Permaculture is growing. Education and research are expanding. Interesting demo sites are becoming available to visitors. Permaculture ‘dots on the map’ are multiplying.1 All this is good news. What was a lifestyle choice for a few, based on a set of ethics, principles and techniques, is starting to look like a movement. Some people may be drawn to permaculture as a political movement.2 Others would prefer an anti-political understanding of permaculture,3 which still offers the prospect of widespread world change. The Bengali poet and polymath, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) offers such a model.
Tagore
often insisted he was not a philosopher or a scholar. He was not
interested in theories or utopian visions. His authority comes from
his practical efforts over fifty years to revive traditional Indian
society, which had been severely disrupted by British rule. His
remedy for a broken society was to heal it from within. Cooperation
was the key. People must get together in their local communities to
help each other and themselves. To give them a start, they would need
advice and expertise, suitable training and education, health and
welfare provision, affordable finance, and encouragement towards
developing participative government and local conflict resolution.
Most importantly for Tagore, to counter fatalism and apathy their
spirits must be raised, by reviving traditional arts and crafts,
music and story-telling, fairs and festivities. Tagore’s motivation
changed over the course of his rural reconstruction efforts:
initially he felt sympathy and a sense of responsibility as a
landlord, next he tried to set out a national programme of
constructive self government, lastly he pinned his hopes on bringing
about change through education.
Tagore was both an indefatigable man of
action and a compulsive writer who left a vast written legacy.4
Fortunately for us, his ideas on world change can be appreciated by
studying just five pieces of writing: two poems: ‘Call Me Back to
Work’ (1894) and ‘They Work’ (1941) and three essays: ‘Society
and State’ (1904); ‘Nationalism in the West’ (1917) and ‘City
and Village’ (1928) (all available at www.tagoreanworld.co.uk).The
dates of the two poems span the period over which Tagore was working
to revive Indian village society. ‘Call Me Back to Work’ shows
vividly the Poet’s compassion and commitment. In the final stanza
he urges himself into action:
Gather
yourself, O Poet and arise.
If you have courage bring it as
your gift.
There is so much sorrow and
pain,
a world of suffering lies
ahead,—
poor, empty, small, confined and
dark.
We need food and life, light and
air,
strength and health and spirit
bright with joy
and wide bold hearts.
Into the misery of this world, O
Poet,
bring once more from heaven the
light of faith.
It was a revelation for Tagore when he
was put in charge of the family estates in East Bengal (now
Bangladesh) in 1891. He was deeply moved by the natural beauty of the
region and the simple life of the common people. He saw the deep
despair which pervades rural life all over the country and determined
to improve the conditions with programmes of rural development. The
root cause of this despair was British imperialism. The British
introduced private land ownership and created an urban middle of
professionals and administrators. The absentee urban landowners
exploited and neglected their tenants.
Tagore moved his base to Santiniketan
in West Bengal in 1901, and continued rural reconstruction work in
the neighbouring villages, as well as maintaining his interest and
involvement in the Tagore estates. In 1903 the British government in
India announced their intention to partition Bengal, into a largely
Muslim East and a largely Hindu West. Popular objection to this
‘divide and rule’ measure manifested as protest marches and a
‘Swadeshi’ boycott of British good, particularly cloth. Tagore
became a leader of the protests, wrote patriotic songs, gave stirring
speeches and led a demonstration of Hindu-Muslim solidarity involving
tying friendship bracelets. He favoured transforming the Swadeshi
boycott into a move towards ‘Constructive Swadeshi’, and he urged
urban landlords to return to their estates and engage in reviving
village craft industries and local fairs. His essay ‘Society and
State’ (Swadeshi Samaj in Bengali) was originally a public
address he gave in 1904, at a meeting to discuss the failure of the
British government in Bengal to solve a problem of water shortage. In
the essay Tagore makes a powerful case for devolving decision making
and responsibility to grassroots level, thus reviving traditional
Indian society: Tagore explains that their country has traditionally
had a society, but not a state in the English sense:
What in English concepts is
known as the State was called in our country Sarkar or
Government. This Government existed in ancient India in the form of
kingly power, but there is a difference between the present English
State and our ancient kingly power. England relegates to State care
all the welfare services in the country; India did that only to a
very limited extent.
Tagore goes on to explain that in
India, ‘social duties were specifically assigned to the members of
society’, and the king made his contribution, like any other
wealthy member of society, and the word for social duties is dharma,
which ‘permeated the whole social fabric’.
Tagore
was unable to persuade the English-educated urban intelligentsia to
adopt his political programme, and the negative boycott turned
violent and destructive, and so he turned his back on the protests
and returned to his base at Santiniketan, where he implemented the
Constructive Swadeshi ideals on a small scale. He had started a small
school at Santiniketan in 1901 where the teaching encouraged
creativity, engagement with nature, local food growing, and learning
about life in the villages. The school grew in numbers and led
eventually to Tagore establishing an international university named
Visva-Bharati. A key element of the university was its Institute of
Rural Reconstruction named Sriniketan. Tagore described the
philosophy behind this venture in his essay ‘City and Village’,
in which his aims appear very modest. He explains that rather than
think of the whole country, it is best to start in a small way: ‘If
we could free even one village from the shackles of helplessness and
ignorance, an ideal for the whole of India would be established’.
Obviously Tagore failed in his efforts.
Vandana Shiva, the indefatigable campaigner for Indian farmers’
rights against agribusiness monopolies, tells of the poverty and
despair, with more than 270,000 farmers caught in the debt trap
committing suicide since 1995.5
Curiously enough, Tagore’s failure then gives us hope a century
later. He foresaw, if not the circumstances Shiva describes, but the
dehumanising effect of industrialism and the nation state, and he
wrote a penetrating critique in ‘Nationalism in the West’, which
is the text of a lecture he gave over twenty times in 1916 in the
United States.
The final piece of Tagore’s writing,
the poem ‘They Work’, written in 1941 shortly before he died,
provides a particularly important and optimistic insight. Its subject
is the transience of the empires which had successively ruled India:
the Pathans, the Moghuls, then the ‘mighty British’:
Again, under that sky, have come
marching columns of the mighty British, along iron-bound roads and in
chariots spouting fire, scattering the flames of their force.
I know that the flow of time
will sweep away their empire’s enveloping nets, and the armies,
bearers of its burden, will leave not a trace in the path of the
stars.
Through
all these changes, the people who carry out the work go on: ‘Empires
by the hundred collapse and on their ruins the people work.’
Translated into permaculture terms, and the situation we are faced
with today, what Tagore is saying is that all parasitic empires,
including modern industrial civilisation, the nation state and
finance institutions, will inevitably exhaust the resources which
sustain them, and so decline and fall. Then the people who work will
reclaim and revive the degraded land, and life will go on.
The message for the permaculture
movement is that we need not think of saving or changing the world
but of returning to normal, and rediscovering the convivial delights
of being human.
2
See ‘Permaculture and Politics’
(http://permacultureambassadors.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/permaculture-and-politics.html
)
3
‘Anti-political’ can mean not ‘Party political’, whether
Green or Leftist; also not reliant on influencing political leaders
at national or international levels; also not understood in
revolutionary terms, whether Marxist or Anarchist. Some of us, of
course, take the view that everything in human life is political.
4
An indication of Tagore’s genius is given by the tribute to mark
Tagore’s 80th birthday by Ramananda Chatterjee,
‘Rabindranath Tagore’ at www.tagoreanworld.co.uk
.
5
Vandana Shiva, ‘How economic growth has become anti-life’, The
Guardian, 1 November 2013,
(http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/how-economic-growth-has-become-anti-life
[20/2/14])
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