Enfances Familles

Générations
Revue interdisciplinaire sur la famille contemporaine

27 | 2017 :
Âges de vie, genre et temporalités sociales

Through the Ages of Life:

Rabindranath Tagore -- Son,
Father, and Educator (1861-
1941)
SWAPNA M. BANERJEE
Traduction(s) :
À travers les âges de la vie : Rabindranath Tagore – fils, père et
éducateur (1861-1941)

Résumés
EnglishFrançais
Research Framework: This essay attempts to reclaim Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941),
the “Myriad-Minded Man” from colonial India, through his “ages of life” – as a son, father,
and educator – and his conceptualization of an alternate education and masculinity.
Tagore’s critique of colonial education, his experiments with institutions, and his
curriculum emphasizing arts and moral aesthetics over muscular nationalism challenged
the dominant culture of masculinity. His paternalism embraced a “manliness” privileging
moral and spiritual sustenance over economic and political considerations.
Objectives: By focusing on Rabindranath Tagore, an iconic figure of Indian modernity,
the essay attempts to demonstrate the tangled relationship between his domestic reality
and his public commitment to social justice and pedagogy.

Methodology: It deploys the method of contextualized textual analysis by examining a

variety of literary sources -- personal narratives, correspondence, lectures, and essays.

Results: Foregrounding the importance of family in its enabling and restrictive capacities,
the essay explores connections between one family’s life and the Bengali understanding of
age, gender, and class in late colonial India.

Conclusions: The essay contends that Tagore’s position as a biological father and the
transference of his affective concern to a larger body of children, in whom he inculcated a
new sense of freedom, were inflected with an alternate sense of masculinity.

Contribution: The essay contributes to our understanding that the role of “fathers,”
biological and metaphorical, attained heightened significance among the educated, affluent
community in colonial Bengal. An examination of the interminable connection between
Tagore’s personal and public life disrupts the separation between the home and the world
and establishes the centrality of the domestic in Indian nationalist politics. As a father and
a reformer, Tagore challenged existing notions of masculinity through his reformed and
secular model of education.

Cadre de la recherche : Cet essai présente Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), « l’homme

d’esprits innombrables » de l’Inde coloniale, à travers ses « âges de vie » – l’âge du fils,
celui du père, celui de l’éducateur – et sa conception d’une éducation et d’une masculinité
alternatives. La critique de Tagore de l’éducation coloniale, ses expériences auprès
d’institutions, et son curriculum où les arts et l’esthétique morale primaient sur le
nationalisme musclé défiaient la culture masculine dominante. Son paternalisme saisissait
une « virilité » qui plaçait la subsistance morale et spirituelle au-dessus de toute
considération économique ou politique.

Objectifs : En étudiant Rabindranath Tagore, figure iconique de la modernité indienne,

l’essai montre la relation entremêlée de sa réalité domestique avec son engagement public
dans la justice sociale et l’éducation.

Méthodologie : L’article déploie la méthode de l’analyse textuelle contextualisée et

examine une variété de sources littéraires – narrations personnelles, correspondance,
conférences, essais.

Résultats : En mettant au premier plan l’importance pour Tagore de la famille, de par ses
capacités habilitantes et restrictives, l’essai considère les liens entre la vie familiale du
philosophe et la compréhension bengali de l’âge, du genre et de la classe à la fin de l’ère
coloniale.

Conclusions : L’essai affirme que la position de Tagore en tant que père biologique et le
transfert de son souci affectif sur un groupe plus large d’enfants, auquel il a inculqué un
nouveau sens de la liberté, étaient modulés par un sens alternatif de la masculinité.

Contribution : L’essai contribue à notre compréhension du fait que dans un contexte

socioculturel et politicoéconomique précis, le rôle des « pères », biologiques et
métaphoriques, a atteint une signification accrue en Inde coloniale. Tagore a articulé une
masculinité à travers une éducation réformée et laïque. L’observation de la vie de penseurs
influents comme Tagore remet en cause la séparation entre privé et public, et fait ressortir
la centralité de la sphère domestique dans la politique nationaliste indienne.

Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : Rabindranath Tagore, paternité, masculinité, virilité, famille, éducation,
pédagogie, Inde coloniale
 Keywords : Rabindranath Tagore, fatherhood, masculinity, manliness, family, education,
pedagogy, Colonial India

