KMG-6: Madanmohan Ghosh and Piyali Palit

I use this blog, the sixth on the series, with recognition of two persons who provided me with new information on Kalimohan Ghosh. This was new information for me and I had not read it earlier, nor heard about it from my mother, uncles or grand mother mentioning these while describing Kalimohan Ghosh to me. Perhaps there were some activities of Kalimohan Ghosh that were not fully known by Kalimohan's own family members, of which I have had talks with at least Manorama Ghosh (wife) Santideb (son) Sagarmoy (son), Salil (son) and Sujata (daughter). I have learned that Salil Ghosh had been communicating with Leonard Elmhirst for a long time through letters, after my grand father passed away. Since I have not sighted these letters, I do not know what were discussed, but would suspect that Kalimohan Ghosh and Sriniketan were the topics more often than not.

One of the two persons that provided new information to me is Mr. Madanmohan Ghosh, bar at law, Kolkata high court, and the eldest surviving member of the Taltor Zamindar family. The other is Dr. Piyali Palit, professor, Jadavpur University and currently in Mauritius with the School of Indological Studies there.

But first, I should go back to Tagore himself, describing the reason behind creation of Visva-Bharati University. Some of the modern day scholars and persons connected with Santiniketan may have lost sight of these issues.

Kalimohan’s life work may draw our attention to a forgotten key element in Rabindranath’s vision of an ideal educational institution for India. And so, I copy here Rabindranath’s own words on the purpose for creating Visva Bharati.

Rabindranath wrote in the very first of his his “Visva Bharati” collection of articles :

সকল দেশেই শিক্ষার সঙ্গে দেশের সর্বাঙ্গীণ জীবনযাত্রার যোগ আছে। আমাদের দেশে কেবলমাত্র কেরানিগিরি ওকালতি ডাক্তারি ডেপুটিগিরি দারোগাগিরি মুন্সেফি প্রভৃতি ভদ্রসমাজে প্রচলিত কয়েকটি ব্যবসায়ের সঙ্গেই আমাদের আধুনিক শিক্ষার প্রত্যক্ষ যোগ। যেখানে চাষ হইতেছে, কলুর ঘানি ও কুমারের চাক ঘুরিতেছে, সেখানে এ শিক্ষার কোনো স্পর্শও পৌঁছায় নাই। অন্য কোনো শিক্ষিত দেশে এমন দুর্যোগ ঘটিতে দেখা যায় না। তাহার কারণ, আমাদের নূতন বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়গুলি দেশের মাটির উপরে নাই, তাহা পরগাছার মতো পরদেশীয় বনস্পতির শাখায় ঝুলিতেছে। ভারতবর্ষে যদি সত্য বিদ্যালয় স্থাপিত হয় তবে গোড়া হইতেই সে বিদ্যালয় তাহার অর্থশাস্ত্র, তাহার কৃষিতত্ত্ব, তাহার স্বাস্থ্যবিদ্যা, তাহার সমস্ত ব্যবহারিক বিজ্ঞানকে আপন প্রতিষ্ঠাস্থানের চতুর্দিকবর্তী পল্লীর মধ্যে প্রয়োগ করিয়া দেশের জীবনযাত্রার কেন্দ্রস্থান অধিকার করিবে। এই বিদ্যালয় উৎকৃষ্ট আদর্শে চাষ করিবে, গো-পালন করিবে, কাপড় বুনিবে এবং নিজের আর্থিক সম্বল-লাভের জন্য সমবায়প্রণালী অবলম্বন করিয়া ছাত্র শিক্ষক ও চারিদিকের অধিবাসীদের সঙ্গে জীবিকার যোগে ঘনিষ্টভাবে যুক্ত হইবে। এইরূপ আদর্শ বিদ্যালয়কে আমি ‘বিশ্বভারতী’ নাম দিবার প্রস্তাব করিয়াছি।

