Tirthankar Roy
About me |
Santiniketan made me human – Trivandrum made me a scholar – and
hostility towards Calcutta’s Marxists made my outlook
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Santiniketan – made me human
I grew up in Santiniketan in eastern India, the "ashram" founded by
Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905), father of the poet, writer, composer
Rabindranath (1861-1941).
Santiniketan embodied the spirit of the Bengali renaissance, a movement
to refresh modern India's links with classical Indian music, art, and
literature. Rabindranath Tagore added to this ideal an internationalism.
"Knowledge has no borders" - this is the motto of the university that
was started there. My
father Satyendranath Roy (1918-2003), a Tagore Professor in Santiniketan
and one of the best literary critics in Bengali, also wrote about the
ideals of 19th c. Bengali cultural revival.
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Calcutta – shaped my outlook
The premier city of eastern India, Calcutta was an international city
until 1940, thanks to its cosmopolitan business heritage. It lost its
international character first in business and then in culture during a
communist upsurge in the 1970s and 1980s and ended up as the provincial
backwater now known as Kolkata.
Santiniketan maintained contact with the world at large. Growing
up here made me allergic to a distasteful side of Bengali modernity :
the arrogance and short-sightedness with which the communists, with a
fetish for the village, set out to first destroy Calcutta's capitalist
heritage, and then to mould the intellectual and cultural life of Bengal
- a great deal of it contribution of Santiniketan - into a politically
correct image. |
Trivandrum – made me a scholar
My move into economic history happened in the Centre for Development
Studies. A left-leaning institution, CDS in my time valued original
thought, wide reading, history as a way to understand the present, and
democracy between teachers and students. All of these values helped me
grow.
CDS taught me that history is telling a new story credibly. Credible is
that story which trusts its sources .. unless contradicted by other
sources.
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