No More Learning

There was a time with us when India had her common language of culture
in Sanskrit. But, for the complete commerce of her thought, she
required that all her vernaculars should attain their perfect powers,
through which her different peoples might manifest their
idiosyncrasies; and this could never be done through a foreign tongue.

In the United States, in Canada and other British Colonies, the
language of the people is English. It has a great literature which had
its birth and growth in the history of the British Islands. But when
this language, with all its products and acquisitions, matured by ages
on its own mother soil, is carried into foreign lands, which have
their own separate history and their own life-growth, it must
constantly hamper the indigenous growth of culture and destroy
individuality of judgement and the perfect freedom of self-expression.
The inherited wealth of the English language, with all its splendour,
becomes an impediment when taken into different surroundings, just as
when lungs are given to the whale in the sea. If such is the case even
with races whose grandmother-tongue naturally continues to be their
own mother-tongue, one can imagine what sterility it means for a
people which accepts, for its vehicle of culture, an altogether
foreign language. A language is not like an umbrella or an overcoat,
that can be borrowed by unconscious or deliberate mistake; it is like
the living skin itself. If the body of a draught-horse enters into the
skin of a race-horse, it will be safe to wager that such an anomaly
will never win a race, and will fail even to drag a cart. Have we not
watched some modern Japanese artists imitating European art? The
imitation may sometimes produce clever results; but such cleverness
has only the perfection of artificial flowers which never bear fruit.

All great countries have their vital centres for intellectual life,
where a high standard of learning is maintained, where the minds of
the people are naturally attracted, where they find their genial
atmosphere, in which to prove their worth and to contribute their
share to the country's culture. Thus they kindle, on the common altar
of the land, that great sacrificial fire which can radiate the sacred
light of wisdom abroad.

Athens was such a centre in Greece, Rome in Italy; and Paris is such
to-day in France. Benares has been and still continues to be the
centre of our Sanskrit culture. But Sanskrit learning does not exhaust
all the elements of culture that exist in modern India.

If we were to take for granted, what some people maintain, that
Western culture is the only source of light for our mind, then it
would be like depending for daybreak upon some star, which is the sun
of a far distant sphere. The star may give us light, but not the day;
it may give us direction in our voyage of exploration, but it can
never open the full view of truth before our eyes. In fact, we can
never use this cold starlight for stirring the sap in our branches,
and giving colour and bloom to our life. This is the reason why
European education has become for India mere school lessons and no
culture; a box of matches, good for the small uses of illumination,
but not the light of morning, in which the use and beauty, and all the
subtle mysteries of life are blended in one.

Let me say clearly that I have no distrust of any culture because of
its foreign character. On the contrary, I believe that the shock of
such extraneous forces is necessary for the vitality of our
intellectual nature. It is admitted that much of the spirit of
Christianity runs counter, not only to the classical culture of
Europe, but to the European temperament altogether. And yet this alien
movement of ideas, constantly running against the natural mental
current of Europe, has been a most important factor in strengthening
and enriching her civilisation, on account of the sharp antagonism of
its intellectual direction. In fact, the European vernaculars first
woke up to life and fruitful vigour when they felt the impact of this
foreign thought-power with all its oriental forms and affinities. The
same thing is happening in India. The European culture has come to us,
not only with its knowledge, but with its velocity.

Then, again, let us admit that modern Science is Europe's great gift
to humanity for all time to come. We, in India, must claim it from her
hands, and gratefully accept it in order to be saved from the curse of
futility by lagging behind. We shall fail to reap the harvest of the
present age if we delay.

What I object to is the artificial arrangement by which foreign
education tends to occupy all the space of our national mind, and thus
kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for the creation of a new
thought-power by a new combination of truths. It is this which makes
me urge that all the elements in our own culture have to be
strengthened, not to resist the Western culture, but truly to accept
and assimilate it; to use it for our sustenance, not as our burden; to
get mastery over this culture, and not to live on its outskirts as the
hewers of texts and drawers of book-learning.

The main river in Indian culture has flowed in four streams,--the
Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, and the Jain. It has its source in
the heights of the Indian consciousness. But a river, belonging to a
country, is not fed by its own waters alone. The Tibetan Brahmaputra
is a tributary to the Indian Ganges. Contributions have similarly
found their way to India's original culture. The Muhammadan, for
example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his
own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious
democracy, bringing freshet after freshet to swell the current. To our
music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the
Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution. Those
who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and
all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the
Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current
that has so intimately mingled with our life.

