Nobel for a school dropout

By NDTV Correspondent

Today is the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindra Nath Tagore, an event that the country will celebrate over the next 12 months. Among those marking the day today are two schools in Kolkata where Tagore studied. The Nobel laureate was not a great student and hated being confined in a classroom. He changed schools four times. Each stay was brief, to say the least. He never matriculated. It's quite another matter that later, Oxford University came down to Shantiniketan to award him a doctorate.

The Oriental Seminary in Kolkata, Tagore's first school. He had thrown a tantrum to be allowed to go to school when he was seven, in 1868, but he left in a month, taking with him a memory of the kind of punishment doled out there. "A boy who was unable to repeat his lessons," he writes in his reminiscences "was made to stand on a bench with arms extended and, on his upturned palms were piled a number of slates."  

"Perhaps from his childhood itself, Tagore just couldn't adjust to formal education given in the confines of four walls, says Manoj Bhattacharya, teacher in charge, Oriental Seminary.

Tagore's memory of St Xavier's School, which he joined in 1876 for about six months, was also bleak. One teacher, Father Depeneranda, who one day noticed he was not writing his paper, put his hand on his shoulder and asked, "Are you not well, Tagore?" "It was a simple question," writes Tagore, "but one I have never been able to forget." 

 "He kept his relationship with St Xavier's for a long time. One is, in 1927, he came to St Xavier's and gave a gift to St Xavier's. The gift was a statue of Jesus Christ," says father Felix Raj, Principal, St Xavier's college. 

So did Tagore lose out because he never managed to get himself a formal education? 

"Rabindra Nath had a formal education; he could at best become an ICS or something like that. That would have been a great loss for our country and for the world, for that matter. I think it's a blessing in disguise that he didn't have formal education," says Chandika Prasad Ghoshal, English teacher, Oriental Seminary. 

In 1940, 27 years after he got the Nobel Prize, Oxford University came down to Shantiniketan, and gave Tagore an honorary doctorate.