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The Prophetic Environmentalism of Rabindranath Tagore

The great British historian E. P. Thompson once remarked that “India is not an important country, but perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. Here is a country that merits no one’s condescension. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East which is not active in some Indian mind.” Some may cavil at his assertion that India is (or ever was) the most important country for the future of the world. But I want rather to endorse Thompson’s other claim —
namely, that there has been an astonishing diversity of intellectual opinion in India. This is a product of the country’s size, its cultural heterogeneity, and its daring (if admittedly imperfect) attempt to construct a democratic political system in a deeply hierarchical society. Indeed, among the countries of the so-called Global South, India is notable for the vigor, sophistication, and self-confidence of its intellectual traditions. In this respect it stands out even compared to its larger neighbor China, where the scholarly legacy of the past has been brutally crushed by a totalitarian state. 

For too long a significant strand of the Indian intellectual tradition has been neglected: its rich speculations about the past, present, and possible future of human relations with the natural world. The burgeoning contemporary literature
on the history of environmentalism is also guilty of this omission, owing to its narrow geographical focus. The challenge to American intellectual hegemony in this field first came from Europe, and what took place there was noticed in America. The traffic of ideas across the Atlantic was intense. Yet the conversation has been conducted as if environmental movements and environmental thinkers could not exist outside Europe and North America. 

I hasten to add that this bias did not originate in any sort of colonialist condescension or feeling of racial superiority. Rather, it most likely had its roots in conventional social science wisdom, which stubbornly held that environmentalism was a “full stomach” phenomenon, possible only in societies where a certain level of material prosperity had been reached. By the canons of orthodox social science, countries such as India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, too poor to be green. As the economist Lester Thurow notoriously remarked in 1980,
“If you look at the countries that are interested in environmentalism, or at the individuals who support environmentalism within each country, one is struck by the extent to which environmentalism is an interest of the upper middle class. Poor countries and poor individuals simply aren’t interested.”

This haughty dismissal of any possibility of poor countries being interested in the fate of the natural environment was, at least with regard to India, years out of date. In the spring of 1973, a popular peasant movement in the Himalaya, known as Chipko, threatened to hug the hill forests to stop them from being felled by commercial loggers. Many of the participants
were unlettered, but its leaders, though themselves from peasant backgrounds, were informed and articulate about the wider issues. They wrote essays and tracts (usually in Hindi) tracing the direct link between industrial forestry, soil erosion, landslides, and floods. These showed that what at one level was an economic conflict — between the subsistence demands of peasants for fuel, fodder, and so on, and the commercial motivations of paper and plywood companies — had deeper ecological implications as well. 

Still, the incomprehension persisted. Consider these remarks, from 1994, by Eric Hobsbawm: “It is no accident that the main support for ecological policies comes from the rich countries and from the comfortable rich and middle classes (except for businessmen, who hope to make money by polluting activity). The poor, multiplying and under–employed, wanted more ‘development’, not less.” Unlike Thurow, Hobsbawm was a historian — a great historian, and therefore more attentive to the messiness of social life, more interested in exploring hidden details than in postulating grand generalizations. And unlike Thurow, whose life was lived largely within the North American academy, Hobsbawm had a keen interest in Latin America, a continent he traveled widely in. He kept himself abreast of current events in Africa and Asia. One would have thought a scholar as learned and well-informed as Hobsbawm would have heard of the Chipko movement in the Himalaya or the Green Belt movement in Kenya. Or at least, given his strong connections with Latin America, of the movement of Chico Mendes and the rubber tappers in Brazil — another example of the environmentalism of the poor. Perhaps Hobsbawm’s Marxist faith did not allow him to see environmentalism as anything other than a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle.

Chipko was followed by a series of other grassroots initiatives around community access to forests, pasture, and water. They likewise posited subsistence versus commerce, the village versus the city, the peasant versus the state, the subaltern versus the elite. Studying and reflecting on these conflicts, some scholars argued that they showed the way to reconfiguring India’s development path. Given the country’s population densities, and the fragility of tropical ecologies, India had erred in following the energy-intensive, capital-
intensive, resource-intensive model of economic development pioneered by the West. When the country got its freedom from British rule in 1947, it should have instead adopted a more bottom-up, community-oriented, and environmentally prudent pattern of development. And yet, the argument further proceeded, it was not too late to make amends. 

The environmental debate in India was at its most vigorous in the 1980s. Scientists, social scientists, journalists, and activists all contributed to it. The debate operated at many levels: philosophical, political, social, technological. It touched on the moral and cultural aspects of humanity’s relations with nature; on the changes required in the distribution of power to promote environmental sustainability; on the design of appropriate technologies that could simultaneously meet economic as well as ecological objectives. The debate embraced all resource sectors — forests, water, soil, transport, energy, biodiversity, pollution, and industrial safety.

The post-Chipko environmental upsurge led to some institutional changes within India. New laws seeking to conserve forests, protect wildlife, and control pollution were enacted. In 1980 the government of India started a new Department of Environment, upgraded later into a full-fledged Ministry of Environment and Forests. New centers of ecological research were set up in Indian universities. Terms such as “ecological history,” “environmental sociology, “and “ecological economics” began entering the teaching curricula and research agendas of the academy. A new breed of “environmental journalists” came into existence, and their reports on forests, pollution, biodiversity, and grassroots struggles featured in newspapers and magazines.

