The first Indian to gain professional qualifications in Agricultural science was Dwijendralal Ray who received a scholarship to study at the Royal College in Cirencester in the Eighteen Eighties. On return to India he was employed by the Government as a Deputy Magistrate rising to the rank of Commissioner of Excise. He is remembered as a patriotic poet, song-writer (Dwijendra Geeti) & playwright of genius. Sadly, his relations with Tagore became strained but his son was able to get close to Gurudeva after his father passed away.
Tagore, whose brother had been an ICS officer, was a landlord who understood that raising agricultural productivity would benefit both the agriculturist as well as the artisan, the merchant and, most importantly, the zamindar.
He may also have been aware that the famous Dacca Muslin had been made from a strain of cotton which had been wiped out by a plant disease. Perhaps scientific experimentation could create a robust variety of cotton which could be used for, high thread count, hand-weaving for the luxury market. The Bengali village needed to grow more food but it also needed higher value adding cash crops so as to gain resources for investment in infrastructure, education, etc.
Sadly, Tagore failed in his attempt to emulate the work being done at the new Agricultural Institute in Pusa by Sir Albert Howard & his wife. Howard praised traditional Indian farming practices & is considered a pioneer of organic farming. Tagore's intention was good but his resources were inadequate and the approach was impractical. This was partly because Tagore had experience of supervising his estates in the East where water was abundant. Shantiniketan was in a relatively arid region in the West. The other problem was that it was difficult to bring and retain properly qualified people to a remote rural place. Only if a profit could be turned on their work could the project be sustainable. Though the Tagore family owned vast estates, they were not flush with funds.
It must be said, American money & expertise could boost agricultural productivity in India. An example is the Etawah project of the Nineteen Fifties. With hindsight, we see that what really mattered was introducing a higher yielding crop strain. 'Village regeneration' was merely palliative- and dependent on increasing subventions of external aid & expertise- if productivity remained stagnant.
Recently, Scroll.in published the following
When Rabindranath Tagore sent 3 men to study agriculture in US so they can build Sriniketan
Tagore's Santiniketan school could not prepare students to an adequate level to get into Calcutta Uni- let alone a British Institution. His initial idea was that they might be able to gain vocational training in engineering in Japan but that was hard work. Thus, his son, son-in-law & the son of a 'Dipty' who had come under his wing were sent to the University of Illinois- a land grant institution with a large number of Chinese students- to study agriculture. This was a mistake. Illinois specialised in corn & dairy under conditions obtaining in the American mid-West. Bengal has a very different climate and soil. I suppose, one could say Cornell would have been a better choice because it put more emphasis on pure science. Still, at the time, the firs step would be to take a degree in Chemistry & then specialise in Soil Science.
The Pusa Agricultural Research Institute had been started in 1905. Its first head was an indigo planter who was part of the Indigo Improvement Syndicate which hired Chemists. I should mention, a first degree in Chemistry would be useful in getting a Government job or, indeed, in setting up a profitable enterprise. The great PC Ray- who had received his Doctorate in Chemistry from Edinburgh during the 1880s- had successfully established a business enterprise. He was very active in the Congress movement.
The three lads Tagore sent to Illinois did return to India to take up agricultural work but soon got malaria or otherwise failed to do anything useful. Tagore tried to get his son-in-law a Government job with the Agriculture Dept. at a time when he was close to the Governor. But the lad simply wasn't qualified to do anything useful. The son of the Dipty had to be employed at Shantiniketan where he used to dance & sing very nicely till he died in 1926.
Tagore later brought in Elmhirst, who had studied at Cornell, to take charge of Sriniketan. Since Elmhirst had married an American heiress, he could afford to subsidize that shite.
In ‘History of Sriniketan’, Uma Das Gupta writes about Tagore’s rural reconstruction project,
which failed
where scientists,
some scientists- e.g. Bose of Boson fame- but these were guys who knew shit about farming
economists, sociologists
Mahalanobis? Good at Stats and highly cultured. At a later point, he suggested a new method of sampling to establish better harvest forecasts.
and technicians came together with villagers to build Sriniketan.
