To: Mr. S. Duttagupta
Vice Chancellor, Visva-Bharati University
Santiniketan
Vice-chancellor@visva-bharati.ac.in
Subject : Expulsion of Ms Andrea Loseries and Mr. Shin Sangwhan
Dear Mr. Duttagupta
I write this as an alumni of Patha Bhavana, and as a member of a family with a five generation long association with the institution and the place.
My maternal grandfather, Kalimohan Ghosh, worked with Rabindranath Tagore in rural reconstruction efforts in the villages under the Tagore estates in eastern Bengal when Rabindranath was involved in overseeing these estates. Later, when he came to Santiniketan, Rabindranath brought Kalimohan to Santiniketan for helping kickstart the Sriniketan project, working with Leonard Elmhirst in the initial stages. Kalimohan’s mother was the first generation of our ancestors to live a considerable part of her life in Santiniketan. My mother Sujata Mitra was born in Santiniketan and ended her life there. My father Sukhamoy Mitra was a professor in Kala Bhavana, and he too ended his life there.
My maternal uncle, Santidev Ghosh, was with Sangeet Bhavana till he retired, and was peronsally requested by Rabindranath not to leave Santiniketan for better financial gains elsewhere. Other members of my family too have long association with the place.
I was born there and did my schooling in Patha Bhavana. My daughter, the fifth generation, did her college there.
Anyhow, I had wished to write to you about a few issues that I felt were of importance, and on which I did not get a good response from Visva Bharati earlier. These included :
- Research on the earliest wax cylinder recordings made by Arnold Bake, between 1925 and 1928, mostly in and around Santiniketan. These are now in London. Not enough research has been done on these. My suspicion is that these might contained unpublished voice recordings of Rabindranath, Dinendranath, Santidev, Gagan Harkara and many others. Visva Bharati should have been the best institute to be involved in research of these yet un-researched audio material and identification of those recordings. The last person I know to study some of those early recordings of Arnold Bake was late Mr. Nazir Ali Jairajbhoy. I have had some exchange with his wife Amy Katlin Jairajbhoy of California, noted for her own work on ethnographic filming and ethnomusicology including work among marginal music groups in India. She too has knowledge on the topic of her late husbands work with the Arnold Bake collection. She wrote to me that she had video recording of Dinendranath performing in Santiniketan. Anyhow Nazir Ali Jairajbhoy worked mostly with the later life recordings of Arnold Bake (made outside of Santiniketan) and not the early life recordings, made in Santiniketan. Unfortunately, I had not succeeded in getting Visva Bharati interested in this research.
- Better preservation and research on the manuscripts currently in possession of Visva Bharati, which include a lot of un-researched history on the circumstances under which these manuscripts came to Visva Bharati. Kalimohan Ghosh was reportedly involved in collecting some of them from surrounding villages where the original family held manuscripts were in deteriorating condition and the families in question could not tend to them. These documents needed more public awareness in preservation of our cultural heritage and needed better exposure to popular media and further research by current scholars. There is also the related issue of the Surul Inscription and its historical significance. Such items are worth being published in Archaeological and historical and geographic magazines. Items less important than them often grace the pages of National Geographic or International Archaeological magazines. It should have been the duty of people of Visva Bharati to get these invaluable artifacts and documents to the world view and fire the imagination of the younger generation on preservation of cultural heritage.
- Refocus on the need for research in sustainable low carbon footprint existence through the rural reconstruction unit of Sriniketan, and finding a solution to the yet unsolved dilemma for India on how to redress the economic imbalance between an exploitative urban Indian economic growth path and an exploited rural Indian economic devastation. There is no task more important than that and not just for Visva Bharati or India, but for a wide swatch of humanity across the planet. Rabindranath did not tinker with Sriniketan for satisfying a superficial hobby. It is distressing to see how far the Sriniketan effort has degenerated in the radar of Visva Bharati. I was also tempted to get Visva Bharati interested to helping out some of the chemical free organic farming efforts ongoing, and being supported by small NGOs to bring a debt free and toxic free natural food cycle economy back in the villages around Santiniketan. These were areas where Sriniketan should have been playing a pioneering role for the nation. There is also other efforts, such as preservation of indigenous varieties of rice strains. India had more than a hundred thousand varieties of rice, developed over several millennia of experimentation, to suit differing soil and weather conditions. But in the past few decades, the corporation driven mono-culture has gripped the nation and India is rapidly losing her biodiversity with regard to rice strain varieties, and today it has no more than two thousand or so trains of rice left. There are a handful of people desperately trying to preserve what can still be preserved, because the day is coming soon when non sustainable high fertilizer high pesticide genetically modified patent holding crop technology, already proving a failure in the west, is going to have to be replaced, and India will have lost its five thousand year old wisdom of rice cultivation by then. Sriniketan, again, should have been in the forefront of these efforts. And again, I failed to get anybody interested in such “boring” issues.
