On 20 September 1944, Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize money and its investment were discussed in a meeting of the Samsad (governing body) of Visva-Bharati. The discussion was sparked off by a letter written six years earlier by the institution’s karma-sachiva (general secretary) Rathindranath Tagore. In this letter, dated 30 January 1938, Rathindranath had apprised the members of the Samsad about the loss of a substantial sum of money, Rs 1,33,571-4-6 (Rupee-Anna-Paise) – huge by any estimate of that time.
Interestingly, the loss was not in the finances of Visva-Bharati, but was in the accounts of the Patisar Krishi Bank, a rural bank located in Kaligram, which was part of the Tagore zamindari in Bengal. The bank had failed to pay the interest which had accumulated to Rs 59,657-0-4, thus raising liability as on 12 February 1938 to Rs 1,93,228-4-10. The money had been advanced as credit to the peasants in the estate of Kaligram, but they could not pay this back. This turned the investments into a bad debt (Samsad Reports 1944: 168).
It may appear puzzling that the Samsad of Visva-Bharati chose to address the matter of a bad financial investment of a rural bank. There were, in fact, sound reasons for this debate since Visva-Bharati had a stake in this financial investment, albeit in an indirect manner. The very large sum invested in the Patisar Krishi Bank was the Nobel Prize money which Rabindranath Tagore had received in 1913, and according to the Memorandum of Association drawn up during the formal inauguration of Visva-Bharati (1921), one of the items in the list of assets given over by Rabindranath Tagore to the Visva-Bharati was the “Nobel Prize Fund in Bank”, a sum of Rs 1,12,000 (Memorandum 1921: 80).
As the karma-sachiva of Visva-Bharati, Rathindranath felt he had to shoulder the responsibility of the financial debacle caused by the failure of Patisar Krishi Bank to pay the interest. He, thus, requested the Visva-Bharati authorities to accept the properties he owned in Calcutta, which he had recently got surveyed and evaluated, in lieu of the money locked up in the bank (Samsad Reports 1944: 168). The members of the Samsad appeared to sidestep the issue of sale of property and engaged in a discussion of Tagore’s intentions regarding investment of the Nobel Prize money.
Testimonies from the Samsad
The recollection of the occasions – both private and public – in which Rabindranath Tagore or Gurudev (the appellation used for the poet) had expressed his wishes constituted the basis of the discussion in the Samsad. Three testimonies seem to be of crucial importance: those by the noted Sanskrit scholar Kshitimohan Sen (1880-1960), who joined the Brahmacharyasrama or the Santiniketan asrama school set up by Tagore on the latter’s invitation; Debendra Mohan Bose, the artha-sachiva or treasurer of Visva-Bharati for two decades (between the mid-1920s and 1940s), and Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893-1972), the polyglot physicist and mathematician with indefatigable organisational skills who had been inducted into the administration of Visva-Bharati by Rabindranath Tagore from the moment of its inception in 1921.
Kshitimohan Sen’s testimony is a recollection of what transpired soon after the news of award of the Nobel Prize reached Santiniketan. Tagore received a telegram in the late afternoon of 14 November 1913 from his relations and friends in Calcutta congratulating him (Pal 1992: 444). In his memoir, Pramathanath Bishi, one of the very early students of the Brahmacharyasrama school, writes that Tagore was out on a stroll with Nepal Majumdar and a few other teachers of the school when the telegram reached him. Apparently, he glanced at the telegram and passed it silently to Majumdar adding, “There Nepalbabu! Here is the money for the building of your drains” (Bishi 2008: 91). This widely circulated anecdote is probably apocryphal and became the source of the commonly held belief that the Nobel Prize money went, literally, down the drain.