In those years, thinkers and activists in India played a profound role in shaping global conversations about humanity’s relationship with nature as well. Indian scholars proposed the idea of “livelihood environmentalism” in contrast to the “full-stomach environmentalism” of the affluent world. Some of the most pungent criticisms of excessive consumption in the West came from Indian writers. Scientists such as Madhav Gadgil and A. K. N. Reddy, journalists such as Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, and activists such as Medha Patkar and Ashish Kothari acquired international reputations. Ideas first developed in India were discussed and debated in other countries and continents.

And then there was the early and original example of Rabindranath Tagore — the poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist; the man who transformed the Bengali language through his prose; the composer who wrote hundreds of songs and set them to music, many of which are still sung decades after his death, among them the national anthems of Bangladesh and of India; the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize and the founder of a major university; the friend of Mahatma Gandhi and the mentor of Jawaharlal Nehru; the painter who took up his brush in his late sixties; the restless traveler who made three trips to Japan and five trips to the United States, and spent time in Europe, Latin America, China, Indonesia and Iran, winning friends, admirers and the occasional critic in all these places. But he was also one other thing. He was a precocious environmentalist — an unacknowledged founder of the modern environmental movement. 

It is past time to recover Tagore’s thoughts on how nature shapes human life and how humans shape nature. His writings on the use and abuse of nature were more important to his worldview and literary achievement than has generally been recognized. (There are a few notable exceptions: in the 1960s, Niharranjan Ray and G. D. Khanolkar wrote insightfully on the subject.) The rehabilitation of Tagore’s environmental thought is not merely of academic interest; his words and warnings speak directly to the environmental challenges that confront India and the world today. 

Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861, into a family of wealth and privilege. In his memoirs, he says of the Bengali children’s primer which gave him the first elements of an education that the “two literary delights that still linger” in his memory were both images of nature”: “the rain patters, the leaf quivers” and “the rain falls pit-a-pat, the tide comes up the river.”

 

Tagore grew up in the family home in the north Calcutta locality of Jorasanko. This was a three-storied mass of buildings built around several courtyards, in which lived several generations of family members as well as their maids, cooks, and bearers. A room that Rabindranath frequented as a little boy had a window, from which he saw “a tank with a flight of masonry steps leading down into the water; on the west bank, along the garden wall, an immense banyan tree; to the south a fringe of cocoa-nut plants. Ringed round as I was near this window, I would spend the whole day peering through the drawn venetian shutters, gazing and gazing on this scene as on a picture-book.”

In this pool adjacent to the Tagores’ house, their poorer neighbors came to bathe. The child watched them with fascination, noting their idiosyncrasies — one man “who would never step into the water himself but be content with only squeezing his wet towel repeatedly over his head,” another “who jumped in from the top steps without any preliminaries at all,” a third who “would walk slowly in, step by step, muttering his morning prayers the while.” As the morning progressed the line of bathers grew thinner, until the “bathing-place would be deserted and become silent. Only the ducks remained, paddling about after water snails, or busy preening their feathers…” 

Once the humans had departed, the boy’s attention wandered to the birds, and then, to a large tree that lay at the tank’s edge. He was fascinated by the “dark complication of coils at its base.” It was of this tree that many years later the poet wrote:

With tangled roots hanging down from your branches, O ancient banyan tree,

You stand still day and night, like an ascetic at his penances,

Do you ever remember the child whose fancy played with your shadows?

Of his childhood encounters with nature Tagore was to remark: “How intimately did the life of the world throb for us in those days! Earth, water, foliage and sky, they all spoke to us and would not be disregarded.”

Tagore’s memoirs were written when he was approaching the age of fifty. Towards the end of the book, he reflected on what nature had meant to him over the course of his life:

From my earliest years I enjoyed a simple and intimate communion with Nature. Each one of the cocoa-nut trees in our garden had for me a distinct personality. When, on coming home from [school], I saw behind the sky-line of our roof-terrace blue-gray, water-laden clouds thickly banked up, the immense depth of gladness which filled me, all in a moment, I can recall clearly even now. On opening my eyes every morning, the blithely awakening world used to call me to join it like a playmate; the perfervid noonday sky, during the long silent watches of the siesta hours, would spirit me away from the workaday world into the recesses of its hermit cell; and the darkness of night would open the door to its phantom paths, and take me over all the seven seas and thirteen rivers, past all possibilities and impossibilities, right into its wonderland.

Tagore’s family owned vast estates in the eastern part of the Bengal Presidency. When he was in his twenties, his father commanded him to oversee their holdings and their management. He went reluctantly, loth to leave his family and the city, but once there he fell in love with the landscape of deltaic Bengal. His letters to his family are redolent with natural imagery, as he delicately describes the interplay of land, water, plants and animals. Here is a typical example, from a letter written by Tagore to his niece Indira Debi sometime in the 1890s, from an unnamed place in eastern Bengal:

Our boat is moored off a lonely grass-covered island in the river. The world is at rest. What a glorious day it is, today! Such loveliness all around! After many days I am really meeting Mother Earth again, and it is as if she says “Here he is.” and I reply “Here is she.” We sit side by side without stir or speech. The water gurgles, the sunlight sparkles, the sand crunches. Tiny wild shrubs crane their heads to watch. A stray bird gets up calling chik-chik. It’s all like a dream, and I feel like writing on and on, just about that and nothing else — the gurgle of the water, the glitter and shimmer of the sunshine, and all the dreaminess of this island. I want to wander day after day along these sandy banks, and write about nothing but this — oh, how badly I want to!

