Should you be what is euphemistically described as a Tagore scholar, it would be for you either the best or the worst of times. This year marks the completion of 150 years since Rabindranath Tagore’s birth. The nation, particularly that bit of it concentrated in an eastern state, loves festivals; any occasion or pretext will do. Celebration of the Tagore anniversary has been turned into a gala carnival stretching across the 365 days in a year. Not just the ministry of culture but a number of other Central ministries too are providing generous funds so that diverse outfits dispersed all over the country, official as well as non-official, can organize commemorative programmes and events. There are symposia, workshops, seminars, lectures and orations, round-the-clock presentations of Tagore songs, plays, dance dramas, exhibitions of Tagore’s paintings, documentaries on Tagore and new films based on this or that Tagore story, displays of Tagore manuscripts, initiation of umpteen research projects to unravel afresh aspects of Tagore’s multi-faceted creativity. In case you are a genuine Tagore scholar and equipped with the requisite temperament to cohabit with maelstroms, you will be having a most exciting time, rushing from one seminar to the next, flying to different parts of the country for delivering lectures or sitting on a committee of experts assigned to suggest the best and quickest ways to translate Tagore in each of the recognized languages of the country. On the other hand, perchance you prefer, in all seasons and circumstances, the groves of academe, to go through all this will be an excruciatingly tortuous experience. The greater likelihood, though, is of your being shoved aside by ersatz characters masquerading as savants. Members of this species have an intuitive way of presenting themselves wherever the gravy flows. There is also foreign gravy to partake of. A number of foreign institutions and international agencies have Tagore programmes of their own for the year. It is not merely hopping over to next-door Dhaka to honour the invitation to participate in the parallel celebrations in Bangladesh. Summons will possibly arrive from London, Paris, Bonn, Stockholm, New York, Chicago, New Jersey, California, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Hawaii, Tokyo or Beijing. The Bengali diaspora is ubiquitous. But Tagore has also an admiring constituency in different corners of the world and, if you are a scholar or artiste or art buff of some distinction, you will feel obliged to respond to the calls of duty from overseas. If you do not mind public glare — rather, revel in it — you will reach the seventh heaven of contentment, your ego will lift by quite a few notches. Accrual of not-altogether-insubstantial material gains need not be separately mentioned. Should you be the pretender of a scholar or artiste or art buff, you would of course know how to optimize the availability of the proffered opportunities.

This frenzy of events and activities is a bonanza for airlines, hotels, contractors and event managers, but perhaps nothing much beyond. Details of how much the Centre and state governments are spending to commemorate the Tagore anniversary are not immediately compilable. One or two corporate houses, perceptive of the role of culture as a vehicle of exploitation, have also joined in the observance of the ritual and incurred some expenditure. Since such expenditure is tax deductible, the amount involved should be added to the public outlay. On a rough guess, the total could approach the neighbourhood of Rs 1,000 crore. In the context of Tagore’s contributions towards national awakening, this is piffle. Our government spends each year more than one hundred times of what it spends on culture — or even more — on defence and national security, an expenditure which in effect remains outside the purview of public scrutiny. And maybe it would be considered unkind to make a reference to the quantum of money stolen from the national exchequer by corrupt elements every year. So none has any business to take umbrage if expenditure of the estimated order is even repeated over a number of years to ensure that the nation pays proper homage to the memory of Tagore.

The issue is not what is being spent, but how it is being spent. Conventional economics was once greatly excited over the concept of opportunity cost. Is not the nation, for instance, surrendering the opportunity of a far superior way of honouring Tagore by using the allocations on the mindless razzle-dazzle we are witnessing this year? The commemorative events have descended to the level of a ritual, and the ritual very often threatens to turn into a racket gifting manna to the you-invite-me-to-your-seminar-I-will-invite-you-to-mine tribe. Instead, why could not the funds be used to extricate Visva-Bharati from the grisly mess it has sunk into and transform it into an exclusive centre of study, research and contemplation on the widely diverse manifestations of Tagore’s genius in the spheres of poetry, fiction, essays, plays and operas, music, dance, painting, education, rural reconstruction, religion and philosophy and all the rest? Was it not a gross blunder in the 1950s to pass the statute granting Visva-Bharati the status of a Central university? The outcome has been disastrous. The flow of liberal funds disequilibrated the ambience of near-pastoral tranquillity and the tradition of informality. Visva-Bharati has become just-another-run-of-the-mill teaching institution, importing the raucous culture of the marketplace; Tagore is fast receding from the landscape. Inveterate orthodoxy bloated by sudden affluence at one end and the arrival of a demolition squad sans minimum academic credentials at the other define the current scene. Give the saboteurs another decade or thereabout, they will convert the place into hoodlumland.

Tagore’s dream is still salvageable. In recent years, its principal focus has been on functioning as a regional centre of studies to satisfy the rapidly growing demand for something passing for higher education emanating mainly from the western districts of West Bengal. Politicians will raise Cain if a facility once conceded to the region is abruptly withdrawn. But there should be a way out. Why not allot funds to improve the infrastructure of the other two universities catering to roughly the same region, those located at Burdwan and Midnapore? Students pursuing under-graduate and post-graduate courses at Visva-Bharati could be offered the option of taking admission in either of the universities. Care could be taken to compensate the students for the transfer cost involved. A similar option could be made available to the serving academic and non-academic staff. For those reluctant to accept either option, yet another option may be offered: they could choose retirement and the government would arrange for an alluring lump sum compensation or provide an equally alluring annuity.

Resentment at being cut off from a privilege enjoyed for long may still refuse to abate. In these unquiet times, a public outcry can be sparked off from any issue, big or small. Desperate situations call for desperate remedies. The authorities should be prepared to set up a new university in the close neighbourhood — say at Suri or Surul — which could offload from Visva-Bharati the rubble it has accumulated over the recent decades.

The outlay for the clearance of such detritus, it could be argued, is a much superior use of public funds than organizing carnivals. Once that task is accomplished, it should not be difficult to persuade a small group of wise men and women to give their undivided attention to work out a schemata of how to restore the Tagore heritage. It will be presumptuous to lay down any terms of reference for them. One can only venture a humble suggestion. Whatever is proposed must have space for solitude. Just as Marx chose the quiet sanctum of the British Museum to sort out his ideas regarding social dynamics and revolution, Tagore too needed the solitude of a houseboat anchored on the river Padma or the vast, languid expanse of Santiniketan to compose his music and poetry. A resurrected Visva-Bharati should provide for this essential infrastructure for creativity. Investing public money to achieve this objective is far nobler than subsidizing pseudo-cultural rackets.