The facts, however, bespeak a different story, one which was perhaps difficult for the members of the Santiniketan community to comprehend. The Nobel Prize money must have seemed like manna from heaven to the members of the asrama school and community in Santiniketan, which was perpetually cash-strapped. Kshitimohan Sen’s testimony in the Samsad pointed to precisely this expectation. Sen says, “A shadow of anxiety fell upon this atmosphere of optimism when we came to learn that Gurudeva had decided to invest the money in the Patisar Krishi Bank” (Samsad Reports 1944: 170).
When Rabindranath Tagore was apprised of the anxiety and agitation of the important members of his asrama community, he took some of them into confidence and explained the rationale of his decision:
He [Tagore] told us that it was the people of Patisar who had so long supplied him with the necessities of life and it was their money which had helped him to build up the Bramhacharyasrama. Thus the school was in the main indebted to Patisar. If in serving their best interests the invested money was lost, the school would have no cause to complain. If on the other hand they profited from the investment, the school would stand to gain. He concluded by saying, ‘People of Patisar have the first claim on the prize-money’ (Samsad Reports 1944: 170) (emphasis added).
The sum which Rabindranath Tagore received from the Nobel Foundation was “Kronor 143,010=89” (Pal 1992: 455). According to Tagore’s biographer, Prasanta Pal, the total investment in the rural banks in 1914 amounted to Rs 75,000 – Rs 48,000 in the Patisar Krishi Bank at 7% interest per annum and Rs 27,000 at the same rate of interest in the Kaligram Krishi Bank1 (Pal 1992: 455-56).2 The terms of the investment ensured that the interest from the investments would be made available for the running and maintenance of the asrama school. Tagore was quite inflexible in his decision that the institution he had set up could only stand to gain in a limited way from the investment – by being a secondary beneficiary of the Nobel Prize money. This came as a surprise to Tagore’s close associates in Santiniketan, who were not fully cognisant of his very strong emotional attachment and ideological commitment to the cause of the poor peasants of his zamindari.
The Poet-Zamindar and His Peasants
Rabindranath Tagore was 28 years old when his father Debendranath Tagore sent him to oversee the Tagore family’s zamindari. These estates sprawled over large tracts and included areas in Sahajadpur, Patisar, Silaidaha, Kustia and Kumarkhali, as well as some tracts in the Cuttack district of Orissa. The close encounter with the countryside changed Rabindranath Tagore, who had so long led an urban existence, an especially privileged one as a young zamindar. The new experience seemed to cry out for a new mode of expression in prose. This took the form of epistles, written to his favourite niece Indira Debi, the daughter of his second brother Satyendranath Tagore.3
If these 12 years (1889-1901) were crucial in shaping the extraordinary fiction and epistles, they also sensitised Tagore to the appalling poverty, ill-health, superstition and lack of resources in rural Bengal. In a gathering at Sriniketan in Surul in 1938, Tagore spoke of his ignorance of village life as a city-bred young man entrusted with the work of the zamindari:
Gradually the sorrow and poverty of the villages became clear to me, and I began to grow restless to do something about it. It seemed to me a very shameful thing that I should spend my days as a land-lord, concerned only with money-making and engrossed with my own profit and loss (Tagore 1942: 95).
The young Tagore, deeply affected by the poverty of the peasants and critical of his own economic and social privilege, was unique among the zamindars or landlords of Bengal. According to Amiya Bagchi, not only was the largest portion of agricultural land owned by a small group of zamindars, but “the ordinary cultivators all over India were poor, illiterate, and subject to coercion by money-lenders, upper-caste groups and landlords” (Bagchi 1972: 94). Bagchi also notes that the “tenants-at-will” had no incentive to invest in agriculture, and the poor peasants could not afford to buy new tools or fertilisers (1972: 96). Indeed, as a recent study in rural credit during the late 19th century points out (Shah et al 2007: 1351-53), the mahajan or the moneylenders wielded an immense power over the peasants at several levels. The farmers’ failure to repay debts, both short-term and long-term, compelled them to sell their produce to the moneylenders at a rate lower than the market price immediately after harvest. This left them with little option but to borrow money from the moneylenders at a very high rate. It created a vicious cycle of perpetual deficit. When crops failed, due to unforeseen natural calamities, the peasants would often be reduced to penury and starvation.