In every country, education has had an intimate link with all walks of life. But in our land, education is geared to benefit only a handful of livelihoods for office going clerks, doctors, deputy commissioners, police officers and agents - the so called respectable professions for the educated middle class gentry. Benefit of human knowledge is not reaching the farmer tilling his land, the worker extracting oil from seeds, or the potter spinning his wheel. Such a calamity has not been observed in other educated civilizations. The reason for this disastrous state in our country is that here, new universities are not designed with their roots in the soil. Like parasitic plants, they hang off the branches of foreign trees. If India is to have real education, then from the start such units will develop its economy, agriculture, its health and hygiene studies and all other crafts of daily use in such a way as to be of direct and measurable benefit for the people in the surrounding villages. New knowledge and wisdom such generated and thus applied will provide a nucleus for a widening circle of man living with nature around this unit. This educational institution will find and implement better means to raise crops, animal husbandry, weaving of cloth, other means that will help the rural folks gain economic freedom and save them from money lenders and a spiral of debt and abject poverty. Using cooperative systems where practical to provide service and generate earning, the teachers and students of this unit will mingle intimately into the lives of the villagers, and such earnings will thus be recycled to provide economic self reliance and sustainability to the community. My wish is to create such an ideal University, and I have named it Visva-Bharati.

The first of the two above paragraphs, was penned in Bengali by Tagore himself. The second is an approximate translation and explanation by myself.

He wrote the article in the month of Baishakh (April) in the year 1326 Bangabda (year 1919 AD by the Georgian Calendar). It was composed in Santiniketan as the first in a collection under the name of Visva Bharati. Tagore was being invited to various places in India and elsewhere to speak and he often had to explain the reason for creation of an University in Bolpur. These writings were to explain his views. He also read out these as speeches in various functions in Santiniketan in the 1920s and 1930s.

I have had the occasion to speak with friends and associates in recent months about Visva Bharati and Santiniketan, what ails it and how to revive it and what should be the duty of ex-students. The experience has been baffling.

Generally, issues that attract immediate attention of the ex-students and supposed well-wishers of Santiniketan, and become focus of animated debate are instantaneous ‘today’ issues. We seem to prefer acting like a fire brigade whose primary function would be to wait quietly for some catastrophe to unleash itself, and then to rush about and see how best to minimize any damage.

My other observation is that there may be a serious lack of comprehension about why Visva-Bharati University was created in the first place and what its primary function was to be. Vague comments are often made on these, even from reputed scholar and life long teachers of Santiniketan. There appear great differences in our minds on what the current course for the University should be, in light of the change that has taken place between the 1910s and the 2010s, assuming that we cannot turn Santiniketan back a hundred years neither can be turn the planet back a century.

However, if one consider the malady of our society that was identified by Tagore a century ago and his views on the role of an ideal educational institute in eradication of those maladies, It should be amply clear that the original task of the University was not only vitally important for India, its task remains unfinished. Even after sixty odd years of so called political and economic independence, India has not solved its root problems of degradation of the human and ecological sphere in the country side. Today, there is as much need, if not more so, for revival of Tagore’s dream of educational institute that would focus on addressing some of the most profound root issues of the society and the nation, not just economically, but also socially, politically and culturally.

We have a lot of cultural pundits among the Tagore lovers and ex-students. And yet, it is not often one can see these cultural beacons of todays Bengal society recognize what Tagore did a hundred years ago - that the source of India’s cultural and philosophical creative fountain was rooted into the rural and forest environment, and not in the urban ambience. Tagore rightly analyzed that, from the time the rural environment became an item for exploitation, looting its economic self sustainability and its creative zeal, the India’s ability to create new human knowledge and open new horizons in philosophy or culture has been diminished. Bengal, with millions of aspiring middle class as a product of its new educational institutes, have lost its roots and the language as well as its culture has produced no new movement worth mentioning. Its affluent middle class is unable sometimes to construct a single sentence in Pure Bengali. Its cultural contribution is restricted to singing old songs with new western instruments, and creating Facebook fan pages.

