Mankind destroyed whatever was gifted as life: Tagore’s lament for the environment 87 years ago

About a century ago, long before environmental degradation became the crisis of our times, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore had sounded early warning bells about the destruction of forests.

Though Tagore was born in the city of Kolkata, he had a deep and abiding contact with nature from childhood, and it shaped his many-sided genius in diverse ways. As an adolescent, he accompanied his father Debendranath to the foothills of the Himalayas, an experience he wrote about in his autobiographical notes.

Later, he was a frequent visitor to a zamindari estate in Shilaidaha, now in Bangladesh, where many of his short stories and songs were written while on a boat on the mighty river Padma. He had experienced the vast expanse of nature – in the sky, in the mountains, in the rivers and the flat, verdant lands of the Bengal delta.

Simultaneously he witnessed the urbanisation of the sleepy villages around Kolkata and Kolkata itself, and lamented the oppressive bounds of concrete and the lessening of contact between human beings and nature. When he founded his school, now a part of the Central University, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, a Unesco World Heritage Site – he ensured that classes took place under canopies of trees rather than within the...

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