Journey
Reform, education & the national movement
Places where nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indians built institutions instead of arguing about them: a school in a mango grove, an ashram that ran a salt march, a university raised by public subscription, a French quarter that became a place of retreat. Education and the freedom movement are the same story here.
Stops (9)
- Jorasanko Thakurbari, Kolkata · Jorāsānko Thākurbāri — the Tagore house
The Kolkata mansion where Rabindranath was born in 1861 and died in 1941, and the household that produced painters, composers, novelists and the first Indian woman to write an autobiography. The Bengal Renaissance was to an unusual degree one extended family, working in one building over three generations.
- Santiniketan · Śāntiniketan — the school in the grove
Tagore opened a school here in 1901 with five pupils, one of them his son, on the argument that lessons should happen under trees and in Bengali. Visva-Bharati followed in 1921 with the motto that the world meets in one nest; Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij made it India's most important modern art school.
- Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi · Banāras Hindu University — raised by subscription
Madan Mohan Malaviya founded it in 1916 after years of going door to door for money, including to princes and to ordinary subscribers, on the principle that a modern university teaching Sanskrit and engineering together should be paid for by Indians. It remains one of Asia's largest residential universities.
- Puducherry (Pondicherry) · Pondicherry — the French town and the retreat
A French grid laid beside a Tamil town, and therefore outside British jurisdiction — which is why Aurobindo, facing prosecution for sedition in Bengal, came here in 1910 and never left. The colonial anomaly that made the town possible is also what made it a refuge.
- Porbandar · Porbandar — the birth
Gandhi was born here in 1869 into a Modh Bania family of state officials, in a Kāthiāwār port whose merchants had traded with Africa and Arabia for centuries. The mercantile world he came out of is part of why he went to South Africa at all, and why he thought in terms of boycott.
- Sabarmati Ashram · Sabarmati — thirteen years and a march
Gandhi's base from 1917, where he ran the ashram on manual labour, spinning and a vow against untouchability, and from where he walked out on 12 March 1930 saying he would not return until India was free. He did not; the ashram was given up in 1933.
- Dandi · Dāndi — the handful of salt
Twenty-four days and three hundred and eighty-five kilometres from Sabarmati, ending on 6 April 1930 when he picked up natural salt from the beach and broke the state monopoly. The chosen grievance was deliberately small and universal: everyone eats salt, and everyone was paying a tax on the sea.
- Sevagram / Wardha · Sevāgrām — the constructive programme
Gandhi moved to a village near Wardha in 1936 and made it the centre of what he called constructive work — khadi, village industry, basic education, sanitation. It is the least photogenic part of his career and the part he thought mattered; the independence movement was run from a mud hut in Vidarbha for a decade.
- Jayrambati, Bankura · Jayrāmbāti — Sāradā Devī
The village where Sāradā Devī was born in 1853 and spent much of her life. Married to Rāmakrishna at five, she became after his death the figure the young order actually took its direction from, and the Rāmakrishna Sāradā Mission for women descends from her rather than from him.