So, in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the
co-ordinate study of all these different cultures,--the Vedic, the
Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islamic, the Sikh and the
Zoroastrian. The Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan will also have to be
added; for, in the past, India did not remain isolated within her own
boundaries. Therefore, in order to learn what she was, in her relation
to the whole continent of Asia, these cultures too must be studied.
Side by side with them must finally be placed the Western culture. For
only then shall we be able to assimilate this last contribution to our
common stock. A river flowing within banks is truly our own, and it
can contain its due tributaries; but our relations with a flood can
only prove disastrous.

There are some who are exclusively modern, who believe that the past
is the bankrupt time, leaving no assets for us, but only a legacy of
debts. They refuse to believe that the army which is marching forward
can be fed from the rear. It is well to remind such persons that the
great ages of renaissance in history were those when man suddenly
discovered the seeds of thought in the granary of the past.

The unfortunate people who have lost the harvest of their past have
lost their present age. They have missed their seed for cultivation,
and go begging for their bare livelihood. We must not imagine that we
are one of these disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come
for us to break open the treasure-trove of our ancestors, and use it
for our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future our
own, and not continue our existence as the eternal rag-pickers in
other people's dustbins.

So far I have dwelt only upon the intellectual aspect of Education.
For, even in the West, it is the intellectual training which receives
almost exclusive emphasis. The Western universities have not yet truly
recognised that fulness of expression is fulness of life. And a large
part of man can never find its expression in the mere language of
words. It must therefore seek for its other languages,--lines and
colours, sounds and movements. Through our mastery of these we not
only make our whole nature articulate, but also understand man in all
his attempts to reveal his innermost being in every age and clime. The
great use of Education is not merely to collect facts, but to know
man and to make oneself known to man. It is the duty of every human
being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of
intellect, but also that personality which is the language of Art. It
is a great world of reality for man,--vast and profound,--this growing
world of his own creative nature. This is the world of Art. To be
brought up in ignorance of it is to be deprived of the knowledge and
use of that great inheritance of humanity, which has been growing and
waiting for every one of us from the beginning of our history. It is
to remain deaf to the eternal voice of Man, that speaks to all men the
messages that are beyond speech. From the educational point of view we
know Europe where it is scientific, or at best literary. So our notion
of its modern culture is limited within the boundary lines of grammar
and the laboratory. We almost completely ignore the aesthetic life of
man, leaving it uncultivated, allowing weeds to grow there. Our
newspapers are prolific, our meeting-places are vociferous; and in
them we wear to shreds the things we have borrowed from our English
teachers. We make the air dismal and damp with the tears of our
grievances. But where are our arts, which, like the outbreak of
spring flowers, are the spontaneous overflow of our deeper nature and
spiritual magnificence?

Through this great deficiency of our modern education, we are
condemned to carry to the end a dead load of dumb wisdom. Like
miserable outcasts, we are deprived of our place in the festival of
culture, and wait at the outer court, where the colours are not for
us, nor the forms of delight, nor the songs. Ours is the education of
a prison-house, with hard labour and with a drab dress cut to the
limits of minimum decency and necessity. We are made to forget that
the perfection of colour and form and expression belongs to the
perfection of vitality,--that the joy of life is only the other side
of the strength of life. The timber merchant may think that the
flowers and foliage are mere frivolous decorations of a tree; but if
these are suppressed, he will know to his cost that the timber too
will fail.

During the Moghal period, music and art in India found a great impetus
from the rulers, because their whole life--not merely their official
life--was lived in this land; and it is the wholeness of life from
which originates Art. But our English teachers are birds of passage;
they cackle to us, but do not sing,--their true heart is not in the
land of their exile.

Constriction of life, owing to this narrowness of culture, must no
longer be encouraged. In the centre of Indian culture which I am
proposing, music and art must have their prominent seats of honour,
and not be given merely a tolerant nod of recognition. The different
systems of music and different schools of art which lie scattered in
the different ages and provinces of India, and in the different strata
of society, and also those belonging to the other great countries of
Asia, which had communication with India, have to be brought there
together and studied.

I have already hinted that Education should not be dragged out of its
native element, the life-current of the people. Economic life covers
the whole width of the fundamental basis of society, because its
necessities are the simplest and the most universal. Educational
institutions, in order to obtain their fulness of truth, must have
close association with this economic life. The highest mission of
education is to help us to realise the inner principle of the unity of
all knowledge and all the activities of our social and spiritual
being. Society in its early stage was held together by its economic
co-operation, when all its members felt in unison a natural interest
in their right to live. Civilisation could never have been started at
all if such was not the case. And civilisation will fall to pieces if
it never again realises the spirit of mutual help and the common
sharing of benefits in the elemental necessaries of life. The idea of
such economic co-operation should be made the basis of our University.
It must not only instruct, but live; not only think, but produce.

