Participation as an Insider
Participation as an insider is always quite tricky and vulnerable. In a community based art activity the visibility and the identity of the artist is extremely important. The position of artist becomes the initiation point of any activity; the position of the artist gets exposed on the level of personal relationship. So for me working in Santiniketan is equally from the position of a teacher and also as part of the community member who is equally involved in the private and public life of Santiniketan. So participation in an insider position is always a very slow process of patience and interaction. In a city position one can initiate a process an vanish but in a close community situation there is no escape, there is a constant visibility and responsibility to the site and the community life with which one is interacting.
participation as a INSIDER
How Art Thou Living-A community based Exploration of the 80 yrs of tree Planting (Brikhsharopan Festival ) in Santiniketan by Mono Gobbet Society,2007
Context
Sanitiniketan today survives both as site with a cultural legacy and heritage and also in the formal way as a university campus. The overlap of these two states of existence make the place both vulnerable, at the same time structured. The annual ritualistic events like Briksharopan which started initially as the process of developing the landscape of the place and also to create an intimate relationship between its community and the environment, today also functions as a heritage event that projects the cultural framework of the process called Asram education but also an economic compulsion as many of the local people are economically dependent on these annual events which generate huge amount of tourist attraction. So Santiniketan constantly shuffles between an academic zone and also a heritage zone that sustains the everyday livelihood of local residents living around Santiniketan. The landscape of Santiniketan today functions both as a memory of a ideology and also the administrative network of the present academic expansion. Today Santiniketan has become a more vulnerable site with its duality and dialectics and as such it is also becoming a new site for nurturing individual differences and co-existence. The present project evolved out of the need to map this duality of the site through an exploration, a visit to the sites where Briksharopan festival which is happening for the last 80 yrs and map the evolution and expansion of the landscape of Santiniketan both as a community space and also as an academic space.
Research and Observation
The process was initiated through the activity of Mono Gobbet Society.
Excerpts of the letter issued by MonoGobbet society as an invitation in Santiniketan to the community.
“MONOGOBBET SOCIETY is a group of conscious, logical fools who have come together to form a unique society in Santiniketan.The main motto of this society is to conduct series of meaningless GOBBET ADVENTURES in and around Santiniketan from time to time. In this respect the gobbets have declared 1st August as GOBBET DAY.
This is our 2nd year of operation. We are glad to inform you that on 1st August, 2007 MONOGOBBET SOCIETY will arrange a GoBBet Expedition in search of the Trees of Vriksharopan.
When Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore initiated the Vriksharopan Utsav as an activity in Santiniketan the land was barren with its Khoai and its few palm trees. More than 80 years have passed. Like its community new soils have been laid and numerous trees have been brought from outside and planted around the landscape. Like its community which comprises people from all over India and