It did introduce some new vegetable crops & encouraged cottage industries. But it didn't and couldn't do what Pusa was doing viz. introducing new higher yield or more robust crop strains (e.g. Pusa wheat) which is what actually lifts up the agricultural sector.
In India there are specialist castes of market gardeners- e.g. 'Phules' of Maharashtra- & dairy men etc. A landlord can bring them in and help them get established. Once they have succeeded in raising yields, all the farmers in the area learn the technique. The specialists can then sell up at a profit and move elsewhere. Why did Tagore not adopt this method? The answer was that his family were newcomers and had bought some land from the local landlords. Also, Tagore was not money minded. Shantiniketan had been chosen by his father, the Maharishi, as a place of spirituality- not a source of profit.
Uma Das Gupta
'Please take it seriously when I say that my whole heart is with you in the great work you have started.
Tagore is saying this to Elmhirst whom he invited to India in 1920. This suggests that his son & son-in-law hadn't achieved shit. To be fair, Tagore was seeking to create a cosmopolitan ambience in Shantiniketan. There can be no doubt that foreigners who came to Shantiniketan were gifted and idealistic people who achieved much in their lives.
I wish I were young enough to be able to join you and perform the meanest work that can be done in your place, thus getting rid of the filmy web of respectability that shuts me off from intimate contact with Mother Dust. It is something unclean like prudery itself to have a sweeper to serve that deity who is in charge of the primal cradle of life.'
I want nice White dude to sweep my primal cradle of life. Also, kindly wipe my bum.
Rabindranath sent the above note to the Sriniketan pioneer L.K. Elmhirst on 31 March 1922, when he learned that the first batch of Surul students had dug trenches in their own backgardens to dump the night soil to help in the improvement of agriculture.
Bengalis think their faeces are a contribution to science.
Rabindranath very eagerly looked forward to the day when his village work would benefit from the contributions of modern science.
Nitrogenous fertilizers? Superphosphates had been used in India from around 1906. In the Thirties, ammonium sulphate- as a byproduct of steel plants- became available. Meanwhile, Sriniketan students were concentrating on shitting copiously so as to improve agriculture. It must be said, there were worse things they could have been getting up to. That was the whole point of Shantiniketan. It was far away from the flesh-pots of Calcutta. If your son is a thicko, send him there. He will learn to climb trees & sing nice songs rather than fuck syphilitic whores.
In as early as 1906, he sponsored three young men from Santiniketan to study agriculture and dairy farming at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the USA.
Which was fine if you were going to be a corn or dairy farmer in the Mid-West.
They were his son Rathi, his son-in-law Nagendranath Ganguli (1889–1958, married to Rabindranath’s youngest daughter Mira Devi), and his friend Srishchandra Majumdar’s son, Santosh Chandra Majumdar (1886–1926, student of the Santiniketan school, and afterwards, teacher too).
They may have been stupid but could have eaten their dinners and become British barristers easily enough. That way they'd have been able at least some money on their own.
The plan was that at the end of their higher studies in agricultural sciences, they would bring their newly acquired knowledge to the work of rural reconstruction in India.
The plan was that they would acquire useful education and be able to support themselves. India is an agricultural country. If you can raise the output of a farm or a herd of dairy cattle, you can earn well as a consultant.
Rabindranath felt sure from his observation of other agricultural countries that the economic salvation of the village lay in the application of expertise.
Why not help the sons of local farmers get that expertise? Buy them a train ticket to where a better technique was being implemented. They would earn their own keep and return home able and willing to spread the new technique purely by the 'demonstration effect'- i.e. by setting an example others could emulate. Tagore was doing the opposite. His mistake was to bring in an Englishman who was trained at Cornel rather than a nice Eskimo lady who had studied arctic fishing under erudite Polar Bears.
In 1909, all the three graduates from the University of Illinois returned with their state-of-the-art training in agriculture and animal husbandry and began to introduce scientific methods to the Sriniketan work. Their experiments were carried out jointly with the villagers.
Why did they fail? Malaria? That was part of it. I believe they did buy a tractor or something of that sort. But they couldn't raise productivity. Thus their 'work' didn't pay for itself. Tagore hoped the Government would employ his useless son-in-law.
