Well, to answer the question right off, no, surely not. No-one can be a perfect authority 100% of the time, even on a single subject, much less on the philosophy of life as well. But the thing is, in India teachers do tend to be treated as if they really knew it all, and I'm interested here in exploring a little why that's so - or perhaps equally, why I have a problem with it.
In the music department where I study the staff are in a curious position, caught between two cultural attitudes. The first is that of the modern Western university, which I am used to, where teachers are (in most cases) marked out from their students purely by an excess margin of book-learning which it is their responsibility to transmit during class. The second is the ancient Indian system known as the guru-sisya parampara, the "guru-disciple lineage", which is a far weightier affair (it sometimes seems very apt that guru also means "heavy" in Bengali, not least in view of the physical corpulence of many Bengali gurus). The guru's responsibility is to "enlighten" his disciple - etymologically gu-ru is said to mean "[bringing] light to darkness" - and the disciple must in return commit himself in full to the relationship, which is ideally an exclusive one. In the West we think of the guru as a religious or spiritual figure, but in India the word means "teacher", and is used in many areas outside the spiritual, particularly in music.
Hindustani classical music is often distinguished from its Western counterparts by its rigorous adherence to an "oral tradition", and this continues to be regarded as central even when, as today, much of the material being handed down by the guru is actually written down. Bandishes ("compositions", although in a sense closer to a jazz standard than a Western classical composition) are printed by the dozen in books on Hindustani music, and a modern teacher will often ask the student to take down these, as well as improvised taans (flourishes), in notation. (The type of notation used is actually older than the Western stave: Sanskrit music treatises had been recording exact scale-steps, durations, sharps, flats, and ornaments for centuries when the West was still stuck with an ambiguous system of neumes.) But there are always some things that must be checked and corrected first-hand: ability to keep rhythm and tempo, pronunciation, tone-production, posture, delivery and so on. Mastery of all these, in exact imitation of the guru, qualifies the student as an authentic representative of his teacher's gharana or "school". He will in turn be in a position to take on students and perpetuate the gharana, with all its particular musical traits, values, and attitudes.
Preservation of the gharana is considered so important that many books on Hindustani music fill pages and pages with genealogical-type diagrams, detailing who studied with whom, reaching from contemporary performers and teachers right back into the eighteenth century and (in some cases) beyond. Indian musicians can be as snobbish about the antiquity of their line as the characters in a Proust novel; and for the outsider such attitudes can appear just as odd. Moreover they look increasingly outdated since the institutionalization of Indian music teaching began in the twentieth century. Now most aspiring young musicians, although they may still have a private guru, also go to university or music college to get a degree. And here they are of course taught in a Western framework of classrooms, timetables and deadlines, all of which is quite alien to the spirit of the guru system. On the other hand, even those teaching within a university retain their respect for the values of that system, and this resistance (among other things) affects the "smooth running" of the higher-educational machine which is prioritized in the West.
The most noticeable result for me in everyday terms is that Sangit Bhavan is managed with a level of administrative inefficiency and haphazardness that far surpasses even the other departments in Visva-Bharati University. A couple of weeks ago, now about halfway into my one-year course, I was for the first time presented with a syllabus - in reality no more than a dictated list of fifteen songs that my teacher had selected off the top of his head during his tea-break. At the same juncture, students were first informed if they would have their exam within this academic year or after the summer vacation. Classes are cancelled without notice and for no apparent reason, as teachers decide they have other business or would prefer to extend their tea-break. The point is that students are too much in awe of the teachers here to protest or "insist on their rights" as they would in the UK or the USA. The guru dispenses enlightenment, and if you have to wait an hour and a half for enlightenment to show up then so be it. Respect for the guru is (at least publicly) absolute.
It is also very publicly demonstrated, via a gesture of obeisance which has become routinized among students here: the padnamaskar or "taking the dust of the feet", usually referred to in Bengali simply as pranaam. This can be developed into something of a fetish, as a few amusing posts relating to the Indian religious guru Sai Baba demonstrate. It is a common Indian gesture of respect to parents, elders, and husbands - although here too the fetish side can get the upper hand (read the description of "charanamrita", the practice of drinking the water in which someone's feet have been bathed!). Perhaps because of its roots in Indian family culture, it comes easier to Indians than it does to me: I find the gesture of bending down and touching the feet of the teacher, followed by one's own forehead and chest, to be loaded with a symbolic significance that I cannot physically bring myself to realize. For the other students it has largely lost this weight of meaning, as they queue up at the end of class - or even in the canteen - to touch their teacher's feet. Sometimes they have to be reminded by the teacher that they have already touched his feet once today, and additional obeisances would exceed the bounds of propriety. One teacher has even entirely forbidden his students to do padnamaskar to him, sensing that the gesture is being abused.