Texte intégral
1 Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the “Myriad-Minded Man” and the first
Asian poet to win the Nobel Prize in literature, was a poet, novelist, essayist,
playwright, composer, painter, philosopher, and pioneering educator from
colonial India. Tagore’s vision and philosophy, either ignored or shrouded by his
image of the mystical poet from the east, are now being addressed to restore his
salience as a thinker of universal reach and significance, one who defied national-
imperial and elite-subaltern binaries (Collins, 2012, p. 3). His legacy -- vast
literary output and educational institutions he founded -- persists in a new
conceptualization of humanity that transcended boundaries of the home and the
world. An iconic figure of Indian modernity, his well-documented life conveys
intersections of personal experiences with his public endeavors for the common
good. The trajectory of Tagore’s life-works, common yet unique, reveals
complicated notions of age and gender characteristic of the specific historical
conjuncture in India.
2 This essay attempts to reclaim Rabindranath Tagore through his “ages of life” –
as a son, father, and educator – and his envisioning of an alternate education and
masculinity. Historians in different fields have identified the connection between
masculinity and fatherhood (Laqueur, 1990; Tosh, 2007 [1999]). The quest for
fatherhood as moral guardians or biological fathers, although hardly addressed in
South Asian literature, was a crucial component of Indian masculinity as well.
Different “psychic and social investments” constituted gendered identities of men
in the precolonial and colonial contexts (O’Hanlon, 1997). Colonial masculinity
was constitutive of a symbiotic relationship between the “manly” Englishman and
“effeminate” Bengalis/Indians (Sinha, 1995), a perception fostered by the official
British community and internalized by the colonized Indian literati (Rosselli,
1980). British officials and Bengali men, the latter being the main target of attack,
forged their manliness in relation to one another, not through opposition but
through shared values as well. Educated Indians resisted their stereotypes by
incorporating hegemonic forms of masculinity such as body-building and
muscular strength (Alter, 1994; Chowdhury, 2001) and infused them with
imagined cultural myths of “warrior monks” and “Hindu soldiers” drawn from
India’s ancient past (Banerjee, 2005; Banerjee & Basu, 2006). Moreover,
nineteenth-century educational reforms promoted a masculinity that crystalized
religious-communal identities (Sengupta, 2011). But in the late colonial era,
Indian “fathers,” biological and metaphorical, articulated a masculinity through a
reformed education that was secular in nature. Visionaries like Rabindranath
Tagore envisaged a new pedagogy that would prepare the future generation for a
world where its “head is held high” and the “mind is without fear” (Tagore, 1912).
Further exploration of masculinity thus demands investigation of familial and
filial relationships that traversed the private-public domains of politics and
culture.
3 Rabindranath Tagore has been often criticized by fellow Bengalis for his
bourgeois effeminacy. What got elided is his radical critique of colonial education
 and his daily practices that defied conventional notions of masculinity. His
experiments with institutions that transcended the geopolitics of the nation, and a
curriculum that emphasized arts, moral aesthetics, and “public poetry”
(Nussbaum, 2007) over muscular nationalism, challenged the dominant culture of
masculinity. His paternalism embraced a “manliness” privileging moral and
spiritual sustenance over economic and political considerations. Drawing on
Tagore’s everyday experiences captured in his personal writings, essays, and
correspondence, this essay demonstrates the tangled relationship between his
domestic reality and his public commitment to social justice and education. As a
global-historical actor, Rabindranath has been described as a product of the
nineteenth century who displayed sensibilities informed by post-Enlightenment
European philosophies (Kumar, 1991; Chatterjee, 2001; Collins 2012; Sen 2014).
Scholars disagreeing with such a view have explained Tagore’s distinctive thinking
drawing from indigenous roots and environment in addition to the European
ideological influences (Sarkar, 2009; Bandyopadhyay, 2013). The familial context
that was integral to colonial modernity (Chakrabarty, 2000; Chatterjee, 1993;
Sarkar, 1992) and was especially critical for Rabindranath’s pedagogic endeavors
still awaits investigation. Even a recent examination of Rabindranath’s
meditations on love and interiority relies solely on his novels and poems, at the
exclusion of his intimate experiences (Kaviraj, 2015). By foregrounding the
importance of the family as an enabler and restrictive force, my study explores
connections between one family’s life and the Bengali understanding of age,
gender, and class in late colonial India.
4 “Age” was a contentious public issue in British India. The colonial state backed
by its Western-educated native elites, driven by a “liberal” progressive agenda to
eradicate oppressive social customs, passed several Acts related to the “right” age
for marriage and its consummation (Forbes, 2007; Tambe, 2009). In 1929, the
Child Marriage Restraint Act declared “the child as a person who, if a male, is
under 18 years of age, and if a female, is under 14 years of age,” thus
establishing an “incontrovertible definition of the “child,” mapped along the axes
of sex and age” (Pande, 2012, p. 205). The controversies revolved around a
specific age for a girl and a boy, both covered by a blanket term, “children,” in
which the category of youth was conspicuous by its absence (Banerjee, 2014).
Unlike the majority of the Indian population for whom the boundaries of age and
the stages of life were blurry, Rabindranath, as a male from a privileged
background, enjoyed distinct “ages of life” evident in his self-writings.
Rabindranath’s stages of life as a boy, youth, and adult intersected with his public
practices as an educationist, a father, and a reformer who created an edifice for
the modern Bengali “child” of the bhadralok (respectable middle class)
community. In the prime of his life he assumed a moral guardianship and
positioned himself as the “father” to his diverse body of students who looked up to
him as the “mentor,” Gurudev (literally, teacher-god).
5 Associating Rabindranath with an “imaginary” fatherhood, I point out his
affective connections as a father and a public leader. In Indian culture, family and
fatherhood are polysemic in nature and are not solely determined by biological
connections (Chatterjee, 2004). The oldest male member, married or single, held
the highest patriarchal authority in multigenerational, patrilineal, patrilocal
households. Families subscribing to monastic lineages and religious associations
 even attributed fatherhood to the spiritual gurus (Chatterjee, 2013). Although
paternity in India was determined by property relations and control over family
resources, claims to fatherhood were not tied to possession of individual private
property as John Locke conceptualized it in the modern West. One of the many
ways life was imagined and practiced by the reform-minded Indian patriarchy was
through the enactment of fatherhood. The Lockean notion of “possessive
individualism” based on the political death of paternal or parental authority never
took roots in the Indian soil (Chakrabarty, 2000, pp. 217-218). Rather, the
reformed Hindu patriarchy forged their national identity through a natural bond
of fraternity and, I argue, through an assumption of fatherhood and propagation
of a new pedagogy displacing the colonial system. Contingent on specific socio-
cultural and political-economic context, the role of fathers attained heightened
significance in late colonial India. Fatherhood, albeit unstable and plural,
constituted the subjective identity of men, particularly of those belonging to the
“respectable” middle class. I contend that Rabindranath’s position as a biological
father and the transference of his affective concern to a larger body of children, in
whom he tried to inculcate a new sense of selfhood through his unique education,
were inflected with an alternate sense of masculinity. The focus on fatherhood and
children, by investigating lives of influential natives like Tagore’s, disrupts the
separation between the private and the public and brings out the centrality of the
domestic in the larger politics of late colonial India.
6 The omnipresence of fathers in Indian culture and their simultaneous image as
distant and removed from the daily lives of children (Kakar, 1981) possibly
naturalized them and explain their lack of inclusion in current scholarship. In the
course of the nineteenth century, “fathers” from the educated middle class
(bhadralok), both in their biological capacity and as ideologues, engaged in
reform movements to make their women and children part of a progressive
modernity. They emerged as an emotional community displaying altered
sensibilities in setting up home, providing economic support, ensuring protection,
and training their progeny with “appropriate” virtues of femininity and
masculinity – similar to, yet different from, those of the Victorian middle class
(Tosh, 2007 [1999]). Rabindranath’s intervention in educational movements and
his embeddedness in family offer us an opportunity to explore the role of fathers
as mentors and interrogate notions of masculinity that were not connected to
gender-specific sex-roles as parents but as “constitutive of social relationships”
and an emerging patriarchal ideology (Sinha, 1999, p. 446). To trace the
interminable connection between the home and the world, it is in order here to
situate Rabindranath in his familial surroundings and the colonial environment.

