I begin AGAIN by telling about the Friday evening before we left for Shantinikitin, July 11. We went to a performance of classical Indian dance and accompanying music at the Tagore Center, which was appropriate, because he founded the school we were going to visit; 5 of his homes are in the village, and we were also visiting a village manufacturing co-op he started. Rabinandrath Tagore won the Nobel prize in 1913; he's not much discussed in the West any more, but he is revered in India, where his lyrics are used in both the National and the Bengali anthems, and his photo and words can be found on billboards, train walls, and schools everywhere. The dance we went to see was based on the cycle of the seasons. I was a little confused about whether it was old or a modern composition, but I think Tagore had something to do with it at some point.
The auditorium was very full, so I stood in back, where I was happy because there was lots of room and a fan. Someone later told us that free performances like this of Indian classical works used to be held weekly all over Kolkata, but now they are rare. I don't know why; there certainly seemed to be a lot of interest. More and more people came in. A man came out and yelled at all the parents to stop having their children take a whole seat. "Two or three children to a seat is fine!" Some reluctantly shifted. Finally he came back and yelled at all the students to get out of the seats and sit in the aisle stairs, which they did, filling them nicely. A seat then opened by my group which I had to take, though I kind of liked it where I was.
I loved the performance, though like Dad "I may have dozed off" a few times--another danger of The Chair! I had forgotten how much I enjoy watching dance, and Indian dance is especially delightful. I love the bent knee and the sideways feet, the hyper-articulated fingers, and especially the big sideways glances. This Bengali dance has a lot of Thai style in it, which helped me see, as does the food here, how the Bay of Bengal is like the Mediterranean--a pond with all these civilizations around its edges interacting with each other.
The next day we had to leave at 4:30 AM to catch the train to Shantinikitan at Howrah Station. I have always wanted to see Howrah Station, since it is in Kipling and other literary places, and is associated in my mind with intrigue and adventure. To me, however, Howrah Station was like a hell, my worst experience here so far, so much that all weekend I dreaded coming back through there.
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| It is huge, and it was raining |
SO, I was hurrying to keep up and also watching my feet, which you always have to do here, and plunged into the station without stopping to get my bearings or see what was ahead of me, and suddenly I was in the midst of this place and I couldn't see the other people in my group. There are some interesting things I would have liked to look at:
There are Indian families having picnics on bright clothes spread out on the cavernous waiting room's floor, all kinds of clerks behind grills wearing green shade visors and what looked like some kind of arm garters, people selling everything. But there is also chaos: black, shadowy walls, an absolute crush of humanity, beggars both pathetic and frightening tugging on your sleeve, an acrid stench of urine, a noise level so high that the person walking next to you is inaudible, holes full of liquid that appear without warning, platform edges that you can't see coming. In an instant I began to panic. Even though actually the worst outcome of missing my train would have been the need to take a cab back to the hotel, I felt as if failing to find these people and the train would mean being trapped forever in that place--it was completely irrational.
Anyway, I spotted them, we caught the train, it was no problem. But it was still an awful experience.
We were in the first class air conditioned section of the train. It was not clean, but it was fairly cool, we each had an assigned seat, and the ride was fine.
This is John Wensman in the front, an English teacher from Minneapolis. On the left in Sumanta, our very patient babysitter on the trip, Caitlin, the Resident Director, and Jodi, another English teacher from Baltimore. Although the train does not have teeny TV screens in the back of the seats like Emirates has, it does have this guy:
Here we all are arriving in the Shantinikitin station after a 3 hour trip. Drew on the left, a Science teacher from Long Beach, Alexis in the white tee, another English teacher, from Greensboro NC, my school and cab mate Sarah in the green tee in back, another Sarah doing the thumbs-up, also ENglish, from Wisconsin, John Clark--Science from Florida in the left-hand yellow tee, Dan Hall, Math, from Baltimore on the end.
You can see we are in a much more rural area, and it was VERY hot and VERY moist.
This is where we stayed. It was not the Oberoi, but it was basically ok.
In fact, I laughed when I saw the place because it looked so much like an older US, especially Southern CA, motel.
I was not crazy about the head stains on the headboard, plus a cockroach came out from under the cupboard, but the main problem was my bedbug phobia. So I had to keep peeking to see if the cockroach ventured out after I chased it back under the TV with my shoe, and then every few minutes I had to turn the light on very very quickly, flinging back the sheets so as to catch any bedbugs in their stealthy advancement toward my legs. Also I was waiting for a snake to poke its head up through this plumbing job in the bathroom:
So finally I just sat up in the chair and read Bring Out the Bodies most of the night , and all was well.
Tagore believed in common with many of his European
contemporaries, like Steiner and all, that education should focus on the Arts,
that children should be taught in and through nature. Amartya Sen, the
economist whose co-written book I spoke of earlier, went to school there, so its not just a touchy-feely school.
The
campus, as you can see, is lovely, with shade, breezes, fruit trees, and
picturesque groups of children and young adults engaged in creative work or
intense discussion. It is in fact reminiscent of many idyllic intellectual
communities found by the Enterprise on various Class M planets, right before
their ideal life is shattered by the Troglytes, Klingons, or Captain Kirk’s
hormones.