Rabindranath Tagore identified the importance of rural credit as central to the backbone of agriculture and stressed the significance of krishi (agricultural) banks. The Patisar Krishi Bank was set up in 1906 and Tagore borrowed money from his relatives and friends for the corpus fund. However, it was not, as is often erroneously assumed, a cooperative bank. Tagore intended it as a zamindari bank with Rathindranath Tagore as its sole proprietor. When Tagore received the Nobel Prize money he decided to invest a large sum in the Patisar Krishi Bank in 1914. This enabled the agricultural bank to loan money to the peasants at an interest of 12% per annum; a very low rate, especially in comparison to what the peasants were earlier forced to pay to the mahajan. Clearly, the Patisar Krishi Bank played a crucial role in releasing the peasants from the stranglehold of the moneylenders.
Tagore wanted the rural banks also to advise “peasants on cutting down unnecessary expenditure and saving” (Raha 2011: 182). It was to this end that Tagore sent his son Rathindranath Tagore, his son-in-law Nagendranath Ganguly, and his friend Srish Chandra Majumdar’s son Santosh Chandra Majumdar to study agriculture in the United States (US). Tagore wanted the experiment in scientific agriculture to begin in earnest.4 Though the experiments with scientific forms of agriculture at Silaidaha and later Patisar had to be abandoned, Rabindranath Tagore never forgot the conditions of the peasants of these villages. This was not merely benevolent paternalism, but a core of his politico-philosophical thinking about decolonisation.
It is not mere coincidence that between 1901 and 1906 Rabindranath Tagore began to write a series of Bengali essays, which were later collected in the volume Atmashakti (1905).5 In the famous “Swadeshi Samaj” essay, Tagore identified atmashakti or self-reliance as the core of this process of the decolonisation of the mind. The villagers, linked through bonds of kinship and neighbourliness, provided the model of such self-reliance, and Tagore intended to create a programme which would strengthen the moral and affective fibre of this traditional community-society which he termed samaj. The need was to build bridges between the so-called uneducated masses living in the villages and the Bengali bhadralok whose urban existence had cut them off from their traditional moorings, and taken them away from the village which constituted the locus of Bharatbarsha (Thakur 1986: 625-41).
It is possible to suggest that Tagore retained his affiliations with his early imaginary of his homeland or swadesh in the samaj, even after he formally cut himself off from his early fervour after 1906. The investment of the Nobel Prize money in the krishi banks in 1914 is a clear indication of his will. The award of the Nobel Prize in 1913 also affected the way in which he began to think about the scope of his work in the Santiniketan asrama.
Gift of the Nobel Prize Money
Rabindranath Tagore began to conceive of an academy that would serve as a bridge between India and the world when he was on a lecture tour in the US. Indeed, he would not rest until his dream took shape: the foundation of the new institution, which he named Visva-Bharati, was laid on 23 December 1918. Rabindrananth Tagore was fortunate that quite a few very able men and women were willing to give shape to his dream. Among them was a very talented and erudite young Brahmo, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.6 Tagore had full faith in Mahalanobis and depended on him for administrative and academic matters of the Visva-Bharati. It was Mahalanobis who drafted the Memorandum of Association, regarded as the first Constitution of Visva-Bharati,7 and this document contains a list of the assets transferred to Visva-Bharati by Rabindranath Tagore. Hence, Mahalanobis’s testimony, as recorded in the Samsad Report of 1944, gains a special significance and is quoted at length.
The Founder President told me that he had deposited the Nobel Prize money in the Potisar Krishi Bank with a view to helping the cultivators in his zamindari and he desired that this money should always remain invested there and should never be withdrawn from that bank by the Visva-Bharati. He stated that his intention was that the Visva-Bharati should enjoy only such interest on the Nobel Prize money as might from time to time be paid by the Potisar Krishi Bank so that the Visva-Bharati would not have a right to change the investment in any way. His own desire was that the above arrangement should be explicitly stated in writing at the time of the formal constitution of the Visva-Bharati (Samsad Reports 1944: 169) (emphasis added).
