SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Report from Shantiniketan:

17 March 2002

We boarded the Shantiniketan Express train from Howrah station in Kolkata at 10 A.M. and arrived at Bolpur 2,5 hours later, where we were met at the station by Professor Amit Hazra, from the Dept for Rural Development at Vishwa Bharati University, Shantiniketan.
After getting accommodated at Bolpur Lodge Professor Hazra arranged for a tour to Sriniketan, neighbouring Shantiniketan, and a meeting with the faculty at his department.
As Sundays are not holidays at Shantiniketan we were able to visit the departments there with all its staff and students working as ususal. (In Shantiniketan Wednesdays are, since Rabindranath Tagore´s time, the weekly holiday).

Meeting with the teaching faculty at the Agro-Economic Research Centre at Sriniketan, Vishwa Bharati University

Present at the meeting:
Dr Surendranath Chatterjee, Reader, Geography, and Head of the Department
Dr Ashim Kumar Adhikary, Professor, Social Anthropology
Dr S Anantharam, Professor, Demography
Dr Onkar Prasad, Professor, Rural Sociology
Dr Amit Kumar Hazra, Professor, Agricultural Economics and Rural Development
Dr M Alankara Masillamani, Lecturer in Rural Development, Environment and Energy Studies
Dr Kakali Nitracpal, PhD, Social Anthropology, Tribal Anthropology

The Agro-Economic Research Centre is a multi-disciplinary department at Sriniketan, the experimental farm near to Shantiniketan, where Rabindranath Tagore´s ideas on rural reconstruction were first implemented by his agronomist son Rathindranath and the British agronomist Leonard Elmhirst in 1921-22. It is now a teaching-cum-research institution, with attached vocational training schools for different handicrafts such as pottery, and textile production – which we were able to have a look at in the afternoon, after the meting with the faculty.

Two Masters courses are offered at the centre, one in Rural Development, and the other in Anthropology. At present 50 students are studying for Masters degree, even though the maximum intake is supposed to be 60. The students are selected through admision tests and come from a wide range of different disciplines – excluding languages (Bengali and English). The staff consists of 10 professors and lecturers. During the courses students are requested to perform 1–2 months of practical training. This can be done through work with a NGO, or in the case of anthropologists, staying in a village.
Additionally there are 20 PhD candidates, coming from universities all over India. Some PhD candidates have also come from abroad, from e g the US, Bangladesh and Japan.

What differentiates the courses at Sriniketan from other Rural development courses at Indian universities, is:

• The explicit emphasis on multi-disciplinarity. The faculty here consists of professors of Anthropology, Demography, Statistics, Rural Development, Sociology and Social Anthropology, and they work in close co-operation in the courses.
• The fact that the department is located not in a big city but in the heart of a rural area makes the connection between the studies and the object for the studies close.
• The basic ideas of Rabindranath Tagore which permeates the centre, namely that you should not try to help people simply by giving money but instead teach them how to generate money themselves, and the need not to impose programmes from above but rather try to create understanding. In order for a programme to be successful the people must learn to assimilate new ideas, which makes the role of the anthropologist important.

After the meeting profesor Hazra took us by car to Amar Kutir, an establihment by the river Kopai near Shantiniketan. This place was created by Tagore as a “commune” or ashram for political victims released from the colonial British jails in 1922. After Independence in 1947 Amir Kutir was transformed into an institution for revival of village arts and crafts, and a society was fomed in 1978, “Amar Kutir Society for Rural Development”.
Several hundred people now depend on craftswork being done here, in the form of leatherworks, batik, weaving, etc. The place has furthermore become a major tourist attraction for middleclass Indian tourists who come here to do shopping in the crafts shop while visiting Shantiniketan.

18 March 2002

Professor Hazra arranged a tour for us around the campus of Shantiniketan and the Vishwa Bharati University, where we had the opportunity to see the famous buildings connected with the creator of the school and university, Rabindranath Tagore. The poet´s living quarters are now turned into a museum, whereas the school buildings are still in use, as are the student hostels and teachers villas.
Tagore founded his school at Shantiniketan in 1901, and the University was started in 1921. From the beginning the university had three faculties, namely the faculties for Art; Music; and Indology (including the study of Chinese and Japanese). After 1947 the Vishwa Bharati University was taken over by the Indian central government, and since then the Chancellor of the university has always been the Prime minister of India. Indira Gandhi had a special relation to the place, as she actually was an ex-student. At present Vajpayee is the Chancellor.
In recent years other faculties have been added, e g Social sciences, but still the focus at Shantiniketan is put on the arts, the music and the indological studies. These are areas in which there is a good scope for student exchange with Sweden, and some Swedish students have already spent several years at Shantiniketan.

We also visited the Department for Fine Arts, which includes painting, art history, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, etc. The buildings are beautifully decorated with paintings and terracotta sculptures, some of them created by the founding father of the department, Nandalal Bose.
There we met:
Prabhir Biswas, Professor, Design, textiles and ceramics
Shiva Kumar, Professor, History of Art
Shushen Ghosh, Principal of the faculty, sculptor

We discussed the history of the department and its present status. It turns out that the infrastructure is very limited, the library is not what it used to be in the old days, and Internet connections are not existent in the department. This could be an inhibiting factor for Swedish students/researchers who might otherwise be interested in Shantiniketan.
Still there are contacts with Sweden, some of which we already knew about, some of which came as news to us.

Hans Hadders, who now teaches Social Anthropology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, was a student at Shantiniketan in the 1980´s, where he learnt to play the sitar for four years. Prof Kumar still remembered Hans.
Another Swedish connection is a recent visit by Swedish weavers (from Hemslöjden), who visited Shantiniketan in February this year.
Finally Prof Ghosh told us that just a week before his cousin, who lives in Sweden, had come to visit him at Shantiniketan. This person turned out be Mr Gajendra Ghose, the editor of the Swedish Bengali-language magazine Uttårapath, published from Göteborg. He is most well-known to us, since Lars was awarded his magazine´s award in 1988, for his work with the magazine SYDASIEN!

On the way back from the campus area to our hotel by chance we met Mr Santosankar Dasgupta, who happens to be in charge of the Internet web site of Shantiniketan. The web page is located at http://www.visva-bharati.ac.in/.

Lars Eklund