Under these circumstances, padnamaskar becomes a symptom of an exaggerated servility - an obvious attempt to "curry favour".Yet without doubt, when performed sincerely, touching feet should be a positive sign of humility, of readiness to bow one's head before wisdom and experience. If we in the West find such prostration impossible, then Indians could be justified in diagnosing a lack of respect and fine manners, and an excess of individual pride in our culture. And so it is with the organization of education too. The Western university is shifting more and more in the direction of an egocentric consumerism, an attitude of "you should get what you pay for" - and if what you pay for doesn't either keep you entertained or give you a leg-up in the job market, then you're being short-changed. With the kind of fees being charged at American universities in particular, it is hardly surprising that students respond by creating consumer-survey-style lecturer rating tables (Rate My Professors being the most notorious), or that everything on a course is quantified into modules, units, objectives and outcomes.
Visva-Bharati was created partly out of Rabindranath's foresight that some alternative would be needed to this utilitarian model of the university. He warned specifically that "universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge" (Creative Unity, pp.171-2); which is however arguably just what is happening to Western academia. Tagore saw the dangers of his era in the bureaucratic fixation on exams, acting as a passport to job success rather than developing students' potential for creative learning, and in the constraining insistence on mastery of English. Both faults have by no means disappeared in twenty-first century India, though they are fostered now by American-driven globalisation instead of Raj-era civil government, and Tagore's critique remains as relevant as it ever was. He saw the corrective in the traditional Indian guru system, as he imagined it having been practised in the ashramas and tapovanas (forest hermitages) of ancient India: a system centred on the teacher-pupil relationship rather than on the specific amount of knowledge to be transmitted between the two -
"I have visualised the guru (the preceptor) at the very heart and centre of the tapovana (hermitage). He is a man and no machine. He is actively human because his main concern is to help humanity to realise its goal... The disciple draws inspiration from his immediate contact. This association with a mind perpetually awake is the most valuable element of education in an asrama, and that value does not lie in the subjects of study, in paraphernalia or methods. Because the guru realises himself at every step, he is able to give of himself abundantly." ("Asrama Education")
These are high ideals indeed, and perhaps Visva-Bharati today realizes them comparatively seldom. But it did genuinely begin as an ashram, with only a handful of pupils taught by Tagore himself, and even as it takes on some conventional principles of university organization, it remains oriented in its best moments towards the ideals Tagore outlined. For a start, there is simplicity, absence of the "paraphernalia" one finds in a Western classroom. Music classes here take place in plain rooms, decorated at most with a portrait of Tagore; at the front sits the teacher with his harmonium or tanpura, around him the students, following his lead in chorus singing one of Tagore's melodies, and taking down the words of the song in a desk diary adapted as an exercise book. Scores of Tagore's songs exist, but most students cannot afford more than a few volumes of these expensive notation books, and so the classes proceed orally, repeating and correcting the rendition according to the teacher's prompts. Occasionally the teacher will divagate and begin expounding the philosophical message behind these songs, or their relationship to the Santiniketan festival calendar. And with the amount of respect, and often genuine love that students invest in their teacher, when he rises to the occasion then these discourses will expand into a flight of inspired fancy and Lebensweisheit, mixed with anecdotes, reminiscences of Santiniketan in its golden era, and lines of other songs suddenly thrown out and spontaneously continued by the students, the whole lesson overrunning the allotted time sometimes by an hour or more, having long since dissolved into that shared joy which Tagore wanted both music and education to embody. Many times I have to sit there shame-faced, knowing that my lack of Bengali still bars me access to participating fully in such moments - but anyone could see the inspiration that shines on the students' faces. Here there is space for the "truth [which] not only must inform but inspire", rather than the teacher "who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge...[and] can only load his students' minds [but] cannot quicken them" (Creative Unity, p.179).
So the guru may not always be right, but we have I think to grant him a degree of trust if experiences like this are to flower in his hands. If his and our hands are too full with assessment forms and examination papers, then that blossoming will not happen; if we cannot even imagine him as a figure of wisdom, then how can we receive wisdom from him? Granted, the oral parampara system has its limitations; like other hierarchies, it encourages self-reproduction rather than critique. The latter has of course become the basis of Western scholarly thinking, due to its textual focus: the real induction into Anglo-American academic procedure occurs (usually at the Master's level) when students are given a text and invited to attack it. If one has spent hours learning that text by heart, however, the critical reflex is usually somewhat in abeyance. Tagore, his creations and ideas are seldom criticized here (as I noted in my first blog post from Santiniketan, and it still holds true) just because so much energy is expended in passing down his enormous personal heritage as a living tradition. But the positive energy of that "quickening", when his art and ideas are well taught is, in my view, worth more than many an adept scholarly critique.
