Keya Sarkar: Santiniketan's dilemma

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This year was the first time Tagore's birthday (25th of Baisakh) was celebrated officially by the Visva Bharati University.

Ever since the university was established, Tagore had laid down a tradition of celebrations on the New Year, before students broke for the summer holidays and Santiniketan reeled under the scorching sun and water shortage.

Today summer holidays no longer begin with the Bengali new year and water shortage is much less an issue now. And Tagore's birthday may well be celebrated on the right day.

But a more uncharitable view is that that the hotels and lodges in Santiniketan put pressure on the university to create another "event" in Santiniketan. The unimaginative middle-class tourists always need a reason to throng a place, and Santiniketan is only three hours from Kolkata.

I had written in this column about how the Visva Bharati University authorities had decided to put up brick and barbed wire fences around the premises of the school run by it as well as all college and university departments. Old students of the university, who have enjoyed the openness of the campus before, were disappointed.

Memories of meeting up with friends in other departments or hostels through flower- and fruit-scented pathways would now remain just that, memories. Not having studied in Santiniketan, my sense of loss wasn't really high. I just felt a generic sadness for a change of a way of life.

But my research on the changing environment of Santiniketan and the reasons for it made me talk to teachers, professors, ex-students, gardeners and other members of maintenance.

What I learnt has made me realise I was wrong to jump to conclusions and blame the university authorities for fencing without reason. I now appreciate how the authorities have to cope with the demands of running an educational institution parallel with a tourist destination.

In Tagore's time, in fact, up to even a decade ago, tourists to Santiniketan were few and far between. Now with bus and Sumo-loads of them arriving, it is distracting for school children, who have their classes under the trees, to be stared at by every passing tourist.

The older students can cope a little better with the tourists and much of their classes are now held indoors anyway. But they have another problem. I do not know whether it is an exaggerated anecdote, but at least half a dozen teachers, professors and students said that their departments had to be fenced because the tourists were creating unmentionable nuisance.

Apparently, every morning when the teachers and students entered their department premises, they stumbled upon used condoms and even found them tied to the locks of the department doors!

"Does that mean that here too there was growing promiscuity amongst the students?" I asked one of the teachers. "No it is the tourists," he said emphatically. "So, the bus loads of visitors were not booking into hotels and helping the local economy," I thought.

Instead they were cosying up here. "But what about the security staff?" I asked. "Can't they stop such atrocities?" "They are bribed," was the prompt reply. "To do what?" I wondered. To go to sleep? Surely that does not need any bribing.

The Statesman has recently reported that the authorities that be are also contemplating making Santiniketan a liquor-free zone to cope with "security" threats perceived on the loss of the Nobel. Tourists are hereby advised to pay heed. No wine, no women, and certainly no women with condoms!