To take the work forward, Rabindranath bought 20 bighas of land in 1912,
six or seven acres.
along with a house that stood on that plot of land just outside the village called Surul, within two miles west of Santiniketan, where the Sriniketan Institute was to be located. The house that stood on the land was commonly known as ‘Cheap Kuthi’. It belonged to the East India Company’s Commercial Resident for the District of Birbhum, John Cheap, who lived in it from 1787 to 1828. His job was to indent the local supply of cotton and silk fabrics on the Company’s account with an annual investment quota of 45,000 to 65,000 in Pounds Sterling. Silk and cotton fabrics comprised the major portion of the East India Company’s advances. The weavers used to work on a system of ‘advances’, all of which was handled by the Company’s Commercial Resident.
There was scope for the development of cottage industries & Sriniketan did in fact encourage some leather-work etc.
As Commercial Resident, the punctual supply of the Company’s requirements was the main job. For that, good cooperation was needed from the local agents. Mr Cheap found Surul and its neighbourhood not only rich in raw materials, but he also found a friend and ally in an influential landlord cum businessman of Surul, Sri Srinivas Sarkar. It was from the Sarkars that John Cheap obtained a vast tract of land, on which he built his palatial house surrounded by a garden and an orchard. It was an impressively large house, but fallen into ruin by the time Rabindranath bought the property. The fact that John Cheap was posted at the place by the East India Company was proof of the earlier prosperity of the region.
Sadly, fossil fuelled steam power was displacing human sweat. Bengal had coal. Tagore's grandfather had invested in coal mines which had first appeared before he was born.
John Cheap encouraged spinning and weaving in the villages around.
How? By paying a decent enough price for good quality stuff. I have personally encouraged pizza production in Fulham by buying pizza of good quality and an affordable price.
He collected his produce, as well as the other goods for sale, through a network of huge clearing stations. It is believed that his enterprise brought the whole area to a level of prosperity, which was seen in a sprouting of ‘pukka’ buildings, houses, and temples.
But did he dig a trench in his garden and fill it with his own shit? No! Thus he didn't improve agriculture at all.
Machine-spun cloth with identical patterns, copied from Cheap’s exported goods, began to reach the Port of Calcutta at cut rates.
This was because Machines in England were very racist and cruel. Charles Dickens once overheard a power-loom say to another power-loom 'Let's fuck over Bengali weavers by copying their patterns & selling cloth to them at a big financial loss to ourselves'. The other power-loom replied 'Great idea! Let us also make Bengali buddhijivis as stupid as shit'. Sadly, there was and is no need for Machines or AI or anything else to do any such thing.
But the inevitable outcome was that Birbhum’s hand-woven cloths were thrown out of the market.
Birbhum preferred to clothe itself more cheaply in stuff produced using fossil fuel, not muscle, power.
As a result, the villages were ultimately reduced to poverty
because Machines in a faraway country were RACIST
and infested with the diseases of cholera and malaria.
Why did those Machines not eradicate cholera and malaria instead of producing cheap cloth?
This was also the time when the district was getting its first railway line.
How sad! District should have been getting its first Yogic Levitation line.
The massive digging undertaken by the East India Railways in laying the Bolpur Line had an adverse impact on the environment and the people’s health.
You should only dig a trench for your own shit. Can steam locomotives shit? No! Thus you should not dig trenches for them
For the first few years of the Sriniketan work, nothing substantial could be done with that plot of land except to clear the jungles surrounding the area of ‘Cheap Kuthi’ and to meet the villagers.
I suppose it would take a few years to clear six acres of land if you keep digging and shitting to improve agriculture.
A scheme was also started to make the Surul farm into a model for the benefit of the cultivators living in the surrounding villages. This holistic task was led by Rathi Babu and Nagendranath Ganguli, who, armed as it were, with their study and training at the University of Illinois were ready to make an impact on rural reconstruction. But nothing came of those early attempts to start the work in earnest, because all the workers came down with malaria. That is how the initial 10 years were spent like a roller coaster with starting the work and stopping it at intervals.
So, Indian graduates from Illinois are useless. Elmhirst, being British, is not useless even though he too studied in America.