In the music department where I study the staff are in a curious position, caught between two cultural attitudes. The first is that of the modern Western university, which I am used to, where teachers are (in most cases) marked out from their students purely by an excess margin of book-learning which it is their responsibility to transmit during class. The second is the ancient Indian system known as the guru-sisya parampara, the "guru-disciple lineage", which is a far weightier affair (it sometimes seems very apt that guru also means "heavy" in Bengali, not least in view of the physical corpulence of many Bengali gurus). The guru's responsibility is to "enlighten" his disciple - etymologically gu-ru is said to mean "[bringing] light to darkness" - and the disciple must in return commit himself in full to the relationship, which is ideally an exclusive one. In the West we think of the guru as a religious or spiritual figure, but in India the word means "teacher", and is used in many areas outside the spiritual, particularly in music.
Hindustani classical music is often distinguished from its Western counterparts by its rigorous adherence to an "oral tradition", and this continues to be regarded as central even when, as today, much of the material being handed down by the guru is actually written down. Bandishes ("compositions", although in a sense closer to a jazz standard than a Western classical composition) are printed by the dozen in books on Hindustani music, and a modern teacher will often ask the student to take down these, as well as improvised taans (flourishes), in notation. (The type of notation used is actually older than the Western stave: Sanskrit music treatises had been recording exact scale-steps, durations, sharps, flats, and ornaments for centuries when the West was still stuck with an ambiguous system of neumes.) But there are always some things that must be checked and corrected first-hand: ability to keep rhythm and tempo, pronunciation, tone-production, posture, delivery and so on. Mastery of all these, in exact imitation of the guru, qualifies the student as an authentic representative of his teacher's gharana or "school". He will in turn be in a position to take on students and perpetuate the gharana, with all its particular musical traits, values, and attitudes.
Preservation of the gharana is considered so important that many books on Hindustani music fill pages and pages with genealogical-type diagrams, detailing who studied with whom, reaching from contemporary performers and teachers right back into the eighteenth century and (in some cases) beyond. Indian musicians can be as snobbish about the antiquity of their line as the characters in a Proust novel; and for the outsider such attitudes can appear just as odd. Moreover they look increasingly outdated since the institutionalization of Indian music teaching began in the twentieth century. Now most aspiring young musicians, although they may still have a private guru, also go to university or music college to get a degree. And here they are of course taught in a Western framework of classrooms, timetables and deadlines, all of which is quite alien to the spirit of the guru system. On the other hand, even those teaching within a university retain their respect for the values of that system, and this resistance (among other things) affects the "smooth running" of the higher-educational machine which is prioritized in the West.
The most noticeable result for me in everyday terms is that Sangit Bhavan is managed with a level of administrative inefficiency and haphazardness that far surpasses even the other departments in Visva-Bharati University. A couple of weeks ago, now about halfway into my one-year course, I was for the first time presented with a syllabus - in reality no more than a dictated list of fifteen songs that my teacher had selected off the top of his head during his tea-break. At the same juncture, students were first informed if they would have their exam within this academic year or after the summer vacation. Classes are cancelled without notice and for no apparent reason, as teachers decide they have other business or would prefer to extend their tea-break. The point is that students are too much in awe of the teachers here to protest or "insist on their rights" as they would in the UK or the USA. The guru dispenses enlightenment, and if you have to wait an hour and a half for enlightenment to show up then so be it. Respect for the guru is (at least publicly) absolute.
It is also very publicly demonstrated, via a gesture of obeisance which has become routinized among students here: the padnamaskar or "taking the dust of the feet", usually referred to in Bengali simply as pranaam. This can be developed into something of a fetish, as a few amusing posts relating to the Indian religious guru Sai Baba demonstrate. It is a common Indian gesture of respect to parents, elders, and husbands - although here too the fetish side can get the upper hand (read the description of "charanamrita", the practice of drinking the water in which someone's feet have been bathed!). Perhaps because of its roots in Indian family culture, it comes easier to Indians than it does to me: I find the gesture of bending down and touching the feet of the teacher, followed by one's own forehead and chest, to be loaded with a symbolic significance that I cannot physically bring myself to realize. For the other students it has largely lost this weight of meaning, as they queue up at the end of class - or even in the canteen - to touch their teacher's feet. Sometimes they have to be reminded by the teacher that they have already touched his feet once today, and additional obeisances would exceed the bounds of propriety. One teacher has even entirely forbidden his students to do padnamaskar to him, sensing that the gesture is being abused.
