It’s a tragedy that the great international institution christened Visva-Bharati (India-World) University in which literature Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore invested the “cargo of my life’s best treasure” and which he gifted to India, has been reduced to the status of a provincial university. Reports Gargi Banerjee with Dilip Thakore The recently-concluded year 2013, especially November 14, was a landmark date for the Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan (VBU, estb. 1921) which sprawls across 1,127 acres in the Bolpur municipality of Birbhum district (West Bengal), 180 km by road from the colonial metropolis of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). In the leafy groves of VBU, the university’s 8,000 students, 604 faculty and residents of the town of Santiniketan (pop.300,000) staged year-long celebrations to mark the centenary of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1913 awarded to VBU’s legendary founder — poet, essayist, painter and educator Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) — the first Asian and (non-European) to receive the Nobel for his anthology of poems titled Gitanjali: Song of Offerings. Translated from Bengali into English by Tagore himself in 1912, it was published with some help from the legendary Irish poet William Butler Yeats later that year. Describing his poetry as “truly universally human in character” in the following year, the Nobel jury conferred its highest prize to Tagore “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. Invested with the poet’s lofty philosophy, embracing humanism and brilliant English language vocabulary, Gitanjali took Europe by storm. Ten editions were published in six months and Rabindranath Tagore was transformed into a global icon. Although President Pranab Mukherjee, while on his first visit to his hometown of Mirati in Birbhum district after his unexpected elevation to Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi in 2012, formally inaugurated VBU’s celebrations in Santiniketan on December 18, 2012 by releasing a special centenary edition of Gitanjali, curiously the year-long commemoration remained a local festival featuring a series of cultural programmes and lectures organised by various faculties of VBU. Among the notable events staged on the VBU campus as a tribute to its multi-skilled and visionary founder were the publication of a biography of his son Rathindranath and an international seminar titled ‘Tagore Across Cultures: The Nobel Prize and Beyond’ addressed by Tan Chung, an authority on Sino-India relations (VBU started a faculty of Chinese studies in 1937) and Janus Martony, Hungary’s foreign minister. But surprisingly — indeed shockingly — beyond Santiniketan, this noteworthy event aroused minimal interest in the rest of the country, and even in neighbouring Kolkata media coverage of the year-long fest was at best cursory. The sad truth is that Visva-Bharati, the great international institution in which this visionary savant and towering intellectual of the 20th century invested the “cargo of my life’s best treasure”, and which he gifted to the about-to-be-born nation in his last meeting with Mahatma Gandhi at Santiniketan on March 2, 1940 expressing the…