In 1921, Rabindranath travelled widely to
get money for his money-pit Skool.
inform the larger humanity about his Visva-Bharati International University at Santiniketan, a ‘place’ for the world to meet as in a single ‘nest’.
of stupidity
When he was in the USA, he arranged to meet a young Englishman who was then a student of agriculture at Cornell University.
i.e. as stupid as shit. To be fair, the dude had been to Cambridge
This was L.K. Elmhirst (1893–1974, agricultural economist, led the Sriniketan work during 1922–24, and later gave it his lifelong support). Rabindranath had been told about Elmhirst by another Englishman, Sam Higginbottom (1874–1958)
a Missionary who claimed to be helping Indian farmers. Allen Dulles (future head of the CIA) spent his gap year in India teaching Shakespeare to farmers. He didn't understand how this would raise agricultural productivity. Elmhirst came under Higginbotham's wing when he was deemed unfit for the Army & spent some time volunteering for the YMCA in India. My point is that all sorts of people were pretending to help the poor starving masses. Some- who introduced a new seed variety- e.g. Himachal's 'Johnny Appleseed' Samuel Stokes- succeeded. Tagore did not.
, who founded the Nainital Agricultural Institute, where Elmhirst had worked for some months as a wartime volunteer in 1917–18. Rabindranath appealed to Elmhirst to come over and start the Surul Farm.
Indians are useless. Bring in a Britisher if you want to get things done.
About their meeting Elmhirst wrote:
I remember well the morning in the spring of 1921 when a telegram reached me at Ithaca, from Tagore, which read ‘Come and see me in New York. I made a hurried journey to New York, and shall never forget the friendly welcome I received.
Why was Tagore so desperate to recruit a Britisher at precisely that time? The University of Dhaka was established on July 1, 1921on the basis of a statute promulgated in March 1920,
Tagore's Vishva Bharati declared itself a University at the same time but it was only in 1951 that it was officially recognised as a degree awarding Institution.
‘I have’, Tagore said to me, ‘an institution of learning and the arts at Santiniketan which is mainly academic.
It really wasn't. That is why it could not become a College under the University of Calcutta. Krishna Chandra College (K.C. College) in Hetampur (about 30 km from Shantiniketan) is generally considered the first college in the Birbhum district to receive affiliation from the University of Calcutta, obtaining approval to teach arts courses in 1896. If you were too stupid to study there, you could go to Tagore's skool for wealthy thickos (the fees were high).
It is surrounded by villages, some Hindu, some Muslim, some Santal,
the Santals had only come in about a century ago because of a famine.
but all are decaying;
not as noxiously as Tagore's own tax-farmer class
all had an ancient culture,
The Tagores did. It was called 'Sanatan Dharma'. They turned their backs on it.
but today they appear sick. Will you come and help me to find out why?
Are you stupid enough to think that you know about India than Indians- more particularly those who didn't study low IQ shite at Collidge?
Would you be prepared to go and live in a village? Would you like to consider it? Then how about sailing back with me tomorrow?’
‘But’, said I, ‘if I am really to be of any use to you, I must finish my course at Cornell’.
The odd thing is that the son-in-law of Tagore's colleague, K.M Sen, had got a PhD in soil science from London. Pabitra Kumar Sen was another PhD scholar who returned to India in the Twenties. He did visit Shantiniketan in the forties but, as far as I can tell, Sriniketan achieved nothing commensurate with the talent pool it could draw on. To be fair, the Imperial Institute had the resources and the prestige. Sriniketan was just window dressing for a rich-man's Arts college for thickos.
Elmhirst came to work for Sriniketan after completing his course of studies at Cornell. He came to Santiniketan at the end of 1921 and started the rural work in 1922, by moving to Surul with a team of two teachers and 10 senior students from the Santiniketan school. In the team were Rathi Babu, Santosh Majumdar, and Kalimohan Ghose, whom Elmhirst referred to as his ‘three closest collaborators’. Another resource person who joined them soon after was from the USA, a paramedical nurse, who was asked to set up the Village Health Centre and Clinic at Surul.
She was first sent to the UK for training as a midwife. She is credited as the first person to make a film about Shantiniketan. She travelled widely and wrote a book about her experiences.