And this, from another letter by Tagore to his niece Indira, written in 1895 from the family estate in Shelidah in Eastern Bengal: 

We can draw a deep and secret joy from nature only because we feel a profound kinship with it. These green, fresh, ever-renewing trees, creepers, grasses and lichens, these flowing streams, these winds, the ceaseless play of light and shade, the cycle of the seasons, the stream of heavenly bodies filling the limitless sky, the countless orders of life — we are related to all this through the blood-beat in our pulse — we are bound by the same rhythm as the entire universe.

These letters, written in Bengali, bear comparison to the writings of American naturalists in the nineteenth century, exploring new landscapes with wonder and excitement, capturing their diversities of species and habitats in their prose. The “profound kinship” that Tagore felt with nature makes him akin to John Muir. We know Muir as a pioneering American environmentalist, but this label has thus far been denied the Indian poet, perhaps because his attention to nature, though impressive enough, was merely one part of his extraordinarily various and multi-faceted achievement. 

 

When he was about thirteen, Rabindranath was taken by his father for a long holiday in the Himalayas. Above the town of Dalhousie (in present-day Himachal Pradesh) the family rented a bungalow. As they climbed up from the plains — father and son being carried on a palanquin by bearers — the terraced hillsides “were all aflame with the beauty of the flowering spring crops.” The boy’s “eyes had no rest the livelong day, so great was my fear lest anything should escape them. Wherever, at a turn of the road into a gorge, the great forest trees were found clustering closer, and from underneath their shade a waterfall trickling out, like a little daughter of the hermitage playing at the feet of hoary sages rapt in meditation, babbling its way over the black moss-covered rocks, there the jhampan bearers would put down their burden, and take a rest. Why, oh why, had we to leave such spots behind, cried my thirsting heart, why could we not stay on there for ever?”

When he was sixteen, the young man was sent to England for a spell. He first lived in London, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to learn Latin from a tutor. He went for an excursion to the Devon countryside, and was charmed by what he saw. “I cannot tell you happy I was,” he wrote later, “with the hills there, the sea, the flower-covered meadows, the shade of the pine woods…” One day he walked down to the coast, where he found a “flat bit of overhanging rock reaching out as with a perpetual eagerness over the waters; rocked on the foam-flecked waves of the liquid blue in front, the sunny sky slept smilingly to its lullaby; behind, the shade of the pines lay spread like the slipped-off garment of some languorous wood-nymph.” His sensitivity to the natural world was preternatural.

Tagore was traveling in Europe from the time he was a young boy. It was in 1916, when he was in his early fifties, that he visited Japan for the first time. It was a long and leisurely journey by ship, from Calcutta to the capital of British Burma, Rangoon, and from there to the town of Penang in British Malaya, and from there on to the Chinese city of Hong Kong, also a British protectorate, and from Hong Kong to his final destination, the island nation of Japan, a country that had never been ruled by Europeans (and which thereby added to Tagore’s fascination for it). En route the poet kept a diary, where he recorded his impressions of the ever-changing human and natural world that he and his traveling companions
were to encounter. 

Tagore’s first impressions of the premier port of Malaya were altogether pleasant. 

Our ship reached the port of Penang just as the sun was setting. Seeing the water and land clasp each other in a bond of love, I had a deep sense of the earth’s beauty. The earth, stretching both its arms, was embracing the sea. The faint rays of light that pierced the clouds and fell on the bluish mountains were like the thin vein of gold that covers the face of a bride without completely hiding her features. Water, land and sky played together a divine tune from the gates of heaven as the evening approached. 

But as the great steamship he was on prepared to dock, Tagore’s mood grew darker. 

As our ship slowly drew near the wharves, the full horror of the great effort of man to overcome nature became conspicuous: the machine was cutting with its sharp, angular claws into the soft curves of nature. What ugliness the enemies of man within him can create! On every beach, in every port, the greed of man is making grotesque faces at the sky — and thereby banishing itself from the kingdom of heaven.

In 1927, a decade after his journey to Japan via various British-ruled ports, Tagore chose to visit the Dutch East Indies. This time the poet does not appear to have kept a detailed diary on board. Fortunately, we have a letter he wrote to his niece Pratima describing his first impressions of the little and predominantly Hindu island of Bali. 

When we crossed over to Bali we saw the Earth in all the freshness of its eternal youth. The old centuries here have their ever new incarnation. The habitations of its people nestle in the lap of shaded woodlands, lulled in a limpid leisure —a leisure decorated with preparations for frequent festivity. In this secluded little island there are no railroads. The railway train is the vehicle of modernity. The modern age is miserly, and reluctant to make provision for any kind of surplus; time is money, says the modern man and, in order to avoid any waste of it, the panting locomotive perspires smokily as it thunders on from country to country. But in this island of Bali the modern time has spread itself over the past centuries and become one with them. It has no need to shorten time, for everything belongs here to all time, as much to the past as to the present. Just as its seasons flow along, opening out flowers of many a color, ripening fruits of many a flavor, so also do its people live on from generation to generation, sustaining the superfluity of their traditional ceremonials, rich in form and color, song and dance.