Mahalanobis then drew attention to the problem which arose when lawyers were preparing the document of the Memorandum of Association. They argued that such details would become cumbersome in a legal document. Following their suggestion, it was Mahalanobis who convinced Tagore to agree to the form in which Appendix I was actually drawn up in which the Nobel Prize Fund was simply stated to be “Rs 1,20,000 in bank”.8 In his oral deposition before the Samsad in 1944, Mahalanobis added that Tagore had made it explicit that in case the “Potisar Krishi Bank was unable to pay any interest on the Nobel prize deposit it would not be open to the Visva-Bharati to withdraw the money from the bank and invest it elsewhere” (emphasis added) (Samsad Reports 1944: 169).
Rabindranath Tagore was particularly sensitive to this issue of investment of the large sum of money in a rural bank. Debendra Mohan Bose, the treasurer of Visva-Bharati, recounted the incident that occurred during 1926-27, a period when he was officiating as the joint secretary of Visva-Bharati. At a Varshik Parishat or annual general meeting, attended by Rabindranath Tagore, there was a suggestion for withdrawing the deficit amount of Rs 40,000 from the Life Members Fund which was also invested in the Patisar Krishi Bank as fixed deposit. Rabindranath misunderstood, interrupted the reading of the report, and said with considerable feeling that he had invested that money in the Patisar Krishi Bank “for the benefit of my tenants previous to the foundation of the Visva-Bharati. The latter is entitled only to the interest accruing from the investment but not to the corpus of the Fund” (Samsad Reports 1944: 168) (emphasis added). Debendra Mohan Bose reassured Tagore that the Samsad was discussing the possibility of withdrawing the Life Members Fund only, and it was only then that Tagore regained his calm (Samsad Reports 1944: 169-70).
The issue of the investment of the Nobel Prize money came up in a meeting of the Samsad in 1934, which was attended, among others, by Rabindranath Tagore himself. The historian Sushobhan Sarkar (who had been nominated a member) asked a series of questions about the financial situation of Visva-Bharati. One of these queries was about the amount of interest being received from the Nobel Prize fund in the Patisar Krishi Bank. Rathindranath Tagore, the karma-sachiva replied that the last date of payment from the bank was 26 September 1932 (Samsad Reports 1934: 123). This may not have been entirely unexpected since the decade of the 1930s bore the brunt of the agricultural depression which had already set in by 1926. As Amiya Bagchi points out, “the total exports of India on private account, which had increased up to 1924-25, declined after that year and remained stagnant up to 1928-29, after which they declined drastically” (Bagchi 1972: 86-87). Given this sharp decline in agricultural exports, it is not difficult to understand why the peasants had failed to return the money which had been advanced to them from the Patisar Krishi Bank as loan.
A subcommittee consisting of Debendra Mohan Bose, Charu Chandra Bhattacharya, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Rathindranath Tagore was appointed to enquire into the present position of the fixed deposit of the Nobel Prize fund, the Kala Bhavana Fund, Kadoorji Water Fund and the Pearson Memorial Fund, all of which were invested with the Patisar Krishi Bank (Samsad Reports 1934: 110). The subcommittee recommended that the rate of interest charged on the fixed deposit in the Patisar Krishi Bank be reduced from 7% to 4.5% per annum with retrospective effect from 20 March 1934, the date on which the matter was first considered by the Samsad (Reports 1938: 111).
