Tagore explored IIEST expertise to set up Visva-Bharati labs

HOWRAH: On Saturday, when the chairman of the IIEST board of governors comes to the Shibpur campus for the annual meeting, he will be presented with a page from history. These gems from the past, memoirs and letters that establish a direct connect between the institute and Tagore, is a chance finding of a scholar, who has been working on the history of the institute to document every bit of its 161-year-old legacy.
Exactly 100 years ago, on November 25, 1917, Tagore spent a whole day at the then Civil Engineering College, Shibpur, to do a recce of how technical teaching-learning happened there, what the laboratories looked like and how they were equipped.He was planning his Visva-Bharati and thought that apart from literature and the arts, technical education should also be a focal area. He had come expressly to meet Sudhir Maitra, a leading faculty of physics who had taught Satyen Bose and Meghnad Saha during his earlier stint at Presidency College.
Tagore struck up a unique friendship with Maitra, who later helped him set up the laboratory in Visva-Bharati’s Patha Bhaban, which was again the first laboratory at the secondary level anywhere in the country. Planning for Sriniketan, along with Tagore’s son, Rathindranath, came next.
“We stumbled upon this history while rummaging through old records here. Tagore came here along with his secretary Kalidas Nag and scholar Brojen Sil. We got in touch with Visva-Bharati to follow this up and saw a whole bunch of correspondence between Tagore and Maitra on how laboratories should be set up at Visva-Bharati. There is a letter where Tagore even entrusts him with cash funds to buy lab equipment for the school,” said Bibhor Das, assistant registrar of the institute who is doing the research. Incidentally, Maitra was also writer Lila Majumdar’s uncle, and her memoirs are replete with Tagore-Maitra friendship.
Since visit of chairman K Radhakrishnan — of Mangalyan and Chandrayan fame — coincides with the day of Tagore’s visit, institute director Ajoy Kumar Roy decided to hold a commemorative function to kick off the meeting. “We are thrilled. No one knew about Tagore’s visit here and the fact that his interaction with one of our own faculty paved the way for tech education at Visva-Bharati. It’s a proud moment for us,” Roy said.
Visva-Bharati is equally excited. “Yes, this bit of history is not widely known and am happy that IIEST and Visva-Bharati have forged a unique tie now,” said Swapan Dutta, Visva-Bharati VC.