Further, if one checks beyond rural Bengal, mankind is facing a civilization altering crisis on a combination of fronts that clearly tells us the business as usual model is broken and unsustainable - from climate change to ultra-materialistic consumer driven culture that is economically debt ridden and bankrupt, going nowhere, with the world facing a bleak future of resource exhaustion, rising demand that cannot be met, almost irreversibly damaged ecology, vanishing wildlife and forests, pollution, vanishing fresh water resources, a population bomb, a major struggle between haves and have nots, rural and marginal humanity that live with a small footprint on the planet increasingly pushed into virtual slavery by an exploitative urban lifestyle promoting cruelty and intolerance in the false name of progress, the political will of the so called free world compromised and bought over by the corrupt influence of corporate wealth, middle class being all but drugged into impotence with a false sense of freedom, progress and security, while greed, intolerance and selfishness drives even the so called most democratic and free civilizations into war, conflict and exploitation of others - all at the same time.

In short, Tagore’s original observation are not only still relevant, they are fast reaching crisis levels casting doubts on the very survival of human civilization in the western materialistic model we have all come to blindly believe in as the best solution for humanity going forward. There is urgent need to re-appreciate Rabidnranath’s deduction on the need - stepping back from this abomination of globalization - to relocate India’s wealth generating centers from the urban enclaves back into the rural environment, to help communities to become self supporting and economically self reliant, to engage with repair and healing of the damaged ecology, to teach ourself to learn to live in harmony rather than in conflict with nature and with each other, to understand that the real share-holders for a sustainable planet are living in rural environments and not those of us that acquire electronic shares of far off corporations in the hope to instant riches. It is time man to wake up and understand that these are about the only sustainable solutions left in mankind’s tool box and yet man is sprinting away from it at a breakneck speed.

It may be time for some of us to go back to school on Rabindranath, and study him afresh. It is time for us to analyze what our own duty should be, having professed our link with Tagore either through santiniketan or through our love for the man’s efforts. Clearly, that responsibility should go a lot further than mimicking a few of his dance drama’s and songs on stage, or finding old singers on U-Tube.

Many that continue to argue that Rabindranath’s ideas are outdated for today, I would ask them to identity what has really changed in the hundred years. Has rural poverty, ignorance, ethnic and religious divide and the exploitation of the rural landscape been eradicated? All that has changed is we now have a n increased mass of selfish middle class that is uncaring and ignorant about the other half. If anything, India has increased the Urban-rural divide and inflated the ranks of the middle class urban exploiters.

Visva-Bharati, instead of being the true pathfinder for a new nation, has betrayed its principals and turned exactly into what it was not supposed to become. It has transformed into a factory for mass production of mindless middle class city-dwelling uncaring people that are of no particular value to anybody except itself, totally divorced from the land. Products of this institutions seem only preoccupied with materialistic trappings of personal wealth creation with no social responsibility of or need to plough some of it back into the society. They are incapable of appreciating the pain of village India, and yet assume a false facade of cultural superiority, hanging on to Tagore’s coat tails.

We the middle class products of this new assembly line institutes connect Visva-Bharati with a place where folks sing and dance and dally in rich man’s entertainment like a distorted caricature of Tagore’s own Tasher Desh. We go there once a year to meet old friends, partake in some more song and dance, make polite talk on how great Rabindranath was, generate some token sound bytes on Rabindranath Tagore and take care to look good before the camera. We can name hundreds of other asramites like ourselves, but may not be able to name a single villager around, unless she was the servant cleaning our clothes or a gardener tending to our front lawn. Our contribution towards self sustainability of rural India is restricted towards paying a monthly salary to the servant, topped with an annual baksheesh.

Rabindranath himself explains this typical apathy through his own life. Till the age of 30, he was a city bred son of a Bengali elite family, living in the lap of relative luxury and the son of a Zamindar to boot. He thought the sole purpose of his life, was to be a poet and create music and poetry. That is all.