Our ancient _tapovanas_, or forest schools, which were our natural
universities, were not shut off from the daily life of the people.
Masters and students gathered fruit and fuel, and took their cattle
out to graze, supporting themselves by the work of their own hands.
Spiritual education was a part of the spiritual life itself, which
comprehended all life. Our centre of culture should not only be the
centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her
economic life also. It must co-operate with the villages round it,
cultivate land, breed cattle, spin cloths, press oil from oil-seeds;
it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using
the best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence
should depend upon the success of its industrial activities carried
out on the co-operative principle, which will unite the teachers and
students and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active
bond of necessity. This will give us also a practical industrial
training, whose motive force is not the greed of profit.

Before I conclude my paper, a delicate question remains to be
considered. What must be the religious ideal that is to rule our
centre of Indian culture? The one abiding ideal in the religious life
of India has been _Mukti_, the deliverance of man's soul from the grip
of self, its communion with the Infinite Soul through its union in
_ananda_ with the universe. This religion of spiritual harmony is not
a theological doctrine to be taught, as a subject in the class, for
half an hour each day. It is the spiritual truth and beauty of our
attitude towards our surroundings, our conscious relationship with the
Infinite, and the lasting power of the Eternal in the passing moments
of our life. Such a religious ideal can only be made possible by
making provision for students to live in intimate touch with nature,
daily to grow in an atmosphere of service offered to all creatures,
tending trees, feeding birds and animals, learning to feel the immense
mystery of the soil and water and air.

Along with this, there should be some common sharing of life with the
tillers of the soil and the humble workers in the neighbouring
villages; studying their crafts, inviting them to the feasts, joining
them in works of co-operation for communal welfare; and in our
intercourse we should be guided, not by moral maxims or the
condescension of social superiority, but by natural sympathy of life
for life, and by the sheer necessity of love's sacrifice for its own
sake. In such an atmosphere students would learn to understand that
humanity is a divine harp of many strings, waiting for its one grand
music. Those who realise this unity are made ready for the pilgrimage
through the night of suffering, and along the path of sacrifice, to
the great meeting of Man in the future, for which the call comes to us
across the darkness.

Life, in such a centre, should be simple and clean. We should never
believe that simplicity of life might make us unsuited to the
requirements of the society of our time. It is the simplicity of the
tuning-fork, which is needed all the more because of the intricacy of
strings in the instrument. In the morning of our career our nature
needs the pure and the perfect note of a spiritual ideal in order to
fit us for the complications of our later years.

In other words, this institution should be a perpetual creation by the
co-operative enthusiasm of teachers and students, growing with the
growth of their soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent,
rich with ever-renewing life, radiating life across space and time,
attracting and maintaining round it a planetary system of dependent
bodies. Its aim should lie in imparting life-breath to the complete
man, who is intellectual as well as economic, bound by social bonds,
but aspiring towards spiritual freedom and final perfection.


THE END

_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.




BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE


=GITANJALI. (Song Offerings. )= Translated by the Author. With an
Introduction by W. B. YEATS, and a Portrait by W. ROTHENSTEIN. Crown
8vo. 5s. net.

_ATHENAEUM. _--"Mr. Tagore's translations are of trance-like beauty. . . .
The expanding sentiment of some of the poems wins, even through the
alien medium of our English prose, a rhythm which in its strength and
melody might recall familiar passages in the Psalms or Solomon's
Song. "


=FRUIT-GATHERING. A Sequel to "Gitanjali. "= Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_ATHENAEUM. _--"The eighty-six pieces that fill this volume are pure
jets of lyric feeling, aphorisms expressed in moving symbols, or fully
developed parables and allegories . . . several are as perfect in form
as they are beautiful and poignant in content. "


=GITANJALI AND FRUIT-GATHERING. =

With Illustrations in colour and half-tone by NANDALAL BOSE,
SURENDRANATH KAR, ABANINDRANATH TAGORE, and NOBINDRANATH TAGORE. Crown
8vo. 10s. net.


