A renowned scholar who has devoted her life to studying the writings and thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore, Uma Das Gupta has a formidable body of work to her credit. Her major publications include Rabindranath Tagore: My Life in My Words; Friendships of ‘Largeness and Freedom’: Andrews, Tagore, and Gandhi, An Epistolary Account, 1912–1940; A Difficult Friendship: Letters of Edward Thompson and Tagore 1913–1940; and recently, A History of Sriniketan: Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering Work in Rural Reconstruction. Her latest book documents Tagore’s role in the creation and evolution of Santiniketan, drawing on Das Gupta’s decades of involvement with both the institution and Tagore’s work

The land in Bolpur, where Santiniketan is located, was originally acquired by Tagore’s father, Debendranath Tagore, as a spiritual retreat. Aghornath Chattopadhyay, an educationist and social reformer who moved to Santiniketan in 1888 with the aim of promoting the principles of the Brahmo Samaj, initially oversaw the institution. Tagore moved to Santiniketan in 1901, with about 10 boys as his students. In contrast to Aghornath’s orthodox outlook, Tagore felt that a brahmacharya ashram (hermitage for celibate students) was not aligned with his idea of a modern educational experiment at Santiniketan.

Tagore’s work at Santiniketan, which he began in 1901 as part of his “experiment”, can also be seen in parallel with his writings collected in Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (1913). In his introduction to Sadhana, Tagore notes that the essays were “culled from several of the Bengali discourses which I am in the habit of giving to my students in my school at Bolpur in Bengal”. 

Sadhana provides an insight into and reflects aspects of his work in Santiniketan, a place that attracted individuals from diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and regions of the world. The chapters of Sadhana—with titles such as “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe”, “Soul Consciousness”, “The Problem of Evil”, “The Problem of Self”, “Realisation in Love”, “Realisation in Action”, “The Realisation of Beauty”, and “The Realisation of the Infinite”—closely reflect themes central to the work carried out at Santiniketan. In many ways, Sadhana can be considered Tagore’s philosophical manifesto for Santiniketan.

Das Gupta’s book is distinguished by more than its detailed historical account of Santiniketan. It includes original photographs, archival material, and references to interviews with individuals associated with its history. The chapters trace the evolution of Tagore’s thinking and the shaping of Santiniketan as a centre of world learning intended not only for India but for the wider world. The opening chapter covers the pre-Santiniketan period circa 1863, when the land was acquired by Debendranath Tagore with the intention of establishing an ashram. The second chapter examines its early growth and development after it became the Santiniketan School in 1901.

‘India’s guest house for the world’

From this school emerged Visva-Bharati, a “centre for the meeting of East and West”, which it truly became during Tagore’s time. Das Gupta records how, in the 1920s and 1930s, Santiniketan became “India’s guest house for the world”. Tagore travelled to 30 countries across 5 continents between 1912 and 1932, advocating for international cooperation. She notes that wherever he went and invited men and women to Santiniketan, they responded with a sense of affinity for his idea of international cooperation: “He invited artists, craftsmen, musicians, scholars, economists, ethnologists, malariologists, agricultural scientists, even dislodged Jewish intellectuals.” It was not just a meeting place for intellectuals but a community of diverse thinkers and creative practitioners from different parts of the world, who together contributed to the making of a unique space of creativity and intellectual exchange.

Das Gupta points out: “Connecting with the world was one aspect of the Santiniketan ideal from its very inception. There was also the other ideal of ‘total activity’ to learn about life in all its variety”. In line with this, after the establishment of Santiniketan School came the creation of the art and music schools, Kala Bhavana and Sangit Bhavana.

In the early years, dance could not be formally taught at Santiniketan owing to the prevailing prejudice that girls should not perform in public. As a result, instruction initially focussed on the theory and philosophy of dance from the Natyasastra. Three dance forms were represented in these explorations: Bharatanatyam, Manipuri, and Kathakali. As such prejudices gradually diminished, more girl students began to enrol at Sangit Bhavana to learn dancing and contribute to the emergence of a distinctive Santiniketan style of dance and drama. The book includes many lovely nuggets of detail about the development of Sangit Bhavana that bring the history of this unique institution to life.

Art could not be separated from aesthetics, given Tagore’s reflections on public art and his strong concerns about the lack of aesthetic sensibility in India, particularly in public spaces. During his travels in South-East Asia, he observed and often contrasted the integration of art and aesthetics in those societies with conditions in India, especially the careful attention given to the design and upkeep of their public spaces.

It is therefore unsurprising that this scholarly history of Santiniketan includes a chapter aptly titled “Public Art and Architecture: A Transformation in Taste”. This chapter offers a careful account of Tagore’s ideas on art and public spaces, as presented by Das Gupta. The discussion on Tagore here recalls the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s study Young Tagore: The Makings of a Genius, which presents a nuanced account of Tagore’s early intellectual development.

