Rabindranath Tagore and Rural Reconstruction by Dr Christine Marsh

Rabindranath Tagore was ‘a poet who was an indefatigable man of action’,[1] whose son said of him that ‘his greatest poem is the life he has lived.’[2] Tagore saw rural reconstruction as his ‘life’s work’.[3] There were three main phases to his endeavours. The first was while he was managing the family estates in the 1890s, the second was the national programme of ‘constructive swadeshi’ he put forward in 1903-8, the third was Sriniketan, a department of his Visva-Bharati university, in the 1920s. Read more

Sriniketan: An Institute of Rural Reconstruction

The final experiments at Visva-Bharati took form in 1922 with the establishment of an institute of rural reconstruction named Sriniketan, abode of prosperity. Rabindranath insisted from the outset that an Indian education would be incomplete without a relationship with the village as the majority of Indians lived in the villages, and without inculcating a moral responsibility for their survival among the educated classes in India. Read more