‘Vidya or Shiksha?: Situating Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas of education’ a talk by Dr. Uma Dasgupta at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 7th May 2015

Time : 3:00 pm Add to Calendar 07-05-2015 15:00:00 07-05-2015 16:30:00 68 ‘Vidya or Shiksha?: Situating Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas of education’ a talk by Dr. Uma Dasgupta Event Page : http://www.delhievents.com/2015/05/vidya-or-shiksha-situating-rabindranath.html Seminar Room, 1st Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi - 110011 DD/MM/YYYY

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Venue : Seminar Room, 1st Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi - 110011
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Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Public Lecture (in the ‘Cultures, Traditions and Contemporary Life’ series) on ‘Vidya or Shiksha?: Situating Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas of education’ by Dr. Uma Dasgupta, Historian and Tagore Biographer, Kolkata.

Abstract:
Poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore chose the path of education and rural reconstruction to serve his country. He founded an alternative school in 1901 at Santiniketan in rural southern Bengal that would be rooted in its immediate natural and cultural setting but branching out to the wider world. In the next decade he proceeded to transform Santiniketan into a world university naming it Visva-Bharati, with a motto in Sanskrit, yatra vishvam bhavatyeka nidam, meaning where the world becomes one nest, that suggests a development of intimate relationship between the various cultures of the world. Tagore wrote ‘We do not want school-masters from the West, but fellow-workers in the pursuit of truth. My aspiration for my country is that the mind of India must join its own forces to the great movement of mind which is in the present day world’. In his post-Nobel prize travels he moved, as if, with an invitation letter to the likeminded men and women of the world. Many came to Visva-Bharati in the 1920s and the 1930s, some for life and some for long and short periods. The outcome was a fusion of studies that included Indian and Western traditions, classics and classical thought, courses on China, Japan and the Middle East. The idea was to create space for a realisation of connected history. He hoped that the West would contribute the scientific method to these studies. He also hoped that every day science and up to date scientific agriculture would be brought to the villages that surrounded the Santiniketan school. To include the villagers in the action he founded an institute of rural reconstruction named Sriniketan. Visva-Bharati became a collective of the school, the university and the rural institute. Was this 40-year unique experiment intended to be Siksha or Vidya, as received education and received knowledge, or as an evolving organic movement between the two? Historian Jadunath Sarkar debated the question with Tagore. This talk will draw from that discussion and go on to reflect if Tagore’s educational ideas should not be situated within an altogether different ethos where learning by reasoning in freedom was the central tenet, where education was to foster the creative and the universal, where the school and university were ideationally an integral part of the community within which they were located?

Speaker:
Historian and Tagore biographer Dr. Uma Dasgupta studied History at Presidency College, Calcutta, and did her doctorate in History at Oxford University. She retired as Professor in the Social Sciences Division of the Indian Statistical Institute.

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