Return to tradition

In recent years, the residents of Santiniketan await the festival of Hoili or Basanta Utsav with great trepidation. As the Visva Bharati University celebrates the coming of spring in the tradition of Rabindranath Tagore, hordes of lovers of Bengali culture descend on this small town to participate in the festivities.

The programme, held by Visva Bharati, comprises singing of and dancing to Tagore’s songs of spring by the students of the school, college and university. The university has always welcomed outsiders to participate. Held in the open with no restrictions on admission, this programme has probably been one of the best welcoming of spring that the country sees. 

However, while earlier tourists (mainly Bengalis) who came from across the globe were aficionados of Tagore literature, those who come now, by the bus from muffosil towns within and without Bengal, may not even know who Tagore was.

So from a cultural festival, Basanta Utsav has become a merry making weekend jaunt hugely aided and abetted by the innumerable hotels and lodges selling weekend packages. While the number of visiting tourists usually hovers around 1-1.5 lakh, this year the number crossed 2.5 lakh, as put out by the university.

The police and administration in their wisdom block entry and exit from the Basanta Utsav venue except through specific roads. The civic volunteers on duty are often from outside of Santiniketan and have no clue about these. The resulting traffic chaos and stampede is dangerous and growing every year.

In addition to those tourists who spend a couple of days, there are of course the day trippers. This year this meant that every open area within Visva Bharati’s large campus had become a parking lot for Volvo buses. Each bus opened its hatch at the back and cooked for the travellers that it had carried. Once the buses had fed all and thrown what they didn’t wish to carry back, the open spaces were a sight to behold. This was in addition to the millions of empty plastic water pouches flying around, which the university had distributed to its 2.5 lakh guests. For residents who can barely cope with the daily garbage that they generate (because Santiniketan has no municipality), the Basanta Utsav merry making aftermath is truly horrific.

This year, however, the recently appointed vice chancellor was all enthusiastic and ensured that over 1,000 members of the university staff and students cleaned the campus over the next two days. Like every year, this year too there has been a lot of debate about the need to have an unrestricted, free-for-all Utsav. Tagore started it for those who lived and studied in Santiniketan and maybe it was time to go back to that.

But the hotel lobby is powerful and moneyed and every year they manage to win this debate. For the university too, as its educational standards are on a decline, its administrators take far more pride in the numbers that attend the Basanta Utsav and the Pous Mela (held in December) than its academic achievements.