- Engage in a research of the decades long chain of correspondence between Kalimohan Ghosh and Leonard Elmhirst, currently preserved in the UK. These documents contained invaluable information on the purpose Kalimohan was sent by Rabindranath to various countries in Europe and the middle east to learn from their education, agricultural and rural reconstruction programs and then to see how to filter through them, and experiment with what might be modified and made usable under Indian conditions, through micro-experimentations in Sriniketan and elsewhere. My belief is that these are treasure troves that best deserve to be researched by Visva Bharati, but unfortunately these documents are not preserved in Santiniketan and are likely to be auctioned off by Dartington Hall if no one shows any interest. I have not had any success, again, in getting Visva Bharati interested in these issues. And that is not all. After the demise of Kalimohan, for the next so many decades, his fourth son Salil Ghosh continued a correspondence with Leolard Elmhirst, till Elmhirst passed away. Those documents too, are filed and preserved by Dartinton Hall. Those too are expected to be illuminating for research on a number of topics, the most important being Rabindranath’s efforts to start the ground work of research to eventually be the pathfinder that might halp solve some of the future problems that India was surely expected to face. Needless to say, I failed to get the University interested in this work. In fact, my experience has been that one immovable constant about the university is its lack of interest in engaging in anything worthwhile.
Rabindranath had toyed about the need for an ideal institute that was more than a school or a college or an university. India having lost its forests of the Upanishadic Aranyak period and the Tapovan phase of its history, he had toyed and experimented with conceptualizing a century ago, under difficult circumstances not under his control, how one might bring back an ambience that were to be a similar germinating ground of brilliant minds. He even selected the name, Visva Bharati, not out of a hat, but after careful deliberation.
However, instead of writing on those “boring” topics, new developments in Santiniketan coax me instead to write to you about a wholly different topic, getting rid of all non-Indians.
I now understand that the university is busy kicking out the last of the foreign professors, such as the Ms Andrea Loseries of Austria and Mr. Shin Sangwhan of Korea.
This has surprised, disappointed and pained me. In one swift stroke, Visva Bharati appears to have amputated the Visva out of itself and prepared to reincarnate itself as a Bhubandanga-Bharati.
There would be no point in engaging with the university on lofted topics of research on Arnold Bake’s recordings or Manuscriptology, or preservation of indigenous strains of rice, or studying old correspondence between dead people like Elmhirst and Ghosh, if the university is mainly focussed on burying itself into a tomb in Birbhum.
I shall therefore request you to seriously contemplate on what direction you are to steer this institution towards in the forthcoming years, and to contemplate on what Rabindranath might have envisaged the destiny of Visva-Bharati and India was to be, and in todays larger geo-ecological-economic context, how rational thought might prompt one in course correction for this supposedly open institute in the development of human endeavor of global significance that was to sprout itself from the soil of India.
I would also suggest that Visva Bharati assumes a bit of humility, and absorb a realization that it needs good people more than good people needs Visva Bharati. It is the unproductive and lazy manipulative people that Visva Bharati has no dearth of, and who would cling to VB at any cost, because their presence has no constructive value and they have nowhere else to go.
Thanking you
Santanu Mitra
10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada
1-604-597 8261.
Tonu@me.com
cc: The registrar, Visva-Bharati University
Cc by physical mail to : Sri Pranab Mukherjee,
Rastrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, India