“The Test of Knowledge” (1919) by Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

Section-Editor Samrat Sengupta writes: 

In the present issue of Sanglap, we are publishing the essay “Vidyar Jachai” by Rabindranath Tagore from his collection of reflections on the state of education in Bengal titled Siksha. Translating this essay in a journal titled Sanglap (which means dialogue) holds enormous significance not only by its content but also as a critical reflection on the ambiguous relationship between colonial pedagogy and the act of translating cultures and Dr. Saptaparna Roy has carefully chosen the essay and undertaken this challenging work. Critical discourses have always functioned upon the clearing of ambiguity but are also built upon ambiguity itself, particularly when it creates contradictions and liminality in different cultural spaces. On one hand, translation engages in a dialogue, but it also announces a failure of conversations. Tagore’s present essay focuses on the colonial mimicry of the western knowledge paradigm in Bengal. While in postcolonial scholarship, such discussion has become a cliché, there are some salient points made by Tagore that demand attention. While the essay written in 1919 can be cited as an antecedent to the major anti-colonial pedagogues like Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, or N’gugi wa Thiongo, the work written in Bengali primarily addresses the second or third generation English-educated natives of Bengal – the foster grandchildren of T. B. Macaulay, who introduced English education en masse in Bengal. It does not obsessively discard the relevance of reading English writers and thinkers but becomes suspicious of our ways of reading them. The essay is a commentary on syllabus making and framing of knowledge rather than a polarisation along the East-West binary. The strategies of reading and dissemination of knowledge through a framework adopted from the West is something that Tagore proposes to reconsider. Unlike veteran nationalists like M. K. Gandhi or Bal Gangadhar Tilak, he was not proposing an outright rejection of Western epistemology for a purely “Indian” one but harping on the necessity of a strategy of reception where “wherever the material is sought, the responsibility to examine is in one’s own hand.”

The translation of this essay in the present moment is an act of writing back to the postcolonial debates on pedagogy and knowledge system, which, even in its act of rage against the worlding of the critical discourse by the erstwhile colonies, adopts a framework born and cultivated in the west. The word “jachai” in the original title of the essay means testing and possibly suggests the intellectual framework derived from the west for testing knowledge. But “jachai” may also mean verification, and Tagore tries to verify the colonial episteme itself in the essay. The essay connects with Tagore’s well-known text “Totakahini” or “The Parrot Story,” where an average Bengali learner in the colonised education system is described as a parrot who is tutored to mimic what is being said by the pedagogue. We have been “practicing handwriting by tracing on a specimen script,” and that causes an intellectual failure. The essay can continue the critical dialogue on colonial pedagogy in the present moment by understanding the ways of adopting critical discourses from the west in the Indian classroom without considering the historical and political situatedness. In the age of AI and ChatGPT, knowledge becomes anything that has greater visibility and archiving and is controlled largely by countries with better economic and cultural resources, and we still feel the need to ask, like Tagore – “but will this be how things turn out forever?”