Where in America you see the ideas of the original designers
of kindergarten or Waldorf education mutate and evolve over time, in India the
original concept and plans of Tagore are preserved religiously, in the
tradition of attention to the words of the guru. Tagore is so revered that we
remove our shoes to visit his former homes or even his museum and library, just
as if these were temples. We visited the office of the Director of Tagore’s
library and museum, a very learned lady who gave us delicious tea in beautiful
tiny porcelain cups (Some who know me well know that I rate cafes according to
the quality of their tea, using a very strict set of criteria. In spite of the
absence of lemon I give the entire subcontinent of India ‘full marks’, as they
say in school here and in other anglophile school systems, for Excellent Tea of
All Types!). She gave us a very interesting talk on Tagore and the tasks of the
museum and its scholarship and shared some of its publications with us. Among
other interesting aspects of our visit with her, I asked her at one point what
other Indian writers she would consider great and recommend we read. The only
writer she could list who might approach but not reach the status of Tagore was
Shakespeare.When we meet I will tell you more about this august lady.
Tagore was a fascinating polymath with his fingers in many rasgulla. In addition to literature and education, he took a great
interest in architecture. He added 4 houses to the original Shantinikitin
mansion owned by his father, and would move from house to house depending on
his needs or mood. One was a classic Indian “bungalow”, which was fascinating
for a person from California, although I may have written about this already. I
knew that our bungalows came from the Indian tradition, but I didn’t know the
traditions were so intact—the deep porches or in Hindi, ‘verandahs’, the tapered columns, plastered or stuccoed walls, deep windows with built-in seats, even the typical floor plans. They are very pleasant types of houses in the Indian climate. One of Tagore's houses was built of terra-cotta, and supposedly was very cool in summer, though apparently it's not holding up well. At that point my problematic camera had betrayed me, but I think you can probably see all his houses online.
This is one of the school directors. She arranged for us to have a meal and discussion time with teachers from different levels, and this was great. Instead of a program or welcome show, we really got to talk in small groups about our two education systems, our shared goals, etc. I hear that Bengalis are famous for their love of conversation, gossip, disputation, and discussion, and I have certainly found this to be very enjoyably true of the people I have spent social time with here--easy to talk to, interesting, witty and engaging.
I took lots of pictures for Eric of the various rickety bamboo scaffoldings I saw because I thought it would freak him out, but on Skype he said bamboo scaffolding was the best, which took all the fun out of it. I'm still pretty sure he hasn't seen scaffolding like you see here...
We visited this tea house in the evening and sat a long time.There are some very pretty houses in this village with nice gardens--I wondered if they might be professors' homes, and also many beautiful birds, including green parrots. A few weeks later when we went on a walking tour of North Kolkata I asked the professor/guide about gentrification. He had shown us examples of interesting and often beautiful old buildings with great historical stories, most in disrepair. With a growing group of wealthy and successful younger people, do they never buy old places and restore them, as is so common in US cities? He said there was no interest in this. In this village, however, some of the houses looked like people with money lived there and had made improvements.
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| After seeing these outside the restaurant, however, I was glad we didn't eat dinner there. |
I will not venture into literary discussion of Tagore here, but I am especially fascinated by his interactions with the west in that turn of the century Victorian period of artistic change. Look at this room and wonder--William Morris or Indian traditional--which comes first? This level of reverence for an author is a new experience for Americans. You have to love a country so passionate about its poetry that they post it on the walls of every train. Still, by the time you have entered all 5 houses, some Americans, I can't imagine which ones, might have been heard claiming they had found Tagore's button on the ground, or Tagore's favorite small rock, or wondering why there was no visit to Tagore's Toilet. Some people have no respect.
Later that day we visited a village which is a handicrafts center. This center was founded by Tagore.
We were being driven around on a large bus which said "TOURIST" in giant letters across the front. The bus could not go down the path/road to this village, so we walked about 1/2-3/4 mile in. The young man who showed us the way said he had not, but his parents had, seen tigers in the brush along this path.
Some have said this village structure was a bit of a Petit Trianon for Tagore, but he also had a sort of Jeffersonian vision for rural independence. He wanted local craftspeople to support themselves from their artistry and be able to remain in the village environment. For a while the handicrafts association was defunct, but it has been revived by wealthy philanthropists as a way to help the rural people, who are very poor and isolated indeed. I was amazed to see, 3 hours by train from Kolkata, that there are people living with no modern technology, by which I mean such as electricity, plumbing, running water, tribal people who do not really interact with the modern world, are not literate, and really appear to be from another time.
Many times in India we have been taken to a hand crafts center and shown people working with hand-made tools, for example grinding marble using a griner powered by a twirled string. However, you will see these exact same pieces all over India and even in Sonoma, so you know they are not all made in that little shop. There is either an enormous factory, or there are thousands and thousands of such little shops. From what I have seen of labor in India, however, they probably are all using these antique tools--why would you buy an electric drill when this workman and his string will probably work his whole life to earn the price of one small power tool? Jobs for more people? Better working conditions for fewer people? Every choice has difficulties. At least we knew that in this big gift shop most of the money would go back to the workers and the local economy. Plus, to destroy any impression that I am a virtuous shopper, way cheap.
I took this photo in the village because I get a big kick out of how the weeds and natural flora here are often our stereotypical houseplants. Look at this philodendron--each of those lower leaves is about 10 inches across.
There were also some musicians to welcome us outside the shop.
Finally, I have restored at least some semblance of the missing entry!
