‘Nature’s Grandchildren’
‘Nature’s
Grandchildren’
Can we be human in
the absence of nature, asked Rabindranath.
To Civilization
Give back the
wilderness, take away the city
Embrace if you will
your steel, brick and stone walls
O newfangled
civilization! Cruel all-consuming one,
Return all sylvan,
secluded, shaded and sacred spots
And traditions of
innocence. Come back evenings
When herds returned
suffused in evening light,
Serene hymns were
sung, paddy accepted as alms
And bark-clothes worn.
Rapt in devotion,
One meditated on
eternal truths then single-mindedly.
No more stone-hearted
security or food fit for kings -
We’d rather breathe
freely and discourse openly!
We’d rather get back
the strength that we had,
Burst through all
barriers that hem us in and feel
This boundless
Universe’s pulsating heartbeat!
(Rabindranath Tagore, Sabhyatar-Prati,
from Chaitali, 1896, Translated by Fakrul Alam)
Deeply resonant with
William Blake’s poem London, in which the poet laments “the
mind-forg’d manacles” of the great city which left “marks of weakness, marks of
woe” on “every face” he met, Rabindranath’s poem Sabhyatar-Prati is
only one among thousands of poems, songs, plays and stories where he
illuminates how metropolitan humanity’s growing alienation from the natural
world continues to enervate it, draining it of the vitality it once had and
which it could possess again if ecological integrity could be restored to our
relationship to nature.
Rabindranath believes
that the inevitable ecological alienation involved in metropolitan life
cripples our cognition profoundly, leaving humanity in a condition of an
ultimately destructive spiritual destitution. Intimacy with the natural world
from a formative age is the only way to restore humanity to spiritual and
ecological health. This, to him, is the core of his practical religion as well
as his pedagogy. Writing about Vishwabhaati University (which he set up in
Birbhum in Bengal) in his essay Creative Unity, he writes:
‘The one abiding ideal
in the religious life of India has been mukti, the deliverance of
man’s soul from the grip of self, its communion with the Infinite Soul through
its union in ananda with the universe… This religion of
spiritual harmony is not a theological doctrine to be taught, as a subject in
the class, for half an hour each day.
Such a religious ideal can
only be made possible by making provision for students to live in intimate
touch with nature, daily to grow in an atmosphere of service offered to all
creatures, tending trees, feeding birds and animals, learning to feel the
immense mystery of the soil and water and air.’ (Emphasis added).
In his insistence that
the surrounding presence and participation in and of the natural world is
essential to a fully conscious human life, Rabindranath Tagore is perhaps
unique among modern philosophers. More than his enormous literary corpus and
his music, beloved to millions of Bengalis, it was Santiniketan that
Rabindranath regarded as his life’s main work. Under exacting modern
conditions, it was his unique educational experiment with the ancient Indian
idea of the forest hermitage, Tapovan. Appropriately, Santiniketan
was not synthetically abstracted from the natural world in the manner of modern
educational institutions. It was dedicated to the revival of Indian rural life.
Without daily outdoor instruction in the midst of nature, human education is
crippled: this is the long-enduring message of Santiniketan, despite the
incursions of the urban mind in its daily working.
The only sensible way
to educate children and the young, Rabindranath felt, was to not sequester them
in dull, four-walled Macaulayite classrooms (which he himself ran away from at
age 14!), but to sit with them under a Bargad or a Peepul tree
and go for walks with them in the woods and the fields. Children growing up and
getting educated in schools in congested, polluted metros around the world -
mentally so far from mountains and rivers, meadows and forests - are more
likely to damage nature inadvertently as they grow up. Today, this is
especially the case, since they are ever more subject to a smartened digitised
system which runs their lives for them. In the process, their minds get
distorted, their tastes enslaved and their appetites fuelled: they end up
contributing to an aggressive culture of consumption which can only hasten
ecological catastrophe.