Tagore frequently spoke and wrote about “creative unity”, a philosophical concept that runs through much of his work and is also the title of a collection of his essays. These essays reflect his ideas on the development and self-realisation of the individual. Santiniketan and the activities that took place there can be understood as a practical expression of “creative unity”, rather than as its literal or direct embodiment.

Tagore’s idea of ‘creative unity’

Nature occupies a central place in Tagore’s thinking on “creative unity”. In examining his conception of nature, we can also consider the broader epistemological questions his work raises, although he is not formally credited with a distinct theory of knowledge despite his undisputed standing as a philosopher. “Creative unity” thus reflects important aspects of philosophical outlook. Santiniketan encapsulated his outlook in institutional form. The educational activities at Santiniketan represent the material expression of these ideas in practice. Many of the outcomes, as Das Gupta notes, remain visible even today.

Amartya Sen, who has written extensively on Tagore and analysed his writings from multiple perspectives, refers to “the organising principles that moved Tagore”. He argues that “the poet who was famous in the West only as a romantic and a spiritualist was in fact persistently guided in his writings by the necessity of critical reasoning and the importance of human freedom. Also, those were the philosophical priorities that influenced Tagore’s ideas on education, including his insistence that education is the most important element in the development of a country.”

Writing about Kala Bhavana, Das Gupta describes how this educational approach was expressed through creative practice: “The teachers and students together learned and practised various decorative arts and crafts, such as alpona, lacquer work, calico painting, batik, stage décor, book-binding and illumination. These activities were incorporated into the Santiniketan way of life and contributed wholesomely to its performances, its ceremonies and seasonal festivals. There was this remarkable breakthrough in the age-old hierarchy between the fine arts and the crafts that had been a long-standing obstacle in energising and visualising Indian art.”

In this context, she also points out that “the direction that Nandalal [Bose] took for Kala Bhavana was a synthesis of East and West in keeping with the Santiniketan vision”. She further observes that Santiniketan’s art ideology was “also inspired by a turn of the century discourse led by Okakura Kakuzo and a group of radical thinkers from Asia and Europe under the banner of ‘Pan Asianism’ that questioned Western hegemony”. Significantly, Das Gupta draws on the art historian Partha Mitter’s observation that Okakura’s Pan-Asian artistic ideas were grounded in three principles—nature, tradition and creativity—that found resonance with Tagore’s own thinking around 1905.

Alongside this vibrant creative activity of art, music, dance, and aesthetics, research was also developed through three institutions: Vidya Bhavana, Cheena Bhavana, and Hindi Bhavana. As the freedom struggle unfolded, Santiniketan remained largely removed from the day-to-day political conflicts taking place across India.

At the same time, both Tagore and Santiniketan offered a broader understanding of “selfhood”, suggesting that it was shaped not only through political freedom but also through cultural self-understanding. This included a renewed engagement with India’s diverse knowledge traditions, as well as its artistic, aesthetic, cultural, and natural heritage.

What Tagore bequeathed to us through Santiniketan, and what is captured so beautifully in this history of one of the world’s most unique institutions, is not just a space of learning and education. Santiniketan may be seen as an enduring intellectual inheritance, a framework for thinking about a form of cosmopolitanism rooted in India’s experience yet open to the wider world. This was a cosmopolitanism that was both practised and lived in Santiniketan and one that continues to invite reflection today.

In contemporary times, when discussions of identity and nationhood are often marked by tension and contestation, such a perspective gains renewed relevance. Debates around cultural and historical interpretation sometimes become polarised, reflecting broader anxieties about identity and belonging. However, Santiniketan’s legacy is best understood less in terms of opposition and more in terms of dialogue, openness, and cultural exchange.

Reading Uma Das Gupta’s carefully researched study A History of Santiniketan allows us not only to revisit the history that Tagore created there but also to reflect on it in an age of febrile nationalism, war, and communal hatred. At a time when questions of global citizenship and cultural openness are often viewed with caution, the Santiniketan experience offers an alternative way of thinking about cultural identity and international engagement.

This history, along with Tagore’s broader contributions as a thinker on nature, education, and culture, is an opportunity to reconsider how we understand collective self-image in a changing world. It invites reflection on how ideas of cultural rootedness and cosmopolitan engagement might coexist, whether in rural or urban contexts. Scholarly works such as Das Gupta’s help to deepen our understanding of Tagore’s intellectual legacy and its continuing relevance, particularly in relation to debates about heritage, history, and cultural interpretation. 

Lawrence Surendra is a specialist on the Asian region and a Tagore aficionado. He writes and speaks on Tagore from the perspective of Asia and the Non-West, especially to younger audiences, as a way of providing them hope in the future that Tagore and his work provides us abundantly.

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