The “Ages” of Childhood: Family and

Colonial Education
7 Born into one of the wealthiest families of colonial Calcutta, Rabindranath came
from a strong patriarchal culture. His grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath (1794
–1846), a “business tycoon” partnering with the British, and his father
Debendranath (1817-1905), a leader of the new monotheistic, religious movement
called Brahmoism, held immense power in the Bengali socio-cultural milieu.
 Rabindranath’s brothers held important government posts and contributed to
various branches of arts and literature. Active involvement in nationalist, cultural,
and educational movements made the Tagores the architects of a new colonial
modernity (Kling, 1976). Rabindranath was knighted by King George V in 1915, a
knighthood that he renounced in the wake of British atrocities in Jallianwala
Bagh, Punjab, in 1919. Rabindranath’s accomplishments determined his
reception, particularly in the West, as a humanist and a critic. But his personal
narratives, letters, and essays unveil his more “radical” side, as a boy/son and
then as an adult –husband/father (Dasgupta, and al., 2013).
8 Rabindranath’s distaste for and rejection of colonial education was evident in
his memoirs. His Boyhood Days opens up with the bustle and scurry that
characterized his multigenerational urban household in “old Kolkata,” but he
presents his childhood as full of ennui and languor during his regular study hours
under the home-tutor (Tagore, 1940, p. 6). It is difficult to ascertain if it was
customary for affluent Bengali families to hire private tutors for training their
children so early in life. But informal training at home, particularly for boys, was
part of the colonial culture. By the time Rabindranath was growing up, primary
schools were set up by the colonial administration. The three reports by William
Adam (1868 [1835; 1836; 1838]), a Unitarian missionary and ardent abolitionist,
who was encouraged by the pioneering Indian social reformer Rammohun Roy to
inquire into the status of education, indicated that the number of students under
domestic instruction was almost nine times higher than those attending public
schools. The average age of admission to a public elementary school was eight
years and that of leaving was fourteen years (Nurullah & Nayak 1951: 23). But
female education was almost non-existent. Like other male children of the time,
Rabindranath went to Normal School and his earliest experience there, “not the
least sweet in particular” (Tagore, 1917:33), was that of singing verses, whose
meaning was inscrutable to him: “Unfortunately the words were English and the
tune quite as foreign, so that we had not the faintest notion what sort of
incantation we were practising;…” (Tagore, 1917, p. 33). Rabindranath’s woes over
learning were further compounded by his inability to “associate with the other
boys” whose manners and habits he found intolerable. Neither did he cherish the
memory of the teachers; he found their language so “foul” that out of sheer
contempt, he refused to answer any questions they asked (Tagore, 1917, p. 34).
9 Rabindranath’s critical recollections of his school days brought home the nature
and purpose of colonial education. The education system developed by
missionaries, colonial administrators, and indigenous leaders was fraught with a
struggle between the effort “by non-Indians to impose a cheap imitation of the
British educational system on India and the desire of the people of the country to
create a new system to meet their own peculiar needs and problems” (Nurullah &
Naik, 1951, p. xiv). The Charter Act of 1813, the earliest British intervention in
Indian education, advocated revival and promotion of the knowledge of science
and literature and was aimed at the encouragement of the learned natives in
India. The earliest schools, however, were set up by the Christian missionaries in
the presidencies of Bengal and Bombay, and in the Punjab. The missionaries had
to rely on the knowledge of the native experts for translation and writing of
textbooks. The Act thus provided the native intellectuals in Bengal and elsewhere
 an opportunity to actively engage with the educational movement through literary
endeavors (Banerjee, 2007).
10 Matters came to a head with the British politician and writer Thomas Babington
Macaulay’s famous Minute of Education in 1835 that replaced Persian with
English as the official language of instruction in India. With a strong Utilitarian
justification denouncing Indian languages and literature, Macaulay claimed that
“of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful
to our native subjects” (Macaulay, 1835). Backed by a sizeable section of the native
population who realized the importance of promoting western-style learning,
Macaulay’s Minute was followed by two other official proclamations, Wood’s
Despatch (1854) and the Hunter Commission (1882), that laid the blueprint for
the colonial education system.
11 Intending to spread Western Knowledge and Science at all levels, Wood’s
Despatch introduced schemes of grants-in-aid to schools and training of all
teachers for schools receiving government aids. This allowed colonial government
the right to inspect and assert greater control over education. After the Rebellion
of 1857-58 and the transfer of power from the Company Raj to the British Crown
(1858), the colonial government became increasingly wary of missionary
education verging on conversion. It launched the first Education Commission
under Sir William Hunter in 1882 and its Report announced that the government
would not delegate western-style education to the missionaries; rather, it would
create its own department of education with state subsidies (Topdar, 2015).
12 Education from the early nineteenth century thus became a pathway for
educated native men to work hand-in-hand with the missionaries and the colonial
government. This also gave them the opportunity to create their epistemic space
as moral guardians of the younger generation (Banerjee, 2007). By 1880-90, the
native literati started taking initiative on their own. In 1881-82, Indians
conducted the majority of the secondary and primary schools in British India
(except Burma): 1341 secondary schools and 54,662 primary schools were
administered by Indian managers as opposed to 757 secondary and 1842 primary
schools run by non-Indians (Nurullah & Naik, 1951, p. 260). In Bengal, for
example, Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, along with other
votaries of modern education, made significant donations for the promotion of
schools and institutions, including the establishment of the Calcutta Medical
College (Sengupta, 2011). Towards the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the
schools were endowed with state power and education became the site of “colonial
governmentality” (Seth, 2006). The schools were not only designing curricula and
introducing new subjects, they were bent on creating subjectivities and regulating
native populations through a range of disciplinary practices. The school’s main
subjects of reform were males, with age unspecified, and dissemination of
education among women followed a different trajectory (Forbes, 2007).
Rabindranath reacted to colonial schools both for their pedagogic practices as well
as their stifling regimen. As he himself recorded: “So long as I was forced to
attend school, I felt an unbearable torture.” Later on, he realized that what
weighed on his mind was the “unnatural pressure of a system of education which
prevailed everywhere” (Tagore, 1925, p. 94).
13 The disciplinary regime of school was matched by an equally strong patriarchal
domain at home. Raised predominantly under the “auspices” and “abuses” of
 manservants, “servocracy,” as Rabindranath described it (Tagore, 1917), the most
awe-inspiring male figure in Rabindranath’s life was his pitrideb (Father-god),
Debendranath Tagore, whose influence continued through his adult life.
Debendranath’s itinerant life-style as a social reformer, his solemn personality,
his sweeping command over family matters were testament to the traits of the
time; yet, he was very different from the “meddlesome tyrant of middle-class
patriarchy,” often described in the Western context (Sen, 2014, p. 70). Child Rabi
(nickname) hardly knew his father: “He would now and then come back home all
of a sudden, and with him came foreign servants […] when my father came, we
would be content with wandering round about his entourage and in the company
of his servants. We did not reach his immediate presence.” Rabindranath’s first
close encounter with his father was at age eleven when they both traveled to the
Himalayas. A commanding personality with a meticulous eye to details,
Debendranath carefully chose and ordered for his son a “full suit of clothes” with a
“gold embroidered velvet cap.” Rabindranath reflected: “[….] Though nothing
would induce him to put obstacles in the way of my amusing myself, he left no
loophole in the strict rules of conduct which he prescribed for me in other
respects” (Tagore 1917, p. 68).
14 Rabindranath’s experience with his father was unique. Very few children, male
or female, in colonial households enjoyed the opportunity of traveling alone with
their fathers and receiving the rigorous training that Debendranath enforced on
his children. Likewise, when Debendranath entrusted eleven-year-old Rabi with
the responsibility of his cash-box, it was exemplary by the standard of his time. By
bestowing a significant responsibility on Rabi, Debendranath enhanced the
agency of his child. Yet, any negligence on Rabi’s part would earn him serious
consequences. As much as Rabi enjoyed his freedom from his school in Calcutta,
his trip to the mountains followed a “rigorous regime” when he would wake up
before sunrise to learn his Sanskrit declensions, shower in ice-cold water, hike up
the mountain ridges with his father, sing devotional songs for him, and pursue
lessons in English, Bengali, and Astronomy (Tagore, 1917:68). It was not
Debendranath alone; fathers of aristocratic background wielded tremendous
influence in training their sons through different stages of life. Jawaharlal Nehru,
the first Prime Minister of independent India, recorded in his autobiography the
commanding personality of his father and how he shaped his childhood
experience. Daughters, including the ones in the Tagore family, however, were
subjected to a different treatment and upbringing.
15 Rabindranath’s evolving relationship with Debendranath attested to the
archetypes of manliness that also prevailed in Victorian England: absent, distant,
and intimate (Tosh, 2007 [1999]). The distance that Rabi, as a child, felt with his
father was bridged in later life through mutual affection and favor. Rabindranath’s
son Rathindranath noted, “My grandfather loved his youngest son and was
delighted to discover unusual talent in him while still a boy. Probably for this
reason he was very generous to him” (Tagore,1958, p. 148). Debendranath also
entrusted Rabindranath with the management of his estates but he was such a
“strict disciplinarian” that on the second of every month he wanted the accounts
to be read out to him. “He [Debendranath] would remember every figure, and ask
awkward questions whilst the report was being read.” Rabindranath was “afraid of
this day of trial, like a school-boy going up for his examination” (Tagore, 1958, p.
 148). As Rabindranath expressed so succinctly, his father “held up a standard, not
a disciplinary rod” (Tagore, 1917, pp. 96-98). The so-called tyrannical aspect of
Victorian fatherhood, in Rabindranath’s recollection, was missing in
Debendranath, the reformed father of a minority religious community.
16 The strong influence of the father stood in contrast with the distant and short-
lived relationship between Rabindranath and his mother Sarada Devi (Banerjee,
2005). Rabindranath reminisced:

when my mother died I was quite a child […] On the night she died, we were
fast asleep in our room downstairs. […] Only when her body was taken out
by the main gateway, and we followed the procession to the cremation
ground, did a storm of grief pass through me […] The day wore on, we
returned from the cremation, and as we turned into our lane I looked up at
the house towards my father’s rooms […] He was still in the front veranda
sitting motionless in prayer” (Tagore, 1917, pp. 255-56).

17 The God-like image of his father always prevailed over Rabindranath. His
venerable portrait of Debendranath was emblematic of a masculinity associated
with fatherhood that protected children and gave them moral guidance to grow
and develop as individuals. Despite his authoritarianism, Debendranath was
broad-minded enough to let his son experiment and explore. He demanded
obedience but also granted freedom: the relationship did not thrive on coercion;
instead, it fostered independence and individualism among his male children
(Sen, 2014, p. 71).
18 As a rebel child, Rabindranath refused to comply with the demands of a colonial
education system. After dropping out of successive institutions, he finally gave up
school at age fourteen, the year his mother died, and it was “through the joy” of
his freedom that he “felt a real urge to teach himself” (Das Gupta, 2006, p. 69).
Shorn of the restrictiveness of the formal school system, Rabindranath was
nourished by the strong cultural environment at home. As a “living university,”
the Tagore household of Jorasanko exposed him to a confluence of European and
Indian thoughts and literature – classical and popular, drawing on folk literature
and music through nursery rhymes, baul songs, and Vaishnava literature and
lyrics (O’Connell, 2002, pp. 44-45).
19 Although unique and versatile, the cultural environment of the Tagore
household was still heavily gendered, with different expectations and roles for
male and female children. Rabindranath’s elder sister Swarnakumari Devi (1855-
1932) was an equally prolific figure in nineteenth-century Bengal. Following the
custom of the time, she was home-schooled; but she wrote novels, poetry, plays,
songs, scientific essays, edited a leading journal, Bharati and engaged in social
work (Chaudhuri, 2016). As Teresa Hubel pointed out, Swarnakumari Devi’s
family connections and gender stood in the way of recognition of her literary
contribution and leadership (Hubel, 2010). Rabindranth himself harbored a
dismissive and condescending attitude towards her as he wrote in a letter to his
English friend: he had given Swarnakumari Devi no encouragement and had
failed to make “her see things in proper light.” Rabindranath dismissed
Swarnakumari as someone having “more ambition than ability;” “just enough
talent to keep her alive for a short period” (Hubel, 2010, p.170). The statement
testifies to Rabindranath’s patriarchal bias. He grew up in the presence of strong
women, yet his was a culture that favored male children.
 Rabindranath Attains Adulthood: The
Father and The Educator
20 Discriminatory practices by gender and age continued to manifest themselves in
the course of Rabindranath’s adult life. An emerging star in the Bengali literary
firmament and well-exposed to the Western ideas of Romanticism and
Victorianism through his travel to England, Rabindranath at age twenty-two
married eleven-year old Bhabatarini aka Mrinalini Devi1 (1872-1902), selected by
his father Debendranath following strict caste rules (Dasgupta and al., 2013, p. 3).
Rabindranath’s coming of age in every phase was intervened by his father. At
eleven, Debendranath made him go through the caste-specific practice of
upanayan, a rite of passage for Brahmin boys, that introduced him to the gayatri
mantra (Tagore, 1917, p. 72).2 Likewise, Debendranath consecrated
Rabindranath’s attainment of manhood through the marriage he arranged for
him. At every stage of his career, he reckoned with his father’s authority without
confronting him. If Rabindranath’s awe and deference to his father could be
explained by bhakti (devotion), that Chakrabarty invoked for analyzing Bengali
nationalist patriarchy (Chakarbarty, 2001, pp. 217-31), in his personal life he
registered a shift in his dealings with wife and children.
21 As a “modern” man, Rabindranath’s masculinity characterized a closeness in
his conjugal relationship. His correspondence with his wife reveals tenderness
and intimacy that ran contrary to his father’s distance with his mother.
Rabindranath’s deepest emotions as a husband and father were best expressed in
his letters to his wife when he traveled. In these letters to Mrinalini Devi, he
expressed his longing for her and deliberated on matters about their children. He
discussed their well-being, happiness, and marriage. His hands-on parenting and
playful connection with children inverted the image of his detached yet
overbearing father. Rabindranath straddled a contested terrain in his family life:
on the one hand, he conformed to the gendered practices of his times in raising
his male and female children; on the other, he challenged the gendered
stereotypes of parenting as he continued to engage with his children through
every step of their lives. Following the death of his wife in 1902, he single-
handedly took care of his five children and often their spouses.3 As Rathindranath
recalled, his father was a “down-to-earth man” and his “august personality” did
not stand in the way with his children:

Father never treated any of his children harshly, nor did he…lavish
sentimental affection upon them. I do not remember any occasion when
Father subjected any of us to physical punishment. Temperamentally it was
impossible for him to use violence. (Rathindranath Tagore, 1958, p. 148).