Under these circumstances, padnamaskar becomes a symptom of an exaggerated servility - an obvious attempt to "curry favour".Yet without doubt, when performed sincerely, touching feet should be a positive sign of humility, of readiness to bow one's head before wisdom and experience. If we in the West find such prostration impossible, then Indians could be justified in diagnosing a lack of respect and fine manners, and an excess of individual pride in our culture. And so it is with the organization of education too. The Western university is shifting more and more in the direction of an egocentric consumerism, an attitude of "you should get what you pay for" - and if what you pay for doesn't either keep you entertained or give you a leg-up in the job market, then you're being short-changed. With the kind of fees being charged at American universities in particular, it is hardly surprising that students respond by creating consumer-survey-style lecturer rating tables (Rate My Professors being the most notorious), or that everything on a course is quantified into modules, units, objectives and outcomes.
Visva-Bharati was created partly out of Rabindranath's foresight that some alternative would be needed to this utilitarian model of the university. He warned specifically that "universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge" (Creative Unity, pp.171-2); which is however arguably just what is happening to Western academia. Tagore saw the dangers of his era in the bureaucratic fixation on exams, acting as a passport to job success rather than developing students' potential for creative learning, and in the constraining insistence on mastery of English. Both faults have by no means disappeared in twenty-first century India, though they are fostered now by American-driven globalisation instead of Raj-era civil government, and Tagore's critique remains as relevant as it ever was. He saw the corrective in the traditional Indian guru system, as he imagined it having been practised in the ashramas and tapovanas (forest hermitages) of ancient India: a system centred on the teacher-pupil relationship rather than on the specific amount of knowledge to be transmitted between the two -
"I have visualised the guru (the preceptor) at the very heart and centre of the tapovana (hermitage). He is a man and no machine. He is actively human because his main concern is to help humanity to realise its goal... The disciple draws inspiration from his immediate contact. This association with a mind perpetually awake is the most valuable element of education in an asrama, and that value does not lie in the subjects of study, in paraphernalia or methods. Because the guru realises himself at every step, he is able to give of himself abundantly." ("Asrama Education")
These are high ideals indeed, and perhaps Visva-Bharati today realizes them comparatively seldom. But it did genuinely begin as an ashram, with only a handful of pupils taught by Tagore himself, and even as it takes on some conventional principles of university organization, it remains oriented in its best moments towards the ideals Tagore outlined. For a start, there is simplicity, absence of the "paraphernalia" one finds in a Western classroom. Music classes here take place in plain rooms, decorated at most with a portrait of Tagore; at the front sits the teacher with his harmonium or tanpura, around him the students, following his lead in chorus singing one of Tagore's melodies, and taking down the words of the song in a desk diary adapted as an exercise book. Scores of Tagore's songs exist, but most students cannot afford more than a few volumes of these expensive notation books, and so the classes proceed orally, repeating and correcting the rendition according to the teacher's prompts. Occasionally the teacher will divagate and begin expounding the philosophical message behind these songs, or their relationship to the Santiniketan festival calendar. And with the amount of respect, and often genuine love that students invest in their teacher, when he rises to the occasion then these discourses will expand into a flight of inspired fancy and Lebensweisheit, mixed with anecdotes, reminiscences of Santiniketan in its golden era, and lines of other songs suddenly thrown out and spontaneously continued by the students, the whole lesson overrunning the allotted time sometimes by an hour or more, having long since dissolved into that shared joy which Tagore wanted both music and education to embody. Many times I have to sit there shame-faced, knowing that my lack of Bengali still bars me access to participating fully in such moments - but anyone could see the inspiration that shines on the students' faces. Here there is space for the "truth [which] not only must inform but inspire", rather than the teacher "who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge...[and] can only load his students' minds [but] cannot quicken them" (Creative Unity, p.179).
So the guru may not always be right, but we have I think to grant him a degree of trust if experiences like this are to flower in his hands. If his and our hands are too full with assessment forms and examination papers, then that blossoming will not happen; if we cannot even imagine him as a figure of wisdom, then how can we receive wisdom from him? Granted, the oral parampara system has its limitations; like other hierarchies, it encourages self-reproduction rather than critique. The latter has of course become the basis of Western scholarly thinking, due to its textual focus: the real induction into Anglo-American academic procedure occurs (usually at the Master's level) when students are given a text and invited to attack it. If one has spent hours learning that text by heart, however, the critical reflex is usually somewhat in abeyance. Tagore, his creations and ideas are seldom criticized here (as I noted in my first blog post from Santiniketan, and it still holds true) just because so much energy is expended in passing down his enormous personal heritage as a living tradition. But the positive energy of that "quickening", when his art and ideas are well taught is, in my view, worth more than many an adept scholarly critique.
