Amartya ‘jail’ jibe at varsity

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen today criticised Visva-Bharati’s decision to erect a boundary wall around its campus in Santiniketan and compared it to the Presidency Jail.

Delivering a lecture in a Bolpur auditorium at a programme organised by the Pratichi Trust, which he founded for research on child health and school education, Sen recalled his days at Trinity College in Harvard which “eccentrically” closed the gates at 10am.

“I achieved expertise in climbing the boundary wall. But these walls are enormously big and have absolutely nothing to put your foot on anywhere… they are more like Presidency Jail than any other wall I can immediately think of,” Sen said while speaking on Shikshar muktadhara Rabindra aitijhya (unrestrained freedom for education and Tagore’s tradition) at a seminar-cum-workshop organised by the Pratichi Trust at Gitanjali auditorium in Bolpur town, about 2-km from the Visva-Bharati campus.

The varsity authorities decided to build a seven-foot boundary wall around the campus in 2004 after the theft of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel medallion and other memorabilia.

But, when the varsity authorities announced the decision, there were protests from ashramites and the project was temporarily shelved. In 2006, a high-level committee, headed by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the then governor and rector of the varsity, set up to “bring back the lost glory” of Visva-Bharati, recommended the wall’s construction. The present vice-chancellor, Rajat Kanta Ray, decided to implement the decision.

Accordingly, construction of a 21km boundary wall began in April this year and 70 per cent of the wall is complete

Sen also lamented that while constructing the wall, the varsity authorities evicted small eateries, bicycle repairing shops and other stalls that existed on the periphery.

“There were small shops at many corners of Visva-Bharati selling tea… a little bit of tailoring was done… bicycle repairing shops… very small enterprises giving small income to the underdogs of the society and also providing great convenient services to the people living in Santiniketan,” Sen said.

Sen recalled that in 1999, there had been an effort to remove these shops.

“The whole community life around it (the campus) is just gone,” he said.

Sen said that construction of the wall went against the tradition of Tagore. “Rabindranath might have wanted to remove walls from classes,” he added.