Tagore’s evocation of the rural-ecological idyll of Bali continues:

But if railways are not, there is the modern globe-trotter, and for him there are motor cars. What if this child of a constricted age has come into the land of unbounded leisure — he must all the same get through his sight-
seeing and his enjoyment within the minimum time. For myself, as I was being whirled along by hills and woods and villages, raising clouds of dust, I felt all the while that this was above all the place where one should walk. There is not much of a loss if one’s eyes are raced over rows of buildings lining a street, but where, on either side of the road, feasts of beauty offer their regalement, this steed of emergency should be kept interned in its garage.

In the 1920s, the motor car was widely admired as a sign of progress and human achievement, though from our own perspective a hundred years later one cannot but see it as having contributed rather substantially to global warming. Tagore was not prophetic enough to recognize this, of course. Yet it would be a mistake to portray him, as some of his contemporaries did, as an anti-modern Luddite. Rather, he was working his way towards a vision where technological innovation would serve humans and harmonize with nature, rather than dominate them both utterly. He appreciated Bali because its inhabitants did not seek to conquer time or space in the manner of the residents of New York or London. In this little island, the fields, the houses, the modes of transport, all reflected a way of life that sought to blend and merge culture with nature.

Tagore prized technological innovations on the human scale, where man was a partner rather than a servant of the machine. This passage, written as his ship was entering Penang, is suggestive:

In the harbor we saw many small boats. There are few things created by man as beautiful as these small sailing boats that skim over the surface of the water to the rhythm of the wind. Indeed, when men have to move in tune with nature their creations cannot be anything but beautiful. The boat has to make friends with the winds and the waves, and so it comes to partake of their beauty; whereas a machine, pretending to look down upon nature from the pinnacle of its power, only displays by this vanity its own ugliness. A steamship has many advantages over a sailing vessel, but the beauty has been lost.

Decent English translations of Tagore’s early nature poetry are hard to come by. Among the exceptions is a sonnet by Tagore entitled “Sabhyatar Prati” (“To Civilization”) and originally published in 1896 in his collection Chaitali. The poem sharply contrasts the soulless, denaturalized, and concretized city of Calcutta with the verdant beauties of the rural landscape of eastern Bengal. As translated by the Bangladeshi scholar Fakrul Alam, the sonnet reads:

Give back the wilderness; take back the city —
Embrace if you will your steel, brick and stone walls
O 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 stone-hearted 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.

Tagore’s most famous poem is the verse sequence Gitanjali, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. The previous year he was in London, where, at the home of the painter William Rothenstein, he read some of his early poems in his own English translations. In attendance was his friend C. F. Andrews, who later provided a report of the soirée for readers back in India. Andrews remarked: “At every verse the Bengal scenery — the Monsoon storm clouds, the surging seas, the pure white mountains, the flowers and fields, the lotus on the lake, the village children at play, the market throng, the pilgrim shrine—came before the eyes, molded into melodies of exquisite sweetness.” And twenty years after the publication of Gitanjali, Tagore composed a volume of poems called Banabani (The Voice of the Forest), which approached trees and the forest in a mystical and religious spirit. The opening poem of the collection “Vrikshavandana” (“A Prayer to the Tree”) reads, in translation:

O Tree, you are the adi-prana [first or original breath], you were the first to hear the call of the sun and to liberate life from the prison-house of the rock. You represent the first awakening of consciousness. You brought to the earth beauty and peace. Before you the earth was speechless; you filled her breath with music.

This was published when Tagore was in his seventies. His poems thus display a lifelong engagement with nature, with what plants, trees, birds, animals, as well as land, sky and water, meant to him and the human world to which he belonged, and also with the human responsibility for not damaging nature’s blessings and wonders.

In 1914, Tagore published his first extended piece of writing in English. It provided an outline of his thinking on morality, aesthetics, and faith. The tract, called Sadhana, began by speaking of the role of forests in Indian culture. It “was in the forests that our civilization had its birth,” he declared, “and it took a distinct character from this origin and environment. It was surrounded by the vast life of nature, was fed and clothed by her, and had the closest and most constant intercourse with her varying aspects.” 

“To realize this great harmony between man’s spirit and the spirit of the world,” continued Tagore, 

was the endeavour of the forest-dwelling sages of ancient India. Even after the forests had given way to cultivated fields, and cities and kingdoms had emerged, Indians continued to look back with adoration upon the early ideal of strenuous self-realization, and the dignity of the simple life of the forest hermitage, and drew its best inspiration from the wisdom stored there.

Tagore contrasted this attitude with that of the West, which “seems to take a pride in thinking that it is subduing nature; as if we are living in a hostile world where we have to wrest everything we want from an unwilling and alien arrangement of things.” Tagore argued that “in the west the prevalent feeling is that nature belonged exclusively to inanimate things and to beasts, that there is a sudden unaccountable break’” between humans and nature. He firmly rejected such a view. “The Indian mind,” he claimed, never has any hesitation in acknowledging its kinship with nature, its unbroken relation with all.”

In another essay, published five years later, Tagore called the forests “the one great inheritance” of India and Indians. He offered an intriguing contrast between how forests shaped Indian history and how the sea had shaped the history of northern Europe. “In the sea,” he wrote, “Nature presented itself to these [European] men in her aspect of a danger, of a barrier, which seemed to be at constant war with the land and its children. The sea was the challenge of untamed Nature to the indomitable human soul. And man did not flinch; he fought and won…” Tagore contrasted the European conquest of the sea with the level tracts of peninsular India, where “men found no barrier between their lives and the Grand Life that permeates the Universe. The forest gave them shelter and shade, fruit and flower, fodder and fuel; it entered into a close living relation with their work and leisure and necessity, and in this way made it easy for them to know their own lives as associated with the larger life.” 