22 Rabindranath’s parenting defied distinct gender roles based on perceived

differences between fathers and mothers. Neither temperamental nor effusive,
Rabindranath was also a strict disciplinarian like his father. He too subjected his
son Rathindranath to rigorous training and hardship (Mira Devi, 1968). His
youngest daughter Mira Devi’s correspondence with him reveals how close she
was with her father since she was a little girl (Banerjee, 2015). Moreover,
Rabindranath as a public intellectual was equally committed to the causes of
children envisioning new educational curriculum that he enshrined in his school
 and university in Santiniketan, a small town west of Calcutta in the Birbhum
district of West Bengal. Rabindranath’s vast repertoire of children’s literature,
consisting of poems, plays, short stories, primers, and essays, let loose his
imaginings of an idealized childhood. But his imaginings were also rooted in a
colonial reality and frustration that he experienced as a child. Rabindranath’s
special relationship with the child commenced from “his own lived experiences”
and it was his “poetic words” that acted as the primary site of the relationship
between the adult and the child (Sarkar, 2009, p. 271).
23 As his commitment to social justice deepened, Rabindranath increasingly saw
his family members “less as individuals than as part of the greater cause to which
he felt his life was dedicated” (Dutta & Robinson, 1997, p. 45). His natural
impatience with formalism led him to formulate a new prose-form and invent new
institutional structures that privileged nature over artificial boundaries and
constructions. He produced his collection of poetry for children, Shishu, while
taking care of his ailing daughter Renuka (aka Rani) during the last days of her
life. His joyous approach to learning resonated with the progressive spirits of the
literary movements of the late nineteenth century that emphasized reading for
pleasure (Sarkar, 2009). It is this new spirit and vitality that Rabindranath
attempted to infuse in his new pedagogy that commenced in his family estate and
thrived with the active support of his family members.
24 Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827-94), a conservative social critic from colonial
Bengal who served as a head master and worked for the Department of Public
Instruction, regretted that in India, there was “very little effort to encourage
mutual affection and understanding between fathers and sons.” In his teacher
training manual Bhudev urged schoolteachers to take on the role of an
understanding and affectionate father: the behavior between the teacher and the
students “should be the same as between fathers and sons” (Sengupta, 2011, p.
81). Rabindranath’s lifeworks merged the roles of father and teacher through his
new educational experiments.
25 Rabindranath’s manliness, manifested in his role as a dear husband and a close
parent, bolstered his critique of colonial education. As an adult his first formal
intervention in educational movements corresponded with his life as a family
man. An aristocratic man in his thirties, a husband, and a father, he pushed
educational reforms that were not far removed from his family. His zeal for
reforms was part of a larger social experiment in India in which other leaders,
including his predecessors, played an active part. With pre-existing family
connections to eminent reformers, Rabindranath in later life developed his own
link with leaders dedicated to education. He joined the National Education
Movement in the early 1890s to actively champion vernacular education
(Mukherjee, 2013; O’Connell, 2002; Seth, 2007).
26 His speech, “Shikshar Herpher” (“Vicissitudes of Education,” 1892), delivered
in the Rajshahi district in eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh), contained his most
scathing critique of colonial education. Reflecting on his boyhood experience
when he felt the disconnect with rote English learning, he argued that the failure
of the Bengalis to communicate their ideas and opinions effectively like an adult
(sabalok) could be explained by the lack of connection they felt with Western-
style education imparted in schools and colleges. Echoing the sentiment of the
time he blamed the enfeeblement of the Bengalis on the colonial system, a point
 that Tanika Sarkar emphasized in a different context (Sarkar, 2001). He stressed
that being forced to master English, the children neither learned nor played: they
did not have the leisure to enter the “true-land” (satyarajya) of nature; the doors
to the imaginary lands of literature were sealed. The only way to strike a balance
between thought and expression, between education and life, was by promoting
vernacular language and literature and not English (Tagore, 1892).
27 When requested to write the Constitution for the National College founded by
the nationalist leader Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), he authored the essay
“Shiksha Samasya” (“Problem with Education”) that again addressed the key
issues of colonial education. For Rabindranath, the problem lay in the
unfathomable distance between Western-style education mechanically
disseminated in schools and the experiences of common people in India (Tagore,
1906). In his proposal for the National College as well as in his own school
(Brahmacharyashram) in Santiniketan, he rejected the popular “gallery model”
championed by the Scottish educator David Stow and adopted by early Bengali
educators like Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (Sengupta, 2011, p. 84). To promote his
idea of freedom for children he advocated a spatio-structural transformation of
the classroom. He moved the classroom to the heart of nature and he stripped it of
any furniture. For him, students and teachers sitting on floors and preferably
holding classes in natural surroundings would be the most effective way of
lowering costs of education (Tagore, 1906). By the time he was engaging with
these questions, the vernacularization of education was already underway under
the initiatives of nationalist-reformers and missionaries. They all shared a
Western model and their demand was infused with strong religious overtones
(Sengupta, 2011; Goswami, 2004). But Tagore’s pedagogy, creative and secular,
offered an alternative, drawing on the best of both the East and the West. Open to
ideas of European thinkers like Pestalozzi and Rousseau and with ties to the
Unitarian movement, Rabindranath’s model, however, differed from that of the
missionaries and the early reformers.
28 Family continued to be Rabindranath’s major arena of play and support in
every project he undertook. He launched his initial educational experiments in his
family estates in eastern Bengal. As early as the 1890s, hoping to alleviate the
hunger and poverty of his tenants, he tried, without much success, to educate the
adult villagers in collective farming. Around the same time, he also started
experimenting with his children’s education. Confronted with a school system that
belied his vision, it was in eastern Bengal that Rabindranath started home-
schooling his three children -- Bela (thirteen), Rathindranath (eleven), and
Renuka (nine) – a practice that he encountered in his own life but for different