It may be conjectured that Rathindranath’s proposal for the sale of the Jorasanko property came up at this juncture because the years 1941-44 were perceived as a period of grave financial crisis for Visva-Bharati. The authorities were apprehensive that in the absence of the charismatic and revered founder of Visva-Bharati, the patronage might not be as bountiful as it used to be. However, there are no records, at least of the Samsad meetings, that Rathindranath’s offer for the sale of property was taken up for discussion. Perhaps the oral depositions made by Kshitimohan Sen, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and others had established beyond doubt that Rabindranath Tagore would not have given his ethical sanction in the matter of the financial entitlement of Visva-Bharati to the Nobel Prize money.
Implication of the Investment
On the centenary celebrations of Tagore’s Nobel Prize award, it is imperative to go beyond recounting the glory of the moment and focus on the material aspects of the Nobel Prize, i e, the money and its utilisation, a fascinating story of the first Asian Nobel Laureate whose feet were firmly planted not only on the ground, but on the soil – he had chosen to give away the stupendous sum for the peasants of his zamindari. In giving the rich harvest of his creative labour to the cause of the common peasant, Tagore the poet and landlord was at the frontiers of socio-economic and philosophical thinking about the Indian village. In 1913, Alfred Nobel’s will had no provision for a Nobel Prize in Economics. Yet, a Nobel in Literature allowed Tagore to fulfil his role as a radical social and economic thinker, one who was committed to a holistic idea of social, and particularly, rural reconstruction.
The testimonies of the members of the Samsad were not merely a matter of an administrative decision pertaining to resolving the financial claims of Visva-Bharati. This was a case of conflict between “truth” and “fact”: the wordings of the document which stated that Tagore had transferred the said amount as asset to Visva-Bharati constituted a “fact”, whereas the “truth” of Rabindranath Tagore’s intention about the utilisation of the Nobel Prize money was conveyed through his spoken word. It was important to debate the nuances of this since Visva-Bharati’s claims were not merely a legal matter of asset transfer. It is well known that Tagore had, in a letter to M K Gandhi, dated 2 February 1940, referred to this institution as “a vessel which is carrying the cargo of my life’s best treasure” (Bhattacharya 1997: 178).
Tagore had spent the last 20 years of his life in various mendicancy missions to provide the finances for his beloved institution. Even during these difficult years, he never entertained the idea that the Nobel Prize fund could be withdrawn from the rural bank. Indeed, a suggestion to invest the Nobel Prize money in the Imperial Bank had been made in the 1920s. Rabindranath Tagore dismissed this advice, and feelingly added that he had his duty by his tenants who not only supported him, but had provided the major part of the money he had spent on Santiniketan (Samsad Reports 1944: 169). In the principles which informed his investment policy, the traditional hierarchy between the peasants and pedagogues was in fact reversed – it was the claim of the chasa (peasant) and not that of the bhadralok which was prioritised. The investment of the Nobel Prize money stands testimony to Rabindranath Tagore’s unique idea of decolonisation that can be achieved by addressing the inequalities that exist within society.
Notes
1 The Samsad proceedings mention only one rural bank, i e, Patisar Krishi Bank in which the entire Nobel Prize money was invested. However, the account given in Tagore’s biography by Prasanta Pal (1992) clearly mentions both Patisar Krishi Bank and Kaligram Krishi Bank. This was soon after 1913. One can speculate that the entire sum was transferred to the Patisar Krishi Bank at a later date, but before 1921.
2 Thus, there appears a discrepancy between Pal’s (1992) account of the investment and the amount mentioned in the transfer of assets by Tagore to Visva-Bharati, a document which was drawn up in 1922. The amount mentioned in the Memorandum of Association of Visva-Bharati (Memorandum 1921) is corroborated by the pass book of the Patisar Krishi Bank No 1629. This reveals that the Nobel Prize money was invested in two instalments. The first instalment, a sum of Rs 82,000 was deposited in 1329 BS (1922) on the seventh day of Baishakh, and the second instalment deposited on the second day of Baishakh 1331 BS (1923) was a sum of Rs 30,000. Hence, the total investment of the Nobel Prize money was a sum of Rs 1,12,000 (TEP nd: 009-0012).
