengal, mooted in 1903 and executed in 1905.” He explained that while the Swadeshi movement can be portrayed in terms of economic nationalism ~ with the boycott of British goods and new politics of local consumption setting the stage for the future ~ there has been greater thrust of cultural historians and anthropologists who studied the expressions of Swadeshi activ – ism in terms of material culture ~ manual industries, styles of dress, and nationalist symbols of everyday comportment. Said Prof Manjapra, “a study of the dynamics of intellectual life in the swa – deshi era complements these approaches.”
“An examination of Swadeshi era thought suggests a movement aimed not only at producing material objects, but also new knowledge. The swadeshi production of knowledge was internationalist in scope and in execution. As swadeshi activists were shutting down to British goods, they were commencing an unparalleled degree of intellectual commerce with the wor – ld outside the British world empire,” Prof Manjapra highlighted, bringing knowledge and intellectual thought to the forefront of our understanding of the Swadeshi movement.
In Tagore’s 1919 lecture, where he articulated objectives for the university, he spoke about cultural autonomy and international cooperation in the intellectual realm in the same breath. Prof Manjapra hailed Gurudev’s clarion call: “A truly national Indian university, should teach at the highest level using the Indian languages, and not English alone. It should foster Asian cultural and aesthetic standards. But it should also ‘perfect irrigation of learning’ based on international ‘co-operation’, since a river belonging to a country is not fed by its own waters alone”. Gurudev’s intellectual internationalism was seen as ‘constructive Swadeshi’ by historians like Prof Sumit Sarkar whose pioneering work ‘Swadeshi Movement 1903-1908’ remains a benchmark study. An interesting side-story is developing here, as Prof Manjapra shared: PC Mahalanobis in the 1950s got the idea for his nationalist project of ‘brain irrigation’ from Tagore. He had served as Tagore’s personal secretary in the 1920s, and worked as the first general secretary of the Viswa Bharati University senate. Quite clearly there is a ‘Tagorean spirit of swadeshi internationalism’ seen sweeping its way into the arts, humanities and the sciences.
“The swadeshi impulse propelled dramatist Shahid Suhra w ardy to Bolshevik Moscow in 1917, singer Dilip Roy and dancer Uday Shankar to Paris, and painter Nandalal Bose to Tokyo on foreign study tours and scholarly sojourns from the 1910s to the 1930s. And knowledgeable internationalism made itself known in perhaps its most visually gripping way through cinema. The 1930s films of the Bombay Talkies, a production house that developed out of Ben gali and German collaboration, portrayed modern social dramas within village settings. Bombay Talkies became an institutional irrigator for the fledgling Bollywood film industry as the film house trained a set of important actors, set designers and technicians who went on to consolidate the genres of Bombay cinema in the 1950s. The producer and artistic director behind the production house was Himanshu Rai. Raiwas trained at Tagore’s Viswa Bharati and spent decades abroad on world travel,” is the breathless account in Prof Manjapra’s article. Intellectual swadeshi is also the domain where Satyajit Ray and his generation of film-makers of the 1950s can be mapped.
“Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) roused adulation and controversy at home, while also winning prizes at Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, San Francisco, Tokyo, and elsewhere. Ray, along with artists like Ramkinkar Baij and Benod Bihari Mukherji also came out of the Santiniketan school of Indian knowledgeable internationalism. The productiveness of intellectual swadeshi lay in the insistence that Indians were not only recipients of foreign knowledge, but also creators and authors of knowledge and art forms that carried global significance,” is the critical point made by Prof Manjapra.
There is the model of scientific institutionalisation set by Asutosh Mukherjee, vice chancellor of Calcutta University during 1906-23 which played an equally significant role. Mukherjee insisted that Indians had to be producers of original scientific and humanistic knowledge both for national uplift and for heightened status within international communities of knowledge. His internationalism was not just about getting know-how and technology from overseas, “but about creating the conditions at home that would allow Indians to make fundamental contributions to the world fund of knowledge.” It is no accident that the Asutoshian era of Calcutta University produced one Nobel Prize winner, CV Raman, for his work in spectroscopy, and two more internationally celebrated scientific researchers, Meghnad Saha with his ionisation equation and S N Bose with his quantum statistics.
Not only did Mukherjee institutionalise a new kind of nationalist university from within the existing structure of Calcutta University, but he insisted that a nationalist university had to be primarily a research university ~ it had to cultivate original knowledge of international standing, and it had to enhance and channel the intellectual creativity of the Indian people.” Gurudev Tagore’s 1919 lecture looks squarely at challenges of “bringing about of an intellectual unity in India…I am told, difficult to the verge of impossibility owing to the fact that India has so many different languages. But every people in the world, in order to attain its greatness, must solve some great problem for itself, or accept defeat and degradation.
All true civilizations have been built upon the bedrock of difficulties. Those who have rivers for their water supply are to be envied, but those who have not must dig wells and find water from the difficult depth of their own soil…We must bravely accept the inconvenient fact of the diversity of our languages… India is not like any one of the great countries of Europe, which has its one language, but like Europe herself branching out into different peoples having different languages.
” Gurudev and these streams of intellectual Swadeshi are our heritage which can neither be ignored, belittled nor erased.
(The writer is a researcherauthor on history and heritage issues, and a former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya)