Friday, March 23, 2012

Rabindranath as a Teacher and Ranu (contd-1)

(Prayer hall, Santiniketan) The School at Santiniketan opened after summer vacation. Sita Devi wrote; " Rabindranath began to teach the boys in Santiniketan regularly." The classes were open to others who are not the students of the class in which he was teaching. Sita Devi added that the classes were being filled with those who are not students. Even Andrews whio was not well in Bengali attended the class more often. It was a marvellous scene that the boys of 10/12 years old were reading poems of Shelley, Keats, Browning . He took classes in other subjects also. Rabindranath was not in favour of thinking the younger as too much young to understand and could not keep himself aloof from making them informed about the beautiful things of the world."
Ranu Adhikari aged about 12 had free access to everywhere in Santiniketan. She happened to go the writing table of Rabin dranath, in the classes under the tree,or in the prayer hall. She had no restriction to go to any place. Letters written subsequently to Ranu reveals many pictures of Santiniketan with proper description.
After a few days (on 10th July) Rabindranath wrote a letter  to Pramatha Choudhury. 
" After coming over here, I could not write a single line. My mind is tired. Now I am a school teacher. If it does not produce any good output, it keeps my  mind well. When I could not utilise my excess energy, for different reasons,  in some creative work my mind becomes restless. I don't feel inspiration for   writing always but my mind is always working for creative work. If it does not find any way out, it will do some harm. For this reason, leaving all my work at the age of 57+ in undetermined, irregular, and untimely, I engaged myself in teaching profession."
Thus he was passing his days in this profession. Sita Devi wrote, "On 13th July, Rabindranath read out some old poems on the roof  of Deholi, his residence in Santiniketan. He explaind some of them, e.g. "Swarga Hate Biday" and "Sindhur prati" and we listened to him."
Wile staying at Santiniketan Ranu wrote about such a get together, " Will you read today 
"Gandharir Abedan ? In which place will you read it ?
I shall be pleased if you read this world famous poetry . I shall read the poem "Abhisar". Shanti too will 
read ." Sita Devi wrote, " Rabindranath kept himself busy too much this time. By constructing songs, taking classes, teaching how to sing, and reading from his own writings for others to listen- these were the works he was doing to keep himself busy. We could not see when he was taking rest... In the afternoon he took his seat on the roof of his  small house and persons coming from all sides sat surrounding him and thus it took the shape of a meeting."