Kinship with nature

In an age when our interaction with nature has been largely transactional, it is instructive to study Rabindranath Tagore's communion with nature.

Tagore, through his soulful and emotive poetry, would share his intimate feelings with inhabitants in nature, animate or inanimate, be it rain, winds, clouds, flowers, birds, plants, forests, rivers, stars in the skies. He felt in tune with its varied forms and rhythms.

Tagore believed that nature reveals to us the inner unity of the world. It enables us to dissolve our narrow self-focus, opening the path to developing as a universal man. He spoke of a deep spiritual presence in nature's balance and harmony amid diverse moods of seasons.


He shifted the focus, in Santiniketan, from teaching 'content' to creating 'conditions' that help intensify a child's connection with nature. 'This religion of spiritual harmony is not a theological doctrine to be taught,' he said, 'it can only be made possible by making provision for students to live in infinite touch with nature, daily to grow in an atmosphere of service offered to all creatures, tending trees, feeding birds and animals, learning to feel the immense mystery of the soil and water and air.... In such an atmosphere, students would learn to understand that humanity is a divine harp of many strings, waiting for its one grand music.'

To celebrate nature with all its manifestations, he organised several festivals in Santiniketan and composed songs especially for them. Yet, during his lifetime, Tagore was pained to sense the adversarial relationship brewing between humans and nature. His words of caution sound prophetic today: 'Before long, the sky over the human world, the East and West, will be smudged with factory smoke and the green of the living nature will be licked grey by the demon of the utilitarian spirit.'