The always farcical Fara Daboiwala- a Parsi Leftist- writes of Amartya Sen in the NY Review of books-
In 1901, at the age of forty, the writer Rabindranath Tagore founded a small school at Santiniketan, in a rural part of Bengal about a hundred miles north of Calcutta.
Surely that is true? Tagore was a writer and Santiniketan was a school- right?
The truth is quite different. In 1888, Maharishi Debendranath, head of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, dedicated the entire property of Santinketan, where he had meditated and founded a Brahmo prayer hall, for the establishment of a Brahmavidyalaya- a seminary for Brahmin students- through a trust deed. In 1901, Rabindranath, who would take over as head of the Adi Dharma on the death of his father, the Maharishi, started a Brahmacharyaashrama- a seminary for celibate Brahmin students- there. It should be remembered that the Maharishi had been active in proselytizing in the Hindu cause in Punjab and other Provinces.
Twenty years later he added a university alongside it—Visva-Bharati, whose name joined together the Sanskrit words for world and wisdom
Bharati is another name for Sarasvati- the Goddess of Learning. Bharat means India.
and whose motto was “Where the whole world meets in one nest.” The educational outlook of these joint institutions was boldly experimental.
But the inspiration was the ancient Brahmin Gurukul.
They were coeducational. There was no physical punishment and little formal discipline. Classes were held outside, under the trees. Fine arts, music, sports, and drama were highly regarded, exams and formal results largely disdained. Teachers and students mingled freely outside their lessons.
But teachers and students alike were useful to Tagore who was himself an artist, musician, dramatist and, later, a painter.
The overriding aim was to encourage the students’ imagination and freedom of thought and to inculcate in them an appreciation of the world’s (and India’s) great intellectual and cultural diversity.
Not to mention reverence for 'Gurudeva'- Teacher-God- i.e. Rabindranath, who had inherited the leadership of the Adi Brahmo Samaj.
To this end, the curriculum ranged very widely, not just across the wealth of Indian history, art, and literature but with equal attention to the cultures of the West, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Asia.
Equal attention, obviously, meaning idiosyncratic attention of a type that the big beardie found useful or convenient.
Tagore’s vision reflected his dissatisfaction with conventional schooling
which, sadly, did not focus wholly on extolling Tagore's vision but which concerned itself with irrelevant things like Chemistry and Trigonometry instead.
as well as his cosmopolitan upbringing.
He was brought up to take over the management of Daddy's vast Estates as well as the Religious Cult he had founded.
He had never himself managed to attend any school for very long, either in India or in England, to which he’d traveled as a teenager. In Brighton he soon dropped out of the public school selected for him; in London he spent only a few months as a student at University College London; at Presidency College in Calcutta he lasted an entire day. Instead he’d been educated in Sanskrit, English, music, philosophy, and other subjects mainly by private tutors and his talented elder brothers and sisters, several of whom were noted Bengali authors, composers, patriots, and intellectuals.
This is why he considered himself to be very very smart. Stupid people went to Collidge but Collidge's can't teach you to revere Tagore as thoroughly as Tagore's own Santiniketan.
This bespoke, multicultural education had been possible not just because Tagore was his parents’ fourteenth child, but because he had been born into one of the leading dynasties of Bengal.
A comprador dynasty which got rich first serving the Brits and then squeezing agricultural tenants. Tagore's daddy, however, had set up as the head of a Religious sect. That's the reason Tagore swanned around in mystic robes. It is also why his poetry was a big hit at a time when the Mystic East was marketing itself like nobody's business.
At the end of the seventeenth century, his ancestors had become successful brokers
servants
to the East India Company. As its fortunes rose, so did theirs. By the nineteenth century, they were the Medici of Calcutta.
If the Medici had been slaves- sure.
Rabindranath’s grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore had been a fabulously wealthy merchant, philanthropist, and social reformer who dazzled European society, was entertained by Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, and was eulogized as the greatest Indian of his time.
He had spent his own money lobbying Westminster to lift all curbs on European settlement in India. Why? He said only the Whites could protect Hindus from the rapacious Muslims.
Rabindranath founded his school and university on a large estate that he inherited from his father, but running them was expensive.