In Santiniketan, the
transition from one season to another (natural events which go unnoticed in
most schools around the world) was marked by festivals, many of which
Rabindranath had himself initiated. For instance, there was Briksharopan (tree-planting
ceremony), held as part of the Varshamangala celebrations on
the arrival of the monsoons, responsible in no small measure for turning the
dry red laterite of Birbhum to a verdure which survives a century on. At
neighbouring Sriniketan (a village adjoining Santiniketan, where rural crafts
were practised), at the same time of the year, the Hala Karshana (ploughing
ceremony) was celebrated.
In a prescient 1938
lecture, Aranyadebata (The God of the Forest), given at the Briksharopan
celebration,
Rabindranath speaks of the enormous significance of living in everyday kinship
with the natural world. He points out that in the past, humanity used to live
physically close to forests. This inspired a relationship of creaturely
affection and awareness (mamtabodh) towards trees, while it was also
dependant on them for a hundred material needs. Thus, it naturally understood
the importance of looking after its habitat. With the onset of urbanisation and
the growth of big cities in the modern era, humanity’s material dependance on
forests remained (and grew), but the knowledge of this fact became more opaque
and remote. Even more significantly, with greater ecological distance,
mamtabodh mutated
into nirmambhaava (mercilessness). Tagore attributes the
increasingly hotter summers of North India to the deforestation that ensued.
The Briksharopan ceremony, Rabindranath says at the end of his
lecture, was meant not only to afforest the region but to feel due regret (chhatobedana)
of inflicting the pain on nature involved in deforestation, the idea being to
restore human intimacy with nature.
Rabindranath’s
writings in all the many genres (poems, plays, stories, songs, letters, essays)
are inextricably intertwined with his intimate experience of the natural world. There is, to take just
one instance, the remarkably tender short story Bolai about a
little boy (mothered by his Kaki, since his own mother is no
more) so much in love with nature, and so attuned to her inner movements, that
he has to hide his true emotions from his friends when they slash roadside
shrubs with a cane, or break the branch of a Bakul tree, just
to tease him. Bolai develops feelings for a Shimul silk-cotton tree that starts
growing in the middle of a path in their garden at home. He does not allow his
uncle to cut the tree. However, after going away to Shimla to study, he asks in
one of his letters for a photograph of the tree. Sadly for him, his uncle has
got the tree removed, to the utter devastation of his wife (Bolai’s Kaki)
- for she had begun to see the tree as a symbol of her nephew studying
outstation. In remorse, she does not eat for two days.
In stories like Bolai or
poems like Brikshvandana and Talgachh or
letters gathered in
Chinnapatrābali, Rabindranath succeeds in
showing the intimacy of the ancient existential bond between humanity and
nature. It would seem from so many of his literary creations that humanity is
properly naturalised only when the natural world is duly personified. This is
only possible if humanity, conquering its avarice, awakens to its liberating
sentient destiny as a witness to creation. For Rabindranath, in keeping with
the vision of the Upanishads and the Vedas, the same consciousness that we
inhabit as human beings also permeates the entire natural world and the cosmos.
However, this great truth is hidden from our perception by our widely shared
illusions today. Self-realisation is necessary to human freedom and it consists
primarily in the realisation of the unity of all creation. In this sense, it is
impossible to be properly human without the constant daily touch of the natural
world of (and to) which we are born, and without which we cannot live for a day
- though we have been led to believe otherwise in a global society stupefied by
technological success and the seductive man-made hardware and software it has
produced for us to live in.
Global metropolitan
life and the increasing urbanisation of the mind (which now impacts villagers
too) involves a physical and psychological alienation from the natural world
that supports, among many other things, human life. With the physical and psychological
distance between us and what feeds us materially and spiritually comes a
structurally destructive ecological alienation which nurtures ecological
ignorance from a cognitively formative age.
In so much of his
writing, Rabindranath emphasises the manner in which modern society routinely
represses its feelings for nature to the point where they cease to exist in its
consciousness. And insofar as it does this, he is quite clear that it suffers
an inner spiritual impoverishment which allows it to participate blindly and
passively in the organised forces which contribute to ecological
destruction. Ever the prophet of
renewal, Rabindranath’s poetic vision is a challenge to the utilitarian ecology
in vogue nowadays and an invitation instead to a spiritual ecology
urgently essential to face the imperilled human predicament in late modernity.