=THE GARDENER. Lyrics of Love and Life. = Translated by the Author. With
Portrait. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_DAILY MAIL. _--"Flowers as fresh as sunrise. . . . One cannot tell what
they have lost in the translation, but as they stand they are of
extreme beauty. . . . They are simple, exalted, fragrant--episodes and
incidents of every day transposed to faery. "


=THE CRESCENT MOON. Child-Poems. = Translated by the Author. With 8
Illustrations in Colour. Pott 4to. 5s. net.

_NATION. _--"A vision of childhood which is only paralleled in our
literature by the work of William Blake. "


=STRAY BIRDS. = Poems. With a Frontispiece by WILLY POGANY. Crown 8vo.
4s. 6d. net.

_SCOTSMAN. _--"The richness of this volume in thought and in imagery,
in tracing analogies and in discovering apologues, is such as to yield
pleasure and profit to the most fertile and cultured minds. "


=LOVER'S GIFT AND CROSSING. = Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_ATHENAEUM. _--"The poems often touch extreme heights of passion and
sublimity, and the diction has a beauty and a music that few have
attained in this particular medium. "


=THE FUGITIVE. = Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

_SUNDAY TIMES. _--"In 'The Fugitive' the lovers of Tagore will not be
disappointed. He has all his powers still undimmed. Indeed, the poet
never, in our judgment, has surpassed this work. "


=CHITRA. A Play.
= Translated by the Author. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

_OBSERVER. _--"An allegory of love's meaning, clear as a pool in the
sunshine. It was written, we are told, twenty-five years ago. . . . Even
then Mr. Tagore had that calm intensity of vision which we have all
come to love in his later work. We find in him that for which Arjuna
groped in his love, 'that ultimate _you_, that bare simplicity of
truth,' and never more than in this little work of beauty, 'Chitra. '"


=THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER. = =A Play. = Translated by KSHITISH CHANDRA
SEN. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_PALL MALL GAZETTE. _--"Altogether, the play is a beautiful piece of
fanciful writing with a veiled purpose at the back of it. "


=THE POST OFFICE. A Play. = Translated by DEVABRATA MUKERJEA. Crown 8vo.
3s. 6d. net.

_MANCHESTER GUARDIAN. _--"'The Post Office' is a delicate, wistful
thing, coloured with beautiful imagery; for a moment it lifts a corner
of the veil of worldly existence. The translation is throughout
extremely happy. "


=THE CYCLE OF SPRING. A Play. = Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

_MANCHESTER GUARDIAN. _--"The whole little drama is a spring-gift such
as England has seldom received. "


=SACRIFICE and other Plays. = Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_SCOTSMAN. _--"All the pieces have a rare beauty of their own. "


=THE HOME AND THE WORLD. A Novel. = Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

_SATURDAY REVIEW. _--"In these days of indiscriminating praise, it is
hard for a reviewer to find words with which to welcome properly a
book so good as this. "


=THE WRECK. A Novel. = Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.

_MORNING POST. _--"The story cannot fail to interest and delight. "


=MASHI and other Stories. = Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_OXFORD MAGAZINE. _--"Full of pregnant pictures of Indian life and
character, subdued but vivid in tone. "


=HUNGRY STONES and other Stories. = Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_DAILY TELEGRAPH. _--"Contains descriptive passages of rare vigour and
beauty, and is embellished with imagery of a delicate and distinctive
character. "


=S? DHAN? : The Realisation of Life. Lectures. = Extra Crown 8vo. 6s.
net.

=NATIONALISM. = Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

=PERSONALITY. Lectures delivered in America. = Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
6s. net.

=CREATIVE UNITY. Essays. = Extra Crown 8vo.

=MY REMINISCENCES. = Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

=GLIMPSES OF BENGAL. Selected from the Letters of Rabindranath Tagore,
1885 to 1895. = Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

=ONE HUNDRED POEMS OF KABIR. = Translated by RABINDRANATH TAGORE,
assisted by EVELYN UNDERHILL. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

=RABINDRANATH TAGORE. = A Biographical Study. By ERNEST RHYS.
Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.

=SIX PORTRAITS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE. = By W. ROTHENSTEIN. Reproduced in
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=THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MAHARSHI DEVENDRANATH TAGORE= (Father of
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DEVI. With Introduction by EVELYN UNDERHILL, and Portrait. Extra Crown
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=THE PHILOSOPHY OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE. = By Prof. S. RADHAKRISHNAN. 8vo.
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=SHANTINIKETAN: The Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore. = By W. W.
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LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO. , LTD.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. The page numbers
in the Table of Contents have been adjusted to match the actual page
numbers.





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