But, as his father sent him to manage the Tagore estate, he came into intimate contact with the villagers of his estate in Patisar and Shilaidah. This was a life altering experience for him. Unlike the other Zamindars, he identified with the misery of the villagers and analyzed the root causes, one of them was that the beneficiary of the labor of the villagers, the Zamindar, did not any more live among the villages and did not share their lives misery and tribulations. He realized that for true independence, the task at hand was not just to drive the British out of the country, but also to redress the economic imbalance between the urban and the rural communities and stop the urban exploitation of the rural landscape.

It was from that realization, along with the fact that knowledge created in India was no more benefitting the rural humanity, came the idea of creating an ideal centre of education for India. This institution was to ensure than the students coming out will have an intimate connection and relationship with rural and natural India and will through the course of his working life, re-invest towards its healthy regeneration.

Visva-Bharati does not recognize that it failed, and we the Tagore-reciting experts do not realize that we are a faulty product that refused to learn the right lessons out of Tagore, in spite of parroting him day in and day out.

Unfortunately even the opening page on Visva Bharati University on the web does not properly describe why the University was created or how it was supposed to be different. It quotes Rabindranath without properly explaining the context nor the underlying reason for the existence of this centre of education. This only helps spread the confusion and allowed the institution to turn away from its original goal and then saunter towards aimless mediocrity in everything else.

So, with all due respect to experts proposing all kinds of roadmaps for the University, I find myself in fundamental disagreement with most of them. The sheer lack of comprehension about Tagore and the lack of far-sight among Asramites and Tagore experts is same time breathtaking and painful to comprehend.

Life and work of Kalimohan might provide a timely reminder of the span and scope of Rabidnranath’s vision towards an university designed to create a complete man, and a universal man, and an ideal community, and not just a urban yuppy, selfish and divorced from real life, with no sense of social or civic responsibility and of no benefit to any one except himself, in essence a community destroyer instead of a community builder.

Back to my write up on Kalimohan, one of the two persons that had parted new knowledge to me, is an octogenarian lawyer in Kolkata, Mr. Madanmohan Ghosh, who is the senior most among the Taltor Zamindar family. The family had long association with Rabindranath Tagore. All the landowning Zamindars around Santiniketan had been generous in handing over land, and offering other assistance to Rabindranath Tagore in order to help him create the ideal university. Some helped more than others. I had spoken with Madanmohan babu on phone, and Piyali had visited him in person, relating to some of the debottar land (khoai) which originally belonged to them, later registered as debottar land, and at one time they offered it for Visva Bharati to acquire and take over, when Rajeev Gandhi was the chancellor. But local political powers had other ideas. Also Rajive Gandhi met an untimely death. So the project fell through.

Anyhow, while I was speaking with him, Madanmohan babu got excited upon learning that I was the grand child of Kalimohan Ghosh. He as a child had seen Kalimohan and the memory left a powerful impression on the young boy. He remembered a noble and highly respected middle aged man, dhoti tucked above his knee, legs mud splattered, sweating, huffing and tired, coming to the village with two assistants hauling all kinds of gears on baskets, to set up light show and crude hand pumped petromax projection devices on home made screen comprising of a white cloth tied to two bamboo posts, to set up some kind of slide show to educate villagers on what kind of mosquito causes the malaria decease. He would put up giant images of an Anopheles mosquito and show how this one differed from the other. He would explain how this mosquito liked to live on blood such as human blood, and how it can be infected by Malaria parasite. Once infected, how its bite can infect a human and so on. He would then explain how this mosquito needed stagnant water in a warm condition to lay its eggs and breed and how it was relatively easy to prevent this mosquito from breeding near a village, thus eradicating malaria, village by village.

The kids of the village would watch all this goggle eyed. The elders would, at the end of the show, gather around Kalimohan, thanking him for the effort, assuring assistance and manpower to engage with malaria eradication around their villages. They would request Kali babu to stay back for the night since it was raining, hot and the roads were all full of mud and near impassable. Young adults would want to join hands with Kali babu and go round the village then and there, to identify all spots of stagnant water and either spray them right then, or prepare plans to drain them or otherwise tend to them.

