A Study of Utopic Education in Colonial India: Tagore, Elmhirst, Rural landscapes, and Villages

• In Event: Space, Affect and Education: Historicizing the Production of Differences

Proposal

Rabindranth Tagore, a cultural symbol in South Asia, is often deployed in the burgeoning field of global citizenship and education (Fraser, 2015; Quayum, 2023). His less known compadre, L.K. Elmhirst, is better known for interventions in alternative education and rural development in England (Hardy, 2000; Neima, 2019; Powers, 2015). My focus here will be on their work together at the Institute of Rural Reconstruction in India, now known as Sriniketan. Tagore and Elmhirst’s goal was to repurpose Bengal’s rural landscape as a space to produce a new kind of historical time in juxtaposition to imperial and nationalist temporalities. A new cosmopolitan subject could be cultivated within this new temporality opened through the rural landscape. I intend to explore the following conjuncture: why, and through what processes, did the rural landscape become the chosen site for a politics of utopia and education?

I analyze this question in two steps. First, I look at the rhythmic, poietic, and non-linear sense of time and history that Tagore invoked (Ghosh, 2015; Vajpeyi, 2012). This is key to understanding his attempt to oppose notions of linear history and Western historiography characteristic of modernity (Mitchell, 2000). I argue that the spatial parallel to this temporal juxtaposition and opening was to be found in the village and the surrounding rural landscape. The village and rural landscapes, as representational (Mitchell, 2002) and spatial (Goswami, 2010) categories, played a significant role in this conjuncture. These were categories already primed to be the site for utopics (Hetherington, 2001). The key point to note is that the village and its surrounding rural landscape were treated as lying partially or totally outside the domain of capitalist-modernity. This had spatial and temporal significance. At once, the village was a space that was not fully subsumed by capitalist-modernity, nor had the linear and evolutionary time of Western historiography completely penetrated its temporal dimension. The uniqueness of capitalist-modernity as a historical process is that it continuously produces an ‘outside’ while simultaneously trying to engulf it (Harootunian, 2015). I situate Tagore and Elmhirst’s project within this continuous process of inclusion and exclusion. While the village and rural landscapes as representation and spatial categories were products of capitalist-modernity, nevertheless, they opened as sites for utopics. Tagore and Elmhirst exploited this in their endeavors.

The second step of my analysis looks at how such utopics gained concrete shape. I intend to explore the pedagogical techniques and strategies Tagore and Elmhirst intended to implement at the Institute of Rural Reconstruction. I take a close look at the kinds of subjectivities that were presupposed, namely the de facto villager and the child learner. For both Elmhirst and Tagore, there was something immanent in children and villagers that needed to be preserved and cultivated. This immanent tendency was the outside to existing forms of education, similar to how the village was considered as outside capitalist-modernity. Therefore the child and the villager, much like the village, could become a site for utopics.

Author

• Debopam Sen, University of Wisconsin Madison