Jyoti Basu died on a Sunday (January 17), Monday was declared a state holiday, Tuesday was the funeral and Wednesday was Saraswati Puja. The holiday mood for Bengalis just got extended with offices shut again for Netaji’s birthday on the 23rd, giving them another long weekend.
As Santiniketan, now more a tourist town than a university campus, gears up for the tourist onslaught, the excitement amongst taxi owners, rickshaw pullers, hotel owners, and souvenir sellers is palpable. The first indication of the arrival of outsiders is the loaded Tata Sumos that come in droves. Then there are busloads bringing in day picnickers from moffusil towns far and near. They park buses on the university campus, bathe, cook, eat, litter and leave after a mandatory tour of Tagore landmarks aided by half-literate guides.
And then come the city slickers in their air-conditioned cruisers, completely insensitive to the mud tracks of Santiniketan, pedestrians and rickshaws. Their irritation at the slightest hint of absence of comfort (What? No Diet Coke? No cold cuts?) makes one wonder why they bothered to drive down to a place that has no ability for instant gratification. It is a nice drive, and many of them have houses in Santiniketan with gardeners to ensure all seasonal flowers are in bloom when the babus arrive with friends. But surely, Santiniketan could do better in terms of amenities, which would make missing their club nights over the weekend worth it.
But cutting across all types of tourists, one sentiment that remains is their idea of Tagore’s Santiniketan as an abode of peace. They are still looking for bounty of nature, pretty tribal women, their villages, all that the poet himself and others after him have immortalised. The reality is that, thanks to promoters, nature has vanished, the tribals and their abodes have been marginalised.
In a place where Tagore abhorred idol worship and established a secular upasana griha for celebrating all religions, the campus is now witness to all sorts of idol worship — not organised by the university authorities, but certainly aided and abetted by them by being mute spectators to mindless music blaring over loudspeakers. In fact, the best coming together of these two completely opposing cultures which really shook many an old resident of Santiniketan was on the day of maghotsav: The eleventh day of the month of Magh on the Bengali calendar which commemorates the institutionalisation of the Brahmo Samaj by Tagore’s father. The university authorities still arrange a celebration at the secular upasana griha.
Since Saraswati Puja was on the 20th and no idol is immersed as per convention the next day anymore, immersion processions with their blaring music and pelvic-dancing passed everyday through the campus as tourists had started arriving since the beginning of the long weekend. But that it finally drowned the maghotsav celebrations on the 25th and that the university authorities were completely impotent in stopping cheap Bengali songs from drowning the readings and the chanting at the maghotsav celebrations was probably a sign of the times. The immersion procession passed right in front of the mandir and all those attending the maghotsav internalised the reality that Tagore’s ideals had little place in today’s world where mass culture had been reduced to showing of brawn power of the less privileged. It was in the fitness of things that the same evening saw the announcement of the Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri nominees. In a country where disproportionate honour is bestowed on movie icons, of what use are education and the values that it upholds?
