Keya Sarkar: The burden of love

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Other cities and towns have municipal corporations. Santiniketan has the legacy of Tagore. When the University was set up, Tagore had invited eminent Bengalis to buy plots around the campus in order to give the university town a certain intellectual character. These plots (one of which I have inherited) were allotted on a 99-year lease which meant that, for the lessees of these plots, the Visva Bharati University remained the landlord. And since the University also acts as the municipal authority (responsible for road building, water supply, garbage collection and the like), residents of these plots are in rather a unique position of having their landlord and their municipal corporation rolled into one.

So it was a cause of huge alarm when we heard that our neighbouring house (given back to the University by its owners) was going to become an undergraduate department. Firstly, because in a quiet residential area a hundred students can create quite a stir. But more because of all that would necessarily follow: the tea stall, the cycle repair shop, the rickshaw stand. Especially as we are flanked on one side by the railway track along which illegal shops and settlements have come up. While the University is very vigilant with us (we are not allowed to chop a branch of a tree in our gardens or carry out any extensions to our houses without its permission), it has been pretty indulgent with these settlers.

Not to mention the unfairness of it all: residents are not allowed to use their properties for any commercial purpose lest they spoil their sanctity as was planned and documented in the original land use map. Last but not the least, we are not free to sell our properties (transfer the lease) without the University's permission, which would obviously have a bearing on the price.

So a few of us got together and wrote to the municipal authority (in this case, also our landlord) expressing our anguish. Needless to say we got no reply. We followed it up with many visits and were finally granted an appointment with the authorities. We explained our position and our anxieties and fears.

The response brought home our unique situation. "Do you not love Santiniketan and do you not wish to honour the legacy of Tagore? Do you not believe in the spirit of self-sacrifice that Gandhi preached?" was the admonition that followed fast and thick. I could not believe I was conversing with an adult. The short point was the university had no place to house many of its departments and therefore had to utilise these sudden gifts like the house in question. Therefore the need for our "sacrifice" to accommodate their lack of planning.

Of course I love Santiniketan. That is why I moved here. And I certainly do not have a barometer that would be acceptable to professionals whose careers have brought them here. But that's not the point. We were citizens expressing our view to our municipal authority. If we were making any unjust demands, all we needed was to be told how so. Why bring in Tagore? The pursuit of legacy surely cannot be contrary to the pursuit of reason!

Maybe the less erudite fail to realise how heady can the legacy of Tagore be. Heady enough for his torch bearers to fail to appreciate mundane everyday realities. Recently a high level committee headed by the West Bengal governor, Gopal Krishna Gandhi (also the rector of Visva Bharati) commented on the fact that the entire university town had no garbage collection or disposal system!

The souvenir shops around the campus sell clay figures of Tagore. In some of the badly sculpted ones, Tagore has a stoop more pronounced than what is noticeable in photographs. To me they are increasingly symbolic of him carrying a burden of too much love.