reasons. As his son noted, fully aware of the ill-effects of the stereotyped school-
teaching, Rabindranath was “anxious that his own children should be spared such
unhealthy and stifling influences (Tagore, 1958, p. 20).” The children were taught
English by a British tutor who lived with them; they also learned Mathematics,
and Sanskrit; Bengali was taught by Rabindranath himself. When imparting basic
education to his children he did not make a distinction between daughter and son.
He wrote texts for his children, but the children never learned grammar. He
insisted that the children read the two Indian epics, The Ramayana and The
Mahabharata, and being unhappy with the existing printed editions, he entrusted
his wife to translate from Sanskrit an abridged version of The Ramayana, left
 unfinished due to Mrinalini’s untimely death (Tagore, 1958, pp. 21-22). The
responsibility for translating The Mahabharata fell to his nephew, Surendranath
Tagore. In Rabindranath’s enterprise everyone in his family was included.
29 As a father-cum-educator, Rabindranath extended his pedagogical experiments
far beyond his immediate family. His major educational reforms were launched in
the thick of political controversies and nationalist upheavals. On 22nd December
1901, with permission and assistance from Debendranath, he inaugurated his
school in Santiniketan with less than ten students, including his son. Departing
from a Western model, Rabindranath invoked the ancient Indian ideal of
brahmacharya (a life-stage prescribed for males) where disciples studied in the
secluded areas of the guru’s house restraining themselves through strict rules and
hardship. All clothed in long yellow robes, the students rose at four in the
morning, bathed, meditated, prayed, and chanted Vedic hymns. Rabindranath’s
son Rathindranath noted that with the “ideal of brahmacharya” as the “keynote,”
both students and teachers led not only simple but an austere life (Tagore, 1958,
pp. 44-45).
30 This school suffered from an acute shortage of funds since it did not collect any
fees from students at first and provided them with food, lodging, and often
clothing as well. The school was funded by a Trust set up by Debendranath, the
money gained from selling his wife’s jewelry, and his own meager resources.
Rabindranath hoped to realize his ideal of democracy and self-reliance by
reaching out to the wider public and transgressing class-caste and religious
boundaries. Through his conception of the ashram (hermitage), the ancient
Indian institution, Rabindranath “sought to imagine a space where his ideas of
self-reliance and democracy could be translated into praxis” (Chandra, 2014). In
his new school, modeled after the ancient Indian system of tapovan (forest
schools), Rabindranath attempted to establish “real swaraj” in his ashram
(Tagore, 1934), where students were tied in a bond of fraternity underscored by a
devotion to the guru and the new order.
31 Rabindranath approximated the environment of the ashram by imparting
spiritual training to all his students: he insisted on understanding and chanting
Gayatri mantra, an ancient hymn, that he learned as a child. According to
Rabindranath, the mantra made the connection between individual consciousness
and external reality, linking the inner self with its deepest aspects and
transcending boundaries of race, class, nationality, and religion. Displaying the
influence of the Father as the god-head Absolute, he reminded children that “God
is our father, and like a father always gives us lessons of wisdom. The teachers are
only the vehicles, but the real knowledge comes from our universal father”
(O’Connell, 2002, p. 67). Rabindranath’s strong enunciations testified to his own
authoritarianism and control, a streak akin to his father’s, but he expressed
himself in a different idiom for an imaginary public. His invocation of God as
“Father” displayed Christian (Unitarian) influence that his father publicly denied
yet enigmatically upheld in the faith he propounded. While Father for
Rabindranath might not have been a sexist symbol, it represented an all-
pervading masculinity as a sovereign source of power.
32 Rabindranath publicly abandoned his nationalist agenda when the anti-
partition Swadeshi movement (1905-08) against Lord Curzon’s plan to divide
Bengal gave way to Hindu-Muslim antagonism, self-aggrandizement, and
 violence. Disassociating himself from the movement to which he gave active
leadership, he critiqued parochial patriotism and shifted his focus to ideas of
universalism and rural reconstruction. He then took the unprecedented step of
admitting six girls to his school in 1908-9. By 1920, the school became both co-
residential as well as coeducational.
33 Ironically, despite including girls in his school, in his personal life
Rabindranath yielded to the practices of his aristocratic family, class, and era. He
had home-schooled his daughters with tutors specially selected and mentored by
him. Like his sister from the previous generation, his daughters were not expected
to go to public schools. Just as he had married an 11-year old girl, he arranged the
marriages of two of his daughters, Bela (14), and Rani (10), both in 1901, the same
year he founded his school. Through the nineteenth century age of marriage for
girls was heavily debated among the social reformers and colonial administration.
The Age of Consent Act (1891) sanctioned consummation of marriage with brides
below twelve as a punishable offense. Even earlier, the Brahmo community split
into three factions over Act III of the Marriage Act of 1871 that aimed to formalize
Brahmo marriages by designating the specific age of marriage, fourteen for girls
and eighteen for boys (Majumdar, 2009, pp. 167-205). Surely, those Acts had little
relevance for the Tagores. Rabindranath justified the early marriages of his
daughters by arguing that it would allow them to quickly adjust and identify with
their in-laws. After leaving Bela at her husband’s home for the first time, he
expressed his parting pains in a letter to his wife: “We must forget our own joy
and sorrow where our children are concerned. […] We must make room for them
so that they can mould their lives in their own way” (Tagore, 1901, pp. 11-12).
Incidentally, Rani, the younger daughter, died of tuberculosis (1903) before she
turned thirteen.
34 That Rabindranath was committed to his educational endeavors despite
inconsistencies in personal life was beyond doubt. As the War broke out in 1914,
he became more convinced of his message of universalism. His reaction against
parochial nationalism was expressed in his condemnation of Western education.
He claimed that his countrymen would gain their India by “fighting against the
education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of
humanity” (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 99). For him, “the highest education is that which
does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all
existence.” He believed that “the object of education is the freedom of mind […]
though freedom has its risk and responsibility as life itself has” (Tagore, 1916). In
his ashram the “guiding spirit” of children was “personal love” and life was “fully
awake” in its activities:

[w]here boys’ minds are not being perpetually drilled into believing that the
ideal of the self-idolatry of the nation is the truest ideal for them to accept;
where they are bidden to realize man’s world as God’s Kingdom, to whose
citizenship they have to aspire; where the young and the old, the teacher
and the student, sit at the same table to partake of their daily food and the
food of their eternal life (Tagore, 1916).

35 Rabindranath, as a father-teacher, evolved through the ages of his life,

transcending nationalistic limits and extending his moral and pedagogic
leadership over a larger body of pupils. In 1918 the establishment of Visva-
Bharati, an international university, crowned his educational experiments. Based
 on a multi-racial network, Visva-Bharati emphasized a non-sectarian and
aesthetic curriculum that included fine arts, music, Indian folk culture, and
literature to understand the psychology of Indian people (Nussbaum, 2009).
36 Rabindranath’s daring educational experiments (like his literary and
philosophical works) remained restricted to his close followers. Scholars have
blamed the lack of success on his elitist background. His aesthetic moralism did
not provide a viable model for mass education (Chatterjee, 2011). However, what
is missed in this assessment is Rabindranath’s paternalistic concern for common
people as evidenced by his efforts to educate the peasantry. His last major
experiment was the establishment of Sriniketan in 1922 with the help of Leonard
Elmhirst, the British agro-economist, and twelve of his former students. Based on
international cooperation since its inception, Sriniketan’s objective was rural
reconstruction to make the villagers “self-reliant and self-respectful, acquainted
with the cultural traditions of their country and competent to make use of modern
resources for improvement of their physical, intellectual and economic
conditions” (O’Connell, 2002, p. 195). Organizing boys and girls in ways that were
modeled on the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and the 4-H movement of America,
village children were trained in practical skills and were made to overcome caste
prejudices through group participation.
37 Rabindranath delegated the main responsibility of Sriniketan to his son,
Rathindranath, who was sent to study Agriculture at the University of Illinois, US,
and Göttingen University, Germany. Upon his return from the West,
Rathindranath served on his family estates training poor farmers in the art of
scientific farming. For the next four decades, he worked for Visva Bharati and
became its first Vice-Chancellor when it became a central university.
Rabindranath arranged Rathindranath’s marriage with seventeen-year-old
Pratima Devi, a child-widow, in 1910. Later, he trained and educated her to be
part of his educational schemes. Again, Rabindranath exerted his paternal
authority, like that of his father, in arranging his son’s marriage; but his choice of
a widow for his son was consonant with the legislation, the Widow Remarriage
Act (1856), passed in the previous century. His closeness with Pratima Devi defied
the conservatism that his father displayed. He signaled a change from the
domineering father like Debendranath to a more self-confident, engaging father in
his own right. Through the ages of life Rabindranath relied on the strength and
support of his family, abided by family rules and customs, but also offered
resistance to the limitations imposed by them.
38 Rabindranath’s masculinity rested on an assumption of fatherhood that he
experienced with his father and older brothers (Sen, 2014). The sense of freedom
he inculcated among the future generation was restrained by his authority as the
paterfamilias in the geographical locale of the ashram. He actualized the dreams
of the earlier educators like Bhudev who wanted to train the teachers so that “they
could relate to [their] students as fathers relate to their sons” (Sengupta, 2011, p.
81). He achieved this first by training the teachers; second, by positioning himself
as a father-cum-educator and becoming a role model for the teachers. His
rigorous training of teachers for his school at Santiniketan is best captured in a
series of essays written between 1936 and 1941, “Ashram-er Rup o Bikash”
(Tagore,1941). As one commentator later reflected, Rabindranath “succeeded in
establishing a cordial atmosphere of mutual understandability and warmth of
 sympathy as a teacher-father - Gurudev of the Ashrama [School]” (Chakrabarti,
1990, p. 94).
39 Committed to nineteenth-century values of liberal individualism, the
entanglements of Rabindranath’s familial side with his pioneering educational
experiments reveal in him an insurgent consciousness that challenged both
colonial oppression and native injustices. While in his imaginings, the child,
mostly male, was “Indian but not orthodox, modern but not mimic [sic],” and its
“rebelliousness was contained within a formalized context and limited authority,”
it will be delimiting to understand Rabindranath only within the post-
Enlightenment analytic (Sen, 2014, p. 60). By focusing on the ages of his life, I
have endeavored to foreground his experiential reality and familial context from
which he drew sustenance.

Conclusion
40 Rabindranath’s reforms were a culmination of the Tagore family’s long
involvement in education over four generations. Rabindranath’s pedagogical
enterprise was a family project. Neither he nor his family superseded prevailing
caste, class, and gender norms, but the family as a whole, and Rabindranath’s
meditations and activism on social ills, gender norms, and education, gestured
towards a radicality that set the Tagores apart as trend-setters and culture-
builders in colonial India. The novelty lay in Rabindranath’s new pedagogic
model, irrespective of age, gender, sex, caste, class, or religion. As a father-cum-
educator he transcended the home (ghar) and reached out to the world (bahir).
While his experiments, localized and limited, failed in the long run, his critique
still remains salient for understanding colonial modernity.
41 Rabindranath’s enactment of masculinity can be tracked along interconnected
trajectories: as a rebellious thinker, Rabindranath rejected the authoritarianism of
British institutions. He blamed colonial education for the emasculation of Indians.
Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, including his own niece Sarala Devi
Chaudhurani, he did not participate in a movement for body-building and
wrestling that would strengthen the “weak” body of the Indians. His masculinity
encompassed a fatherhood, traits of which he chiefly inherited from his
predecessors: a fatherhood that commanded compliance but also nurtured
freedom. Through the ages of his life, his model Pitridev (father-god) evolved into
his own archetype as the “Gurudev” (teacher-god), the father-cum-teacher that
the early native educators emphasized. His “empire” of fatherhood extended
beyond his immediate familial and religious domain. He encouraged the
independent spirit of his students as world citizens but did not subscribe to the
Enlightenment notion of private individuals entrenched in property rights and
predicated on a separation with the father (Chakrabarty, 2001). Mutual deference
(bhakti) that sustained the relationship between him and his disciples did not
undermine the autonomy of either but fostered a culture of creativity unfettered
by the “technologies of power” (Chatterjee, 2011:126). The micropolitics of
everyday life shaped by many competing forces reconstituted his fatherhood in its
nurturing, care-giving roles both within home and outside, thus giving a new
meaning to masculinity that was not just an expression of physical might but also
 an “education in emotional literacy” (Broughton & Rogers, 2007, p. 22).
Identifying imperialism as the principal enemy, the drafting of alternate
educational strategies suggested an overturning of the colonial model and a
refusal to be treated like enfeebled children by the colonial state.
42 Samir Dayal has argued that the “fulcrum” of Rabindranath’s universal
humanism was “an erotic economy of love” that could be best identified in the
notion of sahridayata or empathy, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argued in a different
context (Chakarbarty, 2000). Dayal writes: “Tagore’s preferred version of
patriotism was couched in the rhetoric of love, rather than the received modality
of aggressive nationalist self-affirmation” (Dayal, 2007, p. 78). If “Tagore’s
counternarrative was calculated to destabilize the hegemony of a hypermasculinist
discourse of nationalism” (Dayal, 2007, p. 79), I suggest that his counternarrative
could be traced to his pedagogical experiments in which his family played a
central role. His “love” for humanity (including children) was not confined to the
microcosm of the home but became a blueprint for his public action. By taking
care of a larger community of children as dependents, by protecting them through
training and education, by giving them a home in his ashram outside of home, by
nurturing deeply spiritual, yet secular, democratic principles, Rabindranath
displayed his larger concern as a modern father endowed with altered
sensibilities.
43 As an imperial subject of international stature, Rabindranath felt a bigger onus
of freeing children’s minds and preparing them with skills and knowledge as
autonomous, independent subjects of the modern world. Beset with ambivalence
and contradictions, his sensibility was also conditioned by his contextual reality as
a son and father. Through the ages of his life, family played an important role
through its enabling and restrictive presence. By focusing on the private and the
quotidian aspects that are subsumed under his more popular image of a benign,
universalist poet, I have attempted to establish the link between the history of a
notable family and more widespread notions of the life course, gender, and
masculinity. While one aspect of Rabindranath’s masculinity was anchored in
everyday acts of reformed fatherhood, his other aspect of masculinity de-linked
itself from maleness and acquired its meaning through enunciation of education
programs that challenged colonial forms of domination.

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Notes
1 The Tagores had the practice of renaming their brides who usually came from humble
social backgrounds. Bhabatarini, Rabindranath’s wife, was given the name Mrinalini.
2 Upanayan, a rite of passage for Brahmins, introduced boys to the daily practice of
chanting Gayatri mantra from the RigVeda. Monier Monier-Williams translated the mantra
in 1882: “Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine vivifying Sun, May he
enlighten our understandings.”(2010) (2016) were2 Press, 2005sof the mantra come from
an Orientalist scholar Monier Williams: rn and revivalist Hindu movemen(2010) (2016)
were2 Press, 2005sof the mantra come from an Orientalist scholar Monier Williams: rn
and revivalist Hindu movemen
3 Of his five children, eldest son Rathindranath and youngest daughter Mira Devi only
survived.

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique
Swapna M. Banerjee, « Through the Ages of Life: Rabindranath Tagore -- Son, Father, and
Educator (1861-1941) », Enfances Familles Générations [En ligne], 27 | 2017, mis en ligne
le 31 août 2017, consulté le 07 juillet 2018. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/efg/1508

Auteur
Swapna M. Banerjee
Endowed Chair, Women's & Gender Studies, Associate Professor, History Brooklyn
College of the City University of New York, Banerjee@brooklyn.cuny.edu

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