It was not easy at first for the Santiniketan-Sriniketan team to start their work as
they knew were either foreigners or urban, upper class, Indians with little knowledge of rural conditions.
there was an ongoing political movement at the time. Gandhi’s Non-cooperation Movement had touched many hearts, even in Santiniketan. The political ferment also affected the team’s relationship with the villagers to some extent. Elmhirst wrote in his diary how Rabindranath used to discuss their local problems and experiences regularly and consulted, in particular, with Kalimohan Ghose, as he was the Sriniketan contact person with the local villagers. Moreover, the villagers trusted Kalimohan Ghose
A teacher at Shantiniketan whom Tagore had sent to England to learn modern educational techniques. He came from Tripura and was of a less affluent background.
Initially, the team took up reconstruction work in the three designated villages in Surul’s neighbourhood. The records in Elmhirst’s diary refer to the desperate struggle they had in making the initial contacts, at first, with the Muslim villages, and later, also with the Hindu villages. Again, as Elmhirst wrote in his diaries, Rabindranath learned about it all from Kalimohan and gave his encouragement to keep the work going and reiterated his support for it.
So, despite having been in the area for twenty years, Tagore & Co. had not established good relations with their rural neighbours.
After getting the work started, Elmhirst could stay for only two years, from 1922 to 1924. He had to return to England to start his own educational institution, Dartington Hall in Devonshire, though he remained connected with the Sriniketan work throughout his life. His correspondence with Rathi Babu bears out how closely he followed all matters of Sriniketan, even criticized some of it in his assessment. Rathi Babu sought Elmhirst’s advice earnestly, and a number of the leading village workers also stayed in touch with him. Elmhirst himself returned to Sriniketan on short visits every couple of years. The lady he married, Dorothy Whitney Straight (1887–1958), endowed an annual grant of Rs 32,000 for Sriniketan, which was of foundational help to the work over the years. That is how Sriniketan’s ‘permanence’ was ensured.
In other words, it was a charitable project financed by an American heiress. But the Pusa Institute too had been financed by an American millionaire who was a friend of Lord Curzon's wife's family.
Dorothy Whitney Straight was the daughter of the American financier, William Whitney, and the widow of the distinguished diplomat Willard Straight. Rabindranath dedicated his book of essays, Pioneer in Education, to Dorothy with the following words, ‘To Dorothy Whitney Straight who made Sriniketan possible’.
Swadesi is best financed by American philanthropy.
When the Sriniketan work was being conceived, Rabindranath insisted on an all-rounded approach that would take account of the villager’s life in all aspects.
What improves village life is higher yielding crop strains.
He also asserted his confidence in the cooperation of the young people in bringing about the reforms and in gradually taking along their elders with them to that end. That is why he was attracted to the Scout Movement founded by Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941, founder of the worldwide Scout Movement), and decided to tie up the Sriniketan experiment with the Scout Movement.
The Anushilan Samitis were anti-Imperialist. Baden Powell in his 1908 book 'Scouting for Boys' explicitly says that Scouting was a way to prepare youth to defend and serve the Empire. The Boer War had shown deficiencies in British military training. Boys needed to learn 'scouting'- i.e. exploring and studying the terrain and finding ways to 'live off the land'. Otherwise they would be at a disadvantage when faced with guerilla tactics or a rural insurgency.
Rathi Babu arranged for two boys from the Santiniketan school to join a training course for Scout leaders in the Central Provinces.
Did they go on to join the Army? No.
Among the other aspects of the Sriniketan experiment, Rabindranath encouraged the collaboration of scientists, economists, sociologists, and technicians with the work.
Brilliant Bengalis did participate. But the thing was a money pit. It should have been self-sustaining by raising productivity.
He encouraged one and all to stand by the villagers in their struggle against poverty and oppression.
Raising productivity was the answer. This meant finding higher yield crop strains.
He was also cautious that the team did not impose too much ‘statistics’ or technicalities on the villagers in bringing about the changes. He wrote to Elmhirst, ‘All the time when Sriniketan has been struggling to grow into a form, I was intently wishing that it should not only have a shape, but also light, so that it might transcend its immediate limits of time, space and special purpose.’
Raising productivity means having more food to eat and more money in your pocket. If your economic condition is improving, you are in no hurry to transcend time and place- i.e. die and go to Heaven.
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