We have already seen that this is disingenuous. Rabi did what Daddy told him. He had no independent income. After his father died in 1905 he did try to spread his wings. He sent his son to study agriculture in America with a view to making his Estates more profitable. That didn't work though, later, a Quaker did pretend to run an agricultural research center at Sriniketan.
They were always short of money. Over the remaining forty years of his life, as he crisscrossed every continent, raising funds for them was one of his main preoccupations. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, becoming the first Asian laureate, he used the money to improve facilities at Santiniketan. When the news arrived, it is said, he was stuck in a committee meeting, worrying about how to fund a new sewage system for the school buildings. On reading the telegram from Stockholm, he dryly announced, “Money for the drains has just been found!”
This is pure fiction. There were no drains at Santiniketan. I believe a committee was formed to look into this- but only in 2019.
A genteel enough way to say 'Om Purnamadah Purnamidam' as some at least of Tagore's readers in the West already knew. TS Eliot had studied Sanskrit. Tagore himself translated the 3 Magi to rebuke the younger generation of Bengali poets who were influenced by Pound and Eliot.
The award transformed his life, catapulting him to global fame. The young English poet Wilfred Owen copied Tagore’s poems in a notebook that he carried with him into the trenches of World War I. Bidding farewell to his family for the last time before his fatal return to the battlefield in the summer of 1918, he quoted one of his favorite passages from them: “When I go from hence, let this be my parting word,/That what I have seen is unsurpassable…”
In 1915 Tagore was knighted by the British government.
Kipling declined a Knighthood after he got the Nobel.
Four years later, in protest at the brutal British massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians in Amritsar, he renounced the honor, wishing instead, he said, “to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.”
But he carried on collecting tax for the Brits. Zamindars were actually tax farmers. Tagore's family, lickspittles of the British, had done well out of the Permanent Settlement.
By this time he was already a prominent anti-imperialist and internationalist, a critic of British rule, and a fierce advocate of unity between Hindus and Muslims.
He was the head of a religious sect. As such, he warned Hindus that they must unite or fall prey once more to the predatory Mussulman. On the other hand, he didn't want the Brits to leave because he'd lose his Estates in East Bengal.
Gandhi, his friend, called him the “Great Sentinel” of Indian nationalism.
Though he kept denouncing nationalism.
After the Western adulation came the backlash. Especially after his death in 1941, foreign views of Tagore all too often Orientalized and dismissed him as nothing more than an Eastern sage with a nebulous spiritual message. By the 1960s Bertrand Russell,
who had actually gone to jail during the Great War
despite having met him several times, could recall no more than “mystic views” and “vague nonsense.”
Russell was an atheist. Tagore was the head of a religious sect. Russell too got a Nobel prize for Literature.
But this was an unfair caricature that overlooked Tagore’s lifelong commitment to scientific and technological progress and to reasoned argument as the basis of all knowledge—a rationalist stance that had put him at odds with Gandhi more than once during the 1930s
Both were deeply stupid. Gandhi was more successful at getting money. He gave some to Tagore who was touchingly grateful.
.Some of the central themes of Tagore’s worldview—East and West, household and nation, truth and illusion, religion and nationalism, reason versus tradition, the roles of men and women, freedom of action—can be glimpsed in his great novel Ghare Baire (1916; translated into English in 1919 as The Home and the World).
which ends with Muslims robbing, raping and killing Hindus
They also suffused his educational philosophy, which eschewed textbook learning in favor of an antisectarian,
the fucker was the head of a fucking Sect!
internationalist spirit of free, reasoned inquiry and practical social progress (for example, through the educational uplift of women and of the rural poor, for whom he founded a separate school and clinic on his estate).
This achieved nothing whatsoever. But then plenty of Religions claim to be helping the poor.
“The main object of teaching,” he urged, “is not to explain meanings, but to knock at the door of the mind.”
Rabi didn't know about windows. He thought people had to open a door to see what was outside their home.
To bring this vision to life at Santiniketan,
where his Daddy had forced him to set up a Brahmin school of the traditional type.
he gathered around him a group of equally committed teachers, artists, and social reformers. One of them was Kshiti Mohan Sen, a great liberal scholar of Sanskrit and Pali, Indian history, and folk songs, who joined Santiniketan in 1908 at Tagore’s urging and soon became his close friend and associate.
