Summary of Sobbhotar proti
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Answer:
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 stonehearted 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)
Sabhyatar-Prati is 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. It was only one among thousands of poems, songs, plays and stories where Rabindranath Tagore 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 with 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 Vishwabharati University (at Santiniketan, 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 (bliss) 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. Executed 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 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.