Shantiniketan/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
By Rabindranath Tagore
The greatest teachers in ancient India, whose names are still remembered, were forest-dwellers. By the shady border of some sacred river or Himalayan lake they built their altar of fire, grazed their cattle, harvested wild rice and fruits for their food, lived with their wives and children in the bosom of primeval nature, meditated upon the deepest problems of the soul, and made it their object of life to grow in sympathy with all creation and in communion with the Supreme Being. There students flocked round them and had their lessons of immortal life in the atmosphere of truth, peace and freedom of the spirit.
Though in later ages circumstances changed and numerous kingdoms, great and small, flourished in wealth and power, and forests began to give way to towns with multiplication of luxuries in the homes of the rich, the highest ideals of civilisation in our country ever remained the ideals of those forest sanctuaries. All our great classic poets in their epic verses and dramas looked back with reverence upon that golden daybreak of the awakenment of India's soul.
In the modern time my turn has also come to dream of that age towering above all ages of subsequent history in the greatness of its simplicity and wisdom of pure life. While spending a great part of my youth in the riverside solitude of the sandbanks of the Padma, a time came when I woke up to the call of the spirit of my country and felt impelled to dedicate my life in furthering the purpose that lies in the heart of her history. I seemed choked for breath in the hideous nightmare of our present time, meaningless in its petty ambitions of poverty, and felt in me the struggle of my motherland for awakening in spiritual emancipation. Our endeavours after political agitation seemed to me unreal to the core and pitifully feeble in their utter helplessness. I felt that it is a blessing of providence that begging should be an unprofitable profession and that only to him who hath shall be given. I said to myself that we must seek for our own inheritance and with it buy our true place in the world.
Then came to me a vision of the fulness of the inner man which was attained in India in the solemn seclusion of her forests when the rest of the world was hardly awake. The truth became clear to me that India had cut her path and broadened it for ages, the path that leads to a life reaching beyond death, rising high above the idealisation of political selfishness and the insatiable lust for accumulation of materials. The voice came to me in the Vedic tongue from the ashrams, the forest sanctuaries of the past, with the call—“Come to me as the rivers to the sea, as the days and nights to the completion of their annual cycle. Let our taking and imparting truth be full of the radiance of light. Let us never come into conflict with one another. Let our minds speed towards their supreme good.”
My heart responded to that call and I determined to do what I could to bring to the surface, for our daily use and purification, the stream of ideals that originated in the summit of our past, flowing underground in the depth of India’s soil,—the ideals of simplicity of life, clarity of spiritual vision, purity of heart, harmony with the universe, and consciousness of the infinite personality in all creation.
I knew that the lessons of the modern schools and the tendencies of the present time were aggressively antagonistic to these ideals, but also I was certain that the ancient teachers of India were right when they said with a positive assurance: “It is an absolute death to depart from this life without realising the Eternal Truth of life.”
Thus the exclusiveness of my literary life burst its barriers, coming into touch with the deeper aspirations of my country which lay hidden in her heart. I came to live in the Shantiniketan sanctuary founded by my father and there gradually gathered round me, under the shades of sal trees, boys from distant homes.
This was the time when Satish Chandra Roy, the author of the following little story, felt attracted to me and to my ideas and devoted himself to building up of the ashram and serving the boys with living food from the fulness of his life. He was barely nineteen, but he was born with a luminosity of soul. In him the spirit of renunciation was a natural product of an extraordinary capacity for enjoyment of life. All his student days he had been struggling with poverty—and yet he cheerfully gave up all chances of worldly prospects when they were near at hand and took his place in the ashram because it was truly his by right. He would have needed no recommendation from me, but unfortunately he died young before he had time to fulfil his promise, leaving the record of his greatness only in the memory of his friends.
I cannot but conclude this preface of mine with an extract from my lecture about Shantiniketan where I have described his connection with the ashram.
“Fortunately for me, Satish Chandra Roy, a young student of great promise, who was getting ready for his B.A. degree, became attracted to my school and devoted his life to carrying out my idea. He was barely nineteen but he had a wonderful soul, living in a world of ideas, keenly responsive to all that was beautiful and great in the realm of nature and of the human mind. He was a poet who, if he had lived, would surely have taken his place among the immortals of world-literature, but he died when he was twenty, thus offering his service to our school only for the period of one short year. With him boys never felt that they were confined in the limits of a teaching class, they seemed to have their access to everywhere. They would go with him to the forest when in the spring the sal trees were in full blossom, and he would recite to them his favourite poems, frenzied with excitement. He used to read to them Shakespeare and even Browning—for he was a great lover of Browning—explaining to them in Bengali with his wonderful power of expression. He never had any feeling of distrust for the boys’ capacity of understanding; he would talk and read to them about whatever was the subject in which he himself was interested. He knew that it was not at all necessary for the boys to understand literally and accurately, but that their minds should be roused, and in this he was always successful. He was not like other teachers, a mere vehicle of text-books. He made his teaching personal, he himself was the source of it, and therefore it was made of life-stuff easily assimilable by living human nature. The real reason of his successes was his intense interest in life, in ideas, in everything around him, in the boys who came in contact with him. He had his inspiration not through the medium of books but through the direct communication of his sensitive mind with the world. The seasons had upon him the same effect as they had upon the plants. He seemed to feel in his blood the unseen messages of nature that are always travelling through space, floating in the air, shimmering in the leaves, tingling in the roots of the grass under the earth. The literature that he studied had not the least smell of the library about it. He had the power to see ideas before him, as he could see his friends, with all the distinctness of form and subtlety of life.”