Kshiti Mohan was born in Benares (where he also did his Sanskrit M.A) and had become close to the various Sadhus from different parts of India there. His first teaching job was in Chamba state in Himachal. There is a theory that baidya Sens are actually Mohyal Brahmins. Thus the Bengali Sens might actually have been warrior Brahmins who were associated with various militarized Sadhu sects.
Sen says that after joining Shantiniketan, he continued to travel widely to collect material from the various Sadhaka lineages. Tagore came to know of this. I suppose Kshiti helped Tagore with his translation of Kabir into English though he is not credited in that book.
Kshiti Mohan, though born into a conservative Hindu family, had become a follower of the ecumenical teachings of the fifteenth-century Indian mystic Kabir,
he was not in that lineage. He continued to hold down a job and lead a householder's life. The problem with becoming a 'follower' of a sadhaka is that it generally means having to give up meat and fish and eggs and tobacco and booze and fuck it just kill me already.
which combined Muslim and Hindu ideas and literary traditions. He was captivated by Sufi poetry and music, learned Persian, and published in Bengali, Hindi, and Gujarati. The idea that India’s cultures, peoples, and religions had throughout their long history always been connected and intertwined to their mutual benefit was as central to his scholarship as to his progressive politics.
But Islam had wholly supplanted Hinduism and Buddhism and Kabirism and so forth in parts of India. Kshiti came from East Bengal. There were some progressive Hindus who were retarded enough to remain in East Bengal in the belief that Socialism would make all men brothers. They were killed or ran away.
His wife, Kiranbala Sen (a common surname in Bengal), was an accomplished painter and midwife. Their daughter Amita attended Santiniketan, learned judo alongside the boys, and went on to play the lead in Calcutta in several of Tagore’s celebrated dance dramas, at a time when it was still highly controversial for women of her class to appear onstage.
Shantiniketan provided Tagore with a cheap source of child labor. Cool.
When Amita’s marriage was arranged,
Arranged? How very un-progressive!
she moved to Dhaka, in eastern Bengal, where the family of her husband, Ashutosh Sen, were from, and where he was a professor of chemistry at the university.
His PhD was in Soil Science from the UK. He rose high in Government service- as had his father a District Judge.
But in 1933, following Bengali custom, she came back home to Santiniketan to give birth to her first child. Her mother helped deliver the baby. Ever the creative, progressive spirit, Tagore urged his friends to eschew a traditional name for the infant boy and coined a new one, playing on a Sanskrit word for death: “Amartya,” meaning immortal.
To Hindus, this suggests परा गावो यवसं कच्चिदाघृणे नित्यं रेक्णो अमर्त्य - a Rg Vedic formula asking God to protect one's wealth. Tagore was after all a landlord. One of his nephews had turned Commie by then.
Some children might find it hard to live up to such portentous billing.
Kids in India tend to be given nice names like 'immortal one' rather than shitty names like 'will probably die of syphilis'.
But it turned out to be an apt name, in more than one sense.
The fucker isn't yet dead.
Amartya Sen is now almost ninety and one of the most celebrated and influential thinkers of our time.
Because he is brown.
As a Nobel Prize–winning economist and pathbreaking moral philosopher, his scholarship has had a global influence on how academics and policymakers conceive of and address an entire range of fundamental problems, including the cause and prevention of famines, human well-being and development, poverty, welfare, social choice, the status of women, and definitions of justice.
They now understand that this shite is meaningless. Just do what the smart countries are doing. That means ignore Sen-tentious shitheads. Give them prizes for being brown but don't listen to those monkeys.
He has also always been an elegant and productive public writer and intellectual. Thirty-five years ago, in these pages, an admiring English colleague noted that Sen was “remarkably prolific and seems to have sped up at just the age when other people begin to relax.”
He is recycling his own shite like there's no tomorrow- which there won't be, for him. quite soon.
Meanwhile, like Tagore, Sen could be said to have tried to protect property while pretending to be a thinker or a teacher or some such shite.
Fara says-
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