Comprehensive Knowledge and Critical Acumen: The Tagore Geddes Correspondence in 1922

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes had much in common, not least in their polemical thoughts on education. They met between 1918 and 1930 and were connected till Geddes’ death in 1923. Being critical of the education around them, they emphasized close bonds with nature and regeneration of the land and the lives of the villagers. In their letters the two polymaths discussed approaches to education, and emphasized its harmony with nature. This essay will be a study of the epistolary exchange between Tagore and Geddes in the year 1922. While Geddes through his letters extended a concrete plan of his University – ‘a germ of the life’1 both of them were seeking, Tagore substituted it through his ideas on ‘inner-growth, in which the sub-conscious has ever been bursting with the conscious plan’2 . This study of four important letters exchanged between them in 1922 will vindicate their critical cosmopolitan point of view to create ‘habits of coexistence’3 through an approach of acknowledging cultural alterity. The essay will reveal how Tagore’s letters to Geddes embody the poet’s ideas to bring the East and West closer together through coordination and cooperation to unite the minds of the East and the West in mutual understanding, and Geddes’ letters to Tagore weave the poet’s principles through scientific ideas of a sociologist, town planner - synthesis, sympathy and synergy. Therefore, through their epistolary correspondence, the two pioneers emphasized that Synthesis in thought [for] collective action – to Synergy in deed: and Imagination concentrates itself to prefigure, for this Etho-Polity in Synergy, [facilitates] its corresponding Achievement.4 Therefore, emphasizing the need to leave the cloister of life and embrace the deep chord of the inward life and thought involving a proper assimilation of the ‘spiritual’, ‘temporal’, ‘transcendental’, ‘material and mechanical’ with comprehensive sympathy, imagination, knowledge, and critical acumen.5