Santiniketan

9 May 1922

Dear Geddes,

You ask me for my opinion about the scheme of your Department. I find it rather difficult to answer your question because my own work in Santiniketan has been from first to last a growth, which has had to meet all the obstacles and obstructions due to shortage of funds, paucity of workers, obtuseness in those who were called upon to carry out my ideal. But just because it was a living growth it has surmounted these difficulties and taken its own shape. In writing my stories, I hardly ever have a distinct plot in my mind. I start with some general emotional motive which goes on creating its story form, very often forgetting in the process its own original boundaries. If I had, in the commencement, a definite outline which I was merely to fill in, it would certainly bore me,—for I need the consistent stimulation of surprises, which comes only to a semi-passive medium through some living truth’s gradual self-unfoldment.

The same thing happened with my Santiniketan Institution. I merely started with this one simple idea, that education should never be dissociated from life. I had no experience of teaching, no special gift for organisation; and therefore I had no plan which I could put before the public in order to win their confidence. I had not their power to anticipate what line my work was going to take. I began anyhow. All that I could do was to offer to the five little boys who were my first students my company. I talked and sang to them, played with them, recited to them our epics, improvised stories specially given to them by evening, took them on excursions into neighbouring villages.

It was an incessant lesson to me, and the institution grew with the growth of my own mind and life. With the increase of its population and the widening of its range, elements have constantly been intruding which go against its spirit of freedom and spontaneity. The consequent struggle has been helpful in strengthening and making us realise the fundamental truth which is in the heart of our ashram.

But that which keeps up my enthusiasm is the fact, that we have not yet come to a conclusion. And therefore our task is not a perpetual repetition of a plan perfected once for all. [end p.61]

My first idea was to emancipate children’s minds from the dead grip of a mechanical method and a narrow purpose. This idea has gone on developing itself, comprehending all different branches of life’s activities from Arts to Agriculture. Now it has come to a period, when we are fully aware of the absolute necessity of widening, across all barriers, the human sympathies of our students,—thus leading them to the fulfilment of their Education. This stage we have reached, as I have said, not through planning out my system, but by an inner life-growth, in which the sub-conscious has ever been bursting up with the conscious plans.

Lately it has come to us, almost like a sudden discovery, that our Institution is to represent that creative force which is acting in the bosom of the present age; passing through repeated conflicts and reconciliations, failures and readjustments, while making for the realisation of the spiritual unity of human races.

I have often wished, for my own mission, the help of men like yourself, who not only have a vast comprehensive sympathy and imagination, but also a wide range of knowledge and critical acumen. It has been with a bewilderment of admiration, that I have so often followed the architectural immensity of your own vision. But at the same moment, I have had to acknowledge that it was beyond my power to make a practical use of the background of perspective which your vision provides us with. The temperamental characteristics of my own nature require the greatest part of my work to remain in the sub-soil obscurity of mind. All my activities have the character of ‘play’ in them,—they are more or less like writing poems, only in different media of expression. Your own schemes also, in a great measure, have the same element which strongly attracts me, but they have a different idiom, which I have not the power to use. You will understand from this, my dear friend, that though I have always enjoyed listening to you, when you formulate your ideas, and my mind [illegible] is the vastness of their unity, I cannot criticise them. I suppose they are being stored in my conscious memory waiting for living assimilation with my own thoughts.

Cordially yours

Rabindranath Tagore [end p.62]

H.M’s Guest House

Patiala Punjab

17 May 1922

Dear Tagore,

Yes, I feared that my technical plan of my Dept. of Sociology and Civic would be too dry for you! All plans must be so: that is their mathematical nature and limitation. But they express concrete foundations also, and for City and University alike—the latter too in its spiritual and ideal completeness, — not for knowledge only, but for Good, True and Beautiful together; as the best minds have always seen, but as each age and civilization has to express anew, and as you are trying! (And with unusual share of success!)

So think of us technical workers and students as planning out the foundations for your and other ideal Universities—and locating more clearly—and more spaciously too, the gardens of the Muses upon this sacred Hill.

It was thus an agreeable result to find, for instance, as I said at Jerusalem, that the Great Hall I had to plan for the University there worked out into the hexagon and interesting triangles 88 which are the symbol of Israel, 89 (as the crescent for Islam, or the cross for Christianity). This gave a new style of dome—for all others are on square or octagon—and thus a new style in architecture.

But this came not to me not at all as seeking to realise the Jewish symbol for them, as my Zionist friends at first naturally thought. It was really worked out sixteen years or more before, before I had ever heard of Zionism-and as an ideal Temple for the Unity of Life; (usually the Jewish Ideal!) yet thus strictly derived from synthetising [sic], in graphic forms, my general knowledge of Biology—( Environment functioning on Organism, yet Organism mastering Environment) and of Sociology and Civics—

88 There is a hand sketch of a star here with intersecting triangles here.

89 There is a sketch of a swastika-like symbol just after and above ‘ Israel’. [end p.63]

Place conditioning People, yet People re-conditioning Place

Mathematics and Logic—Technics and Physics, Arts and Esthetics, (Biotechnics= Agriculture, Medicine, etc.) and Biology, Education and Psychology, Politics and Economics, Religion and Ethics, are thus illln ~, so many strings for the philosophic harp, as well as of the poet’s lyre! (Hence they helped in planning these University Buildings).

But you may say I am off again into my world of theories; so stop bothering you with these!

But just read the accompanying short Bombay University circular, as the first published product of this technical looking Department Plan of mine! You will, I am convinced, feel it has some human interest, and I trust more or less agree that it is on the lines of progress you can approve. (The preface is by Harold Mann especially-but all now adopted by University Committee and circulated accordingly.)

The difference between us is that while I work out (the equivalents of) musical notations, the prosody of thought, you can make songs as well as poems! (Yet you know your musical notation, your verse-notation too.) (Why not then notation for thought? Not impossible, though ideas occur without them!) 90

Ever yours

P Geddes

90 This paragraph is added to the left-hand margin. [end p.64]

Bashabi Fraser, The Geddes–Tagore Correspondence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review 109, [n.d.]), pp.61-4

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