The ashram
In 1863 Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, the reformed monotheistic movement of Bengal, acquired land near Bolpur in the Birbhum district and built a retreat for meditation, which he named Santiniketan, "abode of peace". His son Rabindranath came there as a boy.
Tagore's school
In 1901 Rabindranath Tagore opened a school at Santiniketan, at first with a handful of pupils. He rejected the rote learning and closed classrooms of colonial schools and held classes under trees, in the open air, with music, drama, crafts and nature study part of the curriculum. In 1913 Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first awarded to a non-European, and part of the prize money went to the school. Gandhi visited several times, and it was Tagore who is generally credited with popularising the title Mahatma for him.
Visva-Bharati
In 1921 Tagore founded Visva-Bharati, a university whose name expresses the idea of the world meeting in one nest. He invited scholars from Europe and Asia, among them the French Indologist Sylvain Lévi and the Chinese scholar Tan Yun-shan, who founded a department of Chinese studies, and Visva-Bharati became a centre for the study of Buddhism, Chinese, Tibetan and the languages of India. Its art school, Kala Bhavana, led by Nandalal Bose, with the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij and the painter Benode Behari Mukherjee, was one of the main sources of modern Indian art. Its music school developed the songs of Tagore, Rabindra Sangeet.
With the English agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst, Tagore founded Sriniketan in 1922, a centre for rural reconstruction in the surrounding villages, with cooperatives, crafts and health work.
Among those who studied at Santiniketan were the film-maker Satyajit Ray, the economist Amartya Sen, who grew up there, and Indira Gandhi.
After Tagore
Tagore died in 1941. Visva-Bharati became a central university under an act of Parliament in 1951, with the prime minister as its chancellor. Its annual Poush Mela, a winter fair begun by Debendranath, and its spring festival draw large crowds. In 2004 Tagore's Nobel medal was stolen from the university's museum and has not been recovered. In 2023 Santiniketan was inscribed as a World Heritage Site, the first living university to be so listed.
Further reading
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
- Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1994
See also
- British Raj — The British Raj was the period of direct Crown rule over India from 1858 to 1947, following the East India Company's dissolution after the rebellion of 1857.
- Partition of Bengal (1905) — The 1905 division of the Bengal Presidency by Viceroy Lord Curzon into two provinces along broadly religious lines, an act that provoked mass protest and the Swadeshi movement.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.