Winds of change

Santiniketan is more a weekend getaway for merry making, drinking and binge buying of crass handicrafts

Almost 10 days after the country celebrated Teacher’s Day, a video clip of the celebrations at Sangit Bhavana, one of the departments of Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva Bharati, went viral. Informally started in 1919 as part of the Kala Bhavana to take forward Tagore’s idea of art and music being integral to education, Sangit Bhavana was later established as a full-fledged department in the early 1930s.

Many famous singers, musicians and dancers, both of the classical school and indigenous or folk cultures, have taught at and visited Sangit Bhavana and its current faculty still boasts of powerful teachers and performers. However, on that fateful day, at the end of the official celebrations, the programme segued into an unofficial one with some student playing “lungi dance” from his mobile phone playlist. The students were seen, on the video clip, playing some kind of musical chairs to this music while professors from the department were seen dancing to the beat.
 

The tape was played over and over again on every Bengali TV channel and every Bengali bhadralok, connected or unconnected to Visva Bharati spoke words of dismay and lamented the fact that things had come to such a pass. The officiating head of the organisation, however, explained that since it was not an official programme of Visva Bharati (although it was being held in the hallowed portals of the Bhavana), fingers could not be pointed at the university.

If this was a first of sorts for Bengali bhadraloks to stomach, coincidentally on the same day that this video went viral, another record was being etched in the town of Tarapith, only 60kms from Santiniketan. One of the famous abodes of goddess Kali, Tarapith normally sees a peaking of footfalls on the auspicious occasion of kaushiki amavasya. This year the day happened to coincide with the weekend and the footfall that is normally around 15,000 on week days crossed 600,000. But what also broke records that weekend was the liquor sales, which according to estimates, crossed Rs 26 million. 

Strangely, according to hotel owners in Tarapith, almost 40 per cent of bookings were from Bihar. The fact that Bihar has been since 2016 a dry state might have some connection with the spike in liquor sales or it might not. Because shop owners in Bolpur (the town adjacent to Santiniketan) also now talk about increasing liquor sales over the weekend. 

Tarapith is not far from Santiniketan and many tourists going there do a short halt in Santiniketan. They stand out with their red tikas on their foreheads but are welcomed by the local hotels and restaurants because they bring in the money.

So unmistakably, from a university town visited by intellectuals, there is a change in profile of tourists to Santiniketan. Now it is more a weekend getaway for merry making, drinking and binge buying of crass Santiniketan handicrafts. The university is incidental. In the 15 years that I have been here, the change has been sharp in the last five. Earlier, one thought that if the university tried, this trend could be reversed. But now many well wishers of the abode of peace echo my personal feeling — that things have really come unstuck. 

The “lungi dance” is only a symptom of the change. From the authorities’ response to the event, it may have to be understood that they have reconciled themselves to the change. Now it is for the rest of the world to follow suit. After all, it is a full 100 years since Sangit Bhavana was a gleam in Tagore’s eyes.