This essay of 1919 was called “The Message of the Forest,” the title mirroring that of his early volume of poems. Three years later Tagore published a sequel, which he titled “The Religion of the Forest.” Here he spoke of how in ancient India, “the forest entered into a close living relationship” with the work and leisure of humans. They did not therefore think of their natural surroundings as “separate or inimical.” So “the view of truth, which these men found, did not manifest the difference, but the unity of all things.” 

This view of a primordial attachment of Indians to forests was perhaps somewhat rose-tinted. The texts and the scriptures of ancient India by no means speak in one voice on this matter. While the Upanishads do talk of the unity of all creation, and Sanskrit drama does contain moving evocations of nature, one must not overlook the episode in the Mahabharata where the burning of the Khandava forests and the killing of its animals is celebrated as proof of the advance of civilization, the necessary and even mandatory conquest of primitive hunters and gatherers by a sophisticated agrarian civilization. And surely Tagore saw that many, perhaps most, Indians of his day treated forests in severely utilitarian terms, as a source of raw materials rather than of pleasure or spiritual upliftment. Perhaps the writer wanted to believe that his own love for nature, and for forests in particular, was not an idiosyncratic individual taste but a deep and enduring civilizational inheritance.

Tagore was a builder of institutions. Most significantly, he founded Santiniketan, which began as a school for boys in 1901 and grew into a full-fledged university, and Sriniketan, an accompanying experiment in the renewal of village life, that was started in the 1920s. Both were based in rural Bengal, in what is now the district of Birbhum, about three hours by train from Calcutta. They were located originally on a property owned by the Tagore family, with more lands being acquired over the years, as the institutions expanded in size and grew
in numbers.

Krishna Kripalani, a scholar who worked closely with Tagore, summarized his educational ideals in terms of ten maxims, of which the first is: “The child should be brought up in such environments as would provide him with opportunities of direct and close contact with Nature. Civilized existence in society imposes, in any case, such severe restraints on the first, fresh and vital impulses of life that human nature tends to be perverted unless its impulses are renewed and revitalized with constant reference to Nature.” Other maxims include learning through the mother tongue, an equal emphasis on individual initiative and group action, and an appreciation of cultural heritage. Nature makes a reappearance in the sixth maxim, which Kripalani glosses as: “When the child’s senses have been trained to a proper awareness of his surroundings and he has learnt to observe and love Nature, his experiences should then be made intelligible to him, at a later stage, in terms of scientific categories.”

In July 1927, by which time the school he started, Patha Bhavan, had been in existence for a quarter of a century, Tagore found himself speaking to the Indian Association in Singapore, to an audience of parents whose own children were educated in a resolutely metropolitan environment. He told them of his own school, where “boys are taught amidst natural surroundings. They grow up in the midst of the sights and sounds of Nature, among trees, birds, in the open air. This school seeks to enable my boys to realize their bond of unity with Nature.” In another speech in Singapore, to a gathering of children and teachers in the city’s Victoria Theatre, Tagore expanded on his method of learning in and with nature. He told his audience about how and where the children in his school had their lessons:

We have a mango grove. It is full of shade, and in summer, full of the beautiful perfume of the mango blossoms and there are innumerable birds and moths and all kinds of insects living on them. This you may think might distract their attention. But that is not so. I allow them sometimes to have their lessons and to look more closely at some of the things which attract their eyes. Very often they call my attention to some strange birds that have come and perched on the bough — “Sir look at the bird? What bird is that?” — right in the middle of their lesson. And then I talk to them about that bird… They should observe that bird. It would have been wrong were their minds absolutely dull to these impressions, and I would much rather be interrupted in my lessons than force them to keep their minds only on what has been placed before them. Often, again, they would speak to me of their admiration for something unusual — such as an especially fine bunch of mango leaves. I find that helps them, and that this constant movement of their mind is necessary for them. It is the method which nature has adopted in her own school for the young.

In 1921, Santiniketan (the Abode of Peace) became home to a new and more advanced educational experiment, a university which carried the name Visva-Bharati, indicating its ambition to bring the world (visva) to India (bharat), as well as to take India to the world. The university went on to have departments dedicated to the study of Japan and China, to the study of classical and contemporary Indian languages, as well as a celebrated art school.

The land acquired for the university’s construction was dry and bare. To make the place more appealing to the eye as well as more conducive to the sort of learning he desired to impart, Tagore inaugurated in 1928 what was to become an annual festival. The Briksharopan (tree-planting) ceremony was held in July, shortly after the onset of the monsoon. In a play staged on the occasion, the five basic elements of nature — earth, water, sunlight, air and sky — were represented by five students playing these roles. Saplings of carefully chosen (and mostly indigenous) species were planted by boys and girls with loving care, the ceremony accompanied by music and poetry. Over the decades, these saplings, now full-grown, helped transform a barren landscape into one dotted with trees and groves.