3 Indira copied them down in her khata or note book and presented it back to her Rabikaka. Rabindranath edited and published them as Chhinnapatra in 1912. Many of these are romantic lyrical descriptions of nature and vignettes of village life glimpsed from a lazily floating boat. The letters, which straddle the space between the public and private, are the shaping spirit of many of his remarkable short stories written during the late 19th century. The two stories which can be identified easily are Samapti (Conclusion) and Chhuti (Holiday).
4 Interestingly, even while Rabindranath was engaged in introducing scientific modes of agriculture, he began to expand the readership of his work among people of different cultures, primarily those of the anglophone world. It was in 1912 that Rabindranth began to translate the lyrics and poems of Gitanjali, Naibedya and Kheya into English, a project which culminated in the making of the English Gitanjali.
5 The other important essays in Atmashakti which need to be read together are “Nation ki?” (What is a Nation), “Bharatbarshiya Samaj” (The Society of Bharatbarsha), and ‘‘Swadeshi Samaj er Parishistho” (The Conclusion to Swadeshi Samaj).
6 Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, trained as a physicist, was prolific and interested in disciplines as diverse as anthropology and meteorology. He was the founder of several important institutions of modern India, notably the Indian Statistical Institute and the National Sample Survey Organisation. Mahalanobis was a close associate of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the chief architect of the Second Five-Year Plan.
7 Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis drafted this document with the assistance of Surendranath Tagore and with inputs from Brajendranath Seal.
8 There is a discrepancy between the two accounts of the Nobel Prize Fund cited in this article. The first, mentioned earlier, of Rs 1,12,000 is from the Visva-Bharati Society Memorandum, Appendix D of the archives (Memorandum 1921). The second, cited here as Rs 1,20,000, is from an oral deposition (Samsad Reports 1944) of P C Mahalanobis and was probably an error of memory of his part.
References
Digitised Archive
Memorandum (1921): Visva Bharati Society Memorandum, Rabindra Bhavana Archives, Visva-Bharati Papers [VBP File 4(iv) Appendix D].
Samsad Reports (1934): Rabindra Bhavana Archives, Visva-Bharati Papers [VBP File 1(v)].
Samsad Reports (1938): Rabindra Bhavana Archives, Visva-Bharati Papers [VBP File 1(vii)].
Samsad Reports (1944): Rabindra-Bhavana Archives,Visva-Bharati Papers [VBP File 1(iii)].
TEP (nd): Tagore Estate Papers, Rabindra Bhavana Archives [TEP (B) File No 108].
Print
Bagchi, Amiya (1972): Private Investment in India 1900-1939 (London: Cambridge University Press).
Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, ed. (1997): The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915-1941 (New Delhi: National Book Trust).
Bishi, Pramathanath (2008): Rabindranath o Santiniketan [Rabindranath and Santiniketan] (first published in 1944) (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati).
Pal, Prasanta (1992): Rabi Jibani (Biography of Rabi), Volume VI (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers).
Raha, Bipasha (2011): “Attempt at Revival of Villages” in Swati Ganguly and Abhijit Sen (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore and the Nation: Essays in Politics, Society and Culture (Kolkata: Punascha), 179-190.
Shah, Mihir, Rangu Rao and P S Vijay Shankar (2007): “Rural Credit in 20th Century India: Overview of History and Perspectives”, Economic & Political Weekly, 42(15): 1351-64.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1942): “The History and Ideals of Sriniketan”,Visva-Bharati News, February: 95-99. (Translation by Marjorie Sykes of an address given by Rabindranath Tagore at an informal meeting of the workers of the Institute of Rural reconstruction at Sriniketan in 1939; first published in the Modern Review, November 1941.)
Thakur, Rabindranath (1986): “Swadeshi Samaj” (first published in 1904) in Rabindra Rachanavali [Complete works of Rabindranath], Volume 2 (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati), 625-41.
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