Kali babu would then take volunteers and go around the village, demonstrating how to spray and what to spray in open drainage and ditches to prevent malaria. He would help draw rough maps showing which bodies of water should be drained how, and perhaps lead to the paddy fields etc.

On completion of work, he would politely decline to spend the night in the village and move because they needed to cover more villages with no time to waste. He and his assistants would take a glass of water and a small bowl of puffed rice, and move on to the next village and to the next, while the rest of Santiniketan slept.

Folks of Taltor apparently revered this man, and Madanmohan babu, a mere boy of the time took care to tell me of those memories in great detail.

The other person that added new knowledge for me about Kalimohan was Piyali Palit. She once held a three day workshop on manuscriptology in Visva Bharati along with participation from Oxford and Jadavpur University. In the course of those three days, she got to sight a lot of manuscripts maintained in Visva Bharati. She got to also sight the acquisition list on how each of the manuscripts were collected She noticed that many of these were indeed collected by Kalimohan Ghosh, both for preservation and for research. Rare manuscripts were sometimes handed over by their rural owners to Kalimohan Ghosh. The reason some of these would be handed over, were that the manuscripts were deteriorating, and needed repair, or the owners had fallen into hard times and could not tend to them, or they had lost the family trend of learning and practicing in the knowledge to research and augment the contents of the manuscripts and could not even understand what was written in them, and so on.

Piyali had noticed evidence that many important manuscripts were thus acollected by Kalimohan and prevented their destruction and preserved them for further study. As example of such significant manuscript collected by Kalimohan, Piyali mentioned the Manu Sanhita, the Vedic description of Dharma Shastra, that Gurudev Rabidnranath Tagore used to read himself so often and referred from it. This document was also collected by Kalimohan. Interestingly, this manuscript was not a translation but in its original sanskrit, but was written not in Devnagari, but using ancient Bengali script. The manuscript was perhaps datable from a time when using the Nagari script for sanskrit compositions had not yet become standard practice. That manuscript was apparently a source of great interest and inspiration for Rabindranath Tagore himself.

Other than this one, Piyali had also noted evidence of other important manuscripts also collected by Kalimohan Ghosh. These included Kashidas’s Mahabharata, Krittivas’s Ramayana, many of the Puranic Manuscripts, Hindu Jain and Budhhist religious text containing tales including the history of the world, creation to destruction, geneology of kings and sages, and knowledge on cosmology, philosophy and geography. I do not know what the span of the Puranas collected by Kali babu contain. I remember my mother mentioning to me that his father would sometime return home and stay for a few days working in Sriniketan before leaving again for some remote corner. Meanwhile, sometimes he would call her and show her one of the old Punthi, that needed to be repaired, and how the old text was written in script that was not quite modern Bengali, but an earlier version of it, and explain to his daughter than bengali script, like much else, was also a product of evolution. I never heard my grand mother Manorama, or any of my uncles, mention to me at least, anything about Kalimohan bringing manuscripts and Punthis for preservation and for research at Visva Bharati.

These would be wrapped in red cloth, and brought in baskets (ঝুড়ি). How many were collected by Kalimohan Ghosh? Piyali did not count, but thinks there were likely much more than 35, could even be 50 or a hundred. Records were meticulously maintained in the acquisition list, who collected it, when, from which village, from which owner, the content of the manuscript etc.

Manuscripts such as these and many others, were then to be the subject of further study by experts such as Kshitimohan Sen Shastri, Nityananda Vinod Goswami etc stalwarts.

Well, these are the few of my thoughts for today, and the knowledge I gained from speaking with both Madanmohan babu, originally of Taltor and now of Kolkata, and with Piyali Palit, both of whom knew of one or another angle of Kalimohan Ghosh’s work.

Thats it for today Thanks every body Tonu

PS - if there is any mistake in this writeup, I shall be glad if reader would attract my attention to it.