In a lecture to the Santiniketan community, Tagore explained his idea behind Briksharopan:

Man’s greed grew as he received Mother Earth’s bounty. … Men cut down trees to meet their endless needs and stripped the Earth of shade. As a result, the air became increasingly hotter, while the fertility of the soil increasingly diminished. That is how northern India, deprived of its shelter of forests, now lies scorched by the harsh rays of the sun. With all this in our minds, we initiated a tree-planting ceremony to teach the children to replenish the plundered stores of Mother Earth.

The tree-planting ceremony was one of several festivals – Spring Festival, Welcoming the Monsoon, Autumn Festival, Ploughing Ceremony, Harvest Festival — begun in Santiniketan by Tagore, with a view to nurturing among students an affectionate and caring relationship with nature, so that they could seek to harmonize their own lives with its rhythms and variations. 

Tagore took great care in choosing the shrubs and trees that surrounded his homes in Santiniketan, making sure that there were flowering plants throughout the year. In the campus as a whole, there were groves dedicated to specific species: one for the stately sal trees; another for the trees bearing the most delicious of all fruits, the mango; and so on. When he was away from Santiniketan, Tagore’s letters home often asked about the plants and trees he had left behind or hoped would flourish in his absence. In the summer of 1933, he wrote to his daughter Mira: “Ask them [the staff] to plant neem, shirish, and other trees on the street that leads to my room this monsoon. It’s not a bad idea to plant a few jackfruit trees either.” 

In these efforts to plant up Santiniketan with trees and flowers, Tagore was surely inspired by the verdant landscape of eastern Bengal in which he had spent so much time in his youth. With an arid, sandy, soil, and with far less water available, the place where the university was located could never remotely parallel the natural beauty of the Padma river and its surroundings, but it could still be made green and pleasant and welcomingly habitable. And so, under the poet’s guidance and instruction, it became.

Tagore grew up in the city, but became increasingly disenchanted with urban lifestyles. As the writer Aseem Shrivastava observes, Tagore believed that “the ecological alienation of metropolitan life profoundly cripples our sensibility, leaving humanity in a self-destructive state of spiritual destitution.” The poet was thus encouraged to locate his educational experiment, Santiniketan, deep in the countryside rather than anywhere near the city of Calcutta. For Tagore, “open skies, planted fields, and swaying palms [were] more essential to untrammeled learning and the formation of the mind than the hectic cultural exchanges a modern metropolis affords (and a village denies).”

A century before Tagore, English writers had responded in a similar fashion to the radical alterations in the natural landscape that the expansion of cities such as London represented. In his classic book on the subject, Raymond Williams explains why, for poets in particular, the country conveyed a more appealing ecological aesthetic than the city: “The means of agricultural production – the fields, the woods, the growing crops, the animals — are attractive to the observer and in many ways and in the good seasons, to the men working in and among them. They can then be effectively contrasted with the exchanges and counting-houses of mercantilism, or with the mines, quarries, mills and manufactories of industrial production.” 

Like his English forebears, Tagore saw modern cities as being parasitic on the natural resources of the countryside. At the same time, he was not unduly romantic about the village life that he had witnessed at first-hand. His family owned large tracts of agricultural land in eastern Bengal. He and his brothers were sent by turn to manage them. Rabindranath was assigned this responsibility in the early 1890s, by which time he was an established poet, admired and much feted in Calcutta. In a lecture given many years later, Tagore wrote of how in this first extended experience of the countryside, “gradually the sorrow and poverty of the villagers became clear to me, and I began to grow restless to do something about it. It seemed to me a very shameful thing that I should spend my days as a landlord, concerned only with money-making and engrossed with my own profit and loss.” Over the next decade, as Tagore spent more time in his estates, these feelings of guilt intensified. He wished to ameliorate the poverty of the peasants through constructive social work. In 1906, he sent his son, his son-in-law, and a friend’s son to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study modern methods of agriculture and dairying, with a view to implementing them in India.

Tagore’s philosophy was anti-industrial but not anti-modern. He wished to renew village life with the principles and techniques of modern science. That is why he sent his son to study agricultural technology in Illinois. But the son did not prove entirely worthy of his father, so Tagore went looking for someone else who could scientifically supervise programmes of rural uplift in the villages around Santiniketan. He found him in the person of an idealistic young Englishman named Leonard Elmhirst, whom he met in New York in 1920.

Born in 1893, the son of a Yorkshire curate, Elmhirst had studied history at Cambridge before enlisting in the Army during the First World War. He fell sick in Mesopotamia, and came to India to recuperate. There he became interested in agriculture, through meeting the British missionary Sam Higginbottom, who ran an experimental farm outside the northern Indian city of Allahabad. This encouraged Elmhirst to go to Cornell University in upstate New York to study agricultural science. In November 1920, when Tagore was in New York, he heard of the young Englishman and arranged to meet him. This is how, years later, Elmhirst recalled Tagore’s words to him at that meeting:

I have started an educational enterprise in India which is almost wholly academic. It is situated well out in the countryside of West Bengal at Santiniketan. We are surrounded by villages, Hindu, Muslim, Santali. Except that we employ a number of these village folk for various menial tasks in my school, we have no intimate contact with them at all outside their own communities. For some reason these villages appear to be in a state of steady decline. … Some years ago I bought from the Sinha family a farm just outside the village of Surul, a little over a mile from my school. I hear that you might be interested in going to live and work on such a farm in order to find out more clearly the causes of this decay.

Elmhirst came out to Santiniketan in November 1921, a year after meeting Tagore in New York. The experiment in Surul originally was called the Institute for Rural Reconstruction, before Tagore came up with the crisper and more elegant “Sriniketan.” Tagore asked Elmhirst to find better methods for villagers to grow their crops and vegetables, to help them gain access to credit and get a fair price for their produce. He also hoped to augment their farm income with cottage industries such as rice milling and umbrella making.

In Sriniketan, Elmhirst began taking Bengali lessons. In January 1922, Tagore told him that ten Santiniketan students had come to him and were keen to do work in villages after graduating. Since they knew both Bengali and English, they could assist the foreign-born expert in his activities. Tagore now instructed Elmhirst: 

Stop your Bengali lessons. If you learn too much Bengali yourself you’ll want to go on your own to the village to ask questions. You will then make the great mistake of trying to become indispensable to this enterprise like any foreign missionary. I want you never to go alone to any village but always to take with you either a student or a member of your staff to act as interpreter. Only
in this way will they learn what kind of questions
you ask and just how the farmers and villagers frame their answers. These answers they will then have to
interpret back to you. In this way they will never forget the experience.

After Elmhirst had been in Sriniketan for a couple of years, Tagore told him that it was time to move on, so as “to give the Indian staff of the young Institute a chance to find their own feet.” Elmhirst traveled with Tagore to China and Japan in 1924, and from there to Latin America. The following year, with the poet’s blessings, Elmhirst married the American heiress Dorothy Straight, and the couple now set up home in rural England in a medieval manor called Dartington Hall, which they refurbished and made the center of an experimental farm. Straight helped to support Sriniketan financially, while her husband remained in close touch with Tagore.

Tagore was a keen observer of the natural world, yet what we might call his “nature aesthetic” was merely one element of a wider ecological consciousness. He was sharply critical of the environmental devastation caused by unbridled industrialization. When the poet was growing up, the Hooghly river had homes and farms all along it, but then the banks became dotted with factories. Writing in 1916, he observed that he was fortunate in having been born before the iron flood of ugliness began clinging to the river banks near Calcutta. 

At that time the embankments of the Ganges, like the arms of the villages on the banks, embraced their people and kept them close to their bosom. In the evenings people would go for boat-rides on the river. The current of the people’s hearts and the flow of the river — there was no hard and ugly demarcation between them. The beauty of the Bengali countryside could be seen even in the immediate vicinity of Calcutta. As commercial civilization began to spread, however, the beauty of the countryside was slowly and steadily obscured, to the point where now Calcutta has segregated all of Bengal from the lands surrounding it. The vernal beauty of the country has succumbed to the hideous form of Time, showing its iron teeth, belching smoke and fire. The following year, in a lecture in America, Tagore warned thus against the dehumanizing and destructive cult of the machine: “Take man from his natural surroundings, from the fulness of his communal life, with all its living associations of beauty and love and social obligations, and you will be able to turn him into so many fragments of a machine for the production of wealth on a gigantic scale. Turn a tree into a log and it will burn for you, but it will never bear living flowers and fruit.”

During the course of Tagore’s life, the city of his birth became a bustling industrial powerhouse. In the second half of the nineteenth century, jute mills proliferated in and around Calcutta, processing the raw fiber grown in eastern Bengal into packing material sent all around the world. The first jute mill was established on the Hooghly in 1855, six years before Tagore was born. In 1869, when he was a little boy, there were a mere five mills with nine hundred and fifty looms operating. By 1910, when Tagore was approaching the age of fifty, there were a staggering thirty thousand looms in operation, exporting more than a billion yards of cloth. The waterways around Tagore’s native city, whose banks once featured little hamlets and fishing boats, were now lined with the large chimneys of the ever-proliferating jute factories, emitting tons of smoke. This transformation repelled him. 

In 1880, when he was in his late teens, Tagore went for a boat ride up the Hooghly, from Calcutta to the French enclave of Chandannagar, where his brother Jyotindra had a riverside home. Tagore had just returned from a spell in England, and this re-immersion in the Bengal countryside was for him a joyous experience. Of the boat journey and the stay on the river’s banks in Chandannagar, he wrote:

The Ganges again! Again those ineffable days and nights, languid with joy, sad with longing, attuned to the plaintive babbling of the river along the cool shade of the wooded banks. This Bengal sky full of light, this south breeze, this flow of the river, this right royal laziness, this broad leisure stretching from horizon to horizon and from green earth to blue sky, all these were to me as food and drink to the hungry and thirsty. Here it felt indeed like home, and in these I recognised the ministrations of a Mother.

That was back in 1880. By the time Tagore came to pen his reminiscences thirty years later, much had changed. 

That was not so very long ago, and yet time has wrought many changes. Our little river-side nests, clustering under their surrounding greenery, have been replaced by mills which now, dragon-like, everywhere rear their hissing heads, belching forth black smoke. In the midday glare of modern life even our hours of mental siesta have been narrowed down to the lowest limit, and hydra-headed unrest has invaded every department of life. Maybe this is for the better, but I, for one, cannot account it wholly to the good.

Such passages inevitably recall the great British poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who were likewise repelled by the outrage done to nature by the expansion of cities and factories, and who wrote so movingly (and despairingly) about it. Blake (“dark Satanic mills”), Wordsworth, and John Clare come immediately to mind, though perhaps most akin to Tagore’s thinking was William Morris, who, while by no means in the same league as the other three as a poet, had, like Tagore, many interests in life outside his poetry, being an activist and a builder of institutions. Consider this passage from Morris’s long narrative poem “The Earthly Paradise,” from 1868–1870, which begins by asking the reader to —

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its garden green…

Morris wished for a harmonious relationship between the city and the countryside, and between humanity and nature. And so did Tagore. The parallels between these writers are owed to their shared experience continents apart. They lived through a similar historical process — the radical transformation of landscapes and social relations that modern industrialization brought with it. 

Unlike those British poets, whose thoughts and experiences were confined to their island nation or at most to a few culturally (and ecologically) akin countries of the Continent, Tagore had a global vision. He had travelled all over the world, encountering many different landscapes, cultures, religions, and ways of life other than those of his native Bengal. As an Indian living under British rule, moreover, he had an understanding of what Britain had wrought in its colonies, something denied to those (otherwise so gifted and acutely sensitive writers) who lived in Britain itself.

This wider understanding of the modern world is strikingly manifest in some passages of Tagore’s famous tract, Nationalism, from 1917, which includes a profound ecological message that has escaped most commentators. Since the book was originally written in English, it has been far more widely read than his poems, plays, and stories, which first appeared in Bengali. Its readers have focused on its warnings against xenophobia and nationalist hubris while ignoring its powerful environmentalist critique of industrialism and imperialism. Here, for example, is the poet-turned-prophet analyzing the environmental consequences of European imperialism, while speaking of the devastation caused by the rampant greed and new technologies of the new industrial age:

The political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe [and] is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based on exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep at bay the aliens or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker, to be eternally fixed in their weakness. Before this political civilisation came to its power and opened its hungry jaws wide enough to gulp down great continents of the earth, we had wars, pillages, changes of monarchy and consequent miseries, but never such a sight of fearful and hopeless voracity, such wholesale feeding of nation upon nation, such huge machines for turning great portions of the earth into mince-meat, never such
terrible jealousies with all their ugly teeth and claws ready for tearing into each other’s vitals.

Those words were spoken at a public event in Japan in 1916. That Asian nation was far more advanced, economically and industrially, than Tagore’s native India, yet he nonetheless hoped that Japan would restrain itself from going all the way down the route mapped by Europe. He reminded his hosts that too eagerly embracing the urban-industrial way of life would be a denial, even a repudiation, of their own culture, of “the spiritual bond of love she [Japan] has established with the hills of her country, with the sea and the streams, with the forests in all their flowery moods and varied physiognomy of branches…” Tagore urged Japan to offer the world a vision of humanity’s relations with nature rather different from that being envisioned and put into practice in modern Europe. The visiting poet reminded the Japanese that “the ideal of maitri [friendship] is at the bottom of your culture — maitri with men and maitri with Nature.” That ideal had to be renewed and reaffirmed, even if it might seem like “an anachronism, when the sound that drowns all voices is the noise of the market-place.” He defiantly stated his own belief “that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and the idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment — that, after all the forgetfulness of his divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.”

Six years later, in 1922, Leonard Elmhirst, the newly appointed Director of the Institute of Rural Reconstruction in Sriniketan, gave a lecture on the renewal of village life. Elmhirst’s talk was prefaced by some introductory remarks by his mentor and employer, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore offered a parable of environmental destruction, imagining that on the moon a new race of beings was born, “that began greedily to devour its own surroundings.” 

Through machinery of tremendous power this race made such an addition to their natural capacity for that their career of plunder entirely outstripped nature’s power for recuperation. Their profit makers dug big holes in the stored capital of the planet. They created wants which were unnatural and provision for these wants was forcibly extracted from nature. When they had reduced the limited store of material in their immediate surroundings they proceeded to wage furious wars among their different sections, each wanting his own special allotment of the lion’s share. In their scramble for the right of self-indulgence they laughed at moral law and took it as a sign of superiority to be ruthless in the satisfaction each of his own desire. They exhausted the water, cut down the trees, reduced the surface of the planet to a desert, riddled with enormous pits, and made its interior a rifled pocket, emptied of its valuables.

This parable of what might happen on the moon resonated with what Tagore was witnessing on earth in his own time, where the age of industrialism and colonialism had led to an unprecedented assault on the earth and its resources. This imaginary race of rapacious beings on the moon, he continued, “behaved exactly in the way human beings of today are behaving upon this earth, fast exhausting their store of sustenance, not because they must begin their normal life, but because they wish to live at a pitch of monstrous excess. Mother Earth had enough for the healthy appetite of her children and something extra for rare cases of abnormality. But she has not nearly sufficient for the sudden growth of a whole world of spoiled and pampered children.”

I have chosen to cite Tagore’s own words at length not only to give the reader an experience of their prodigious beauty, but also to establish the depth and the prescience of his environmentalist thinking. He grasped in all its enormity the devastating environmental consequences of industrialism and imperialism, and anticipated by many decades the now influential idea of the ecological footprint, the impact of the vast and unsustainable demands that the production and consumption patterns of a particular nation or social class makes upon the earth. Even though the term “environmentalist’” had not acquired its present meaning in his lifetime, Tagore was indeed a pioneering environmentalist. In his lecture at Sriniketan, Tagore offered in passing an aphorism that can serve, a century and more later, as a maxim of environmental responsibility for our times. “When our wants are moderate, the rations we each claim do not exhaust the common store of nature and the pace of their restoration does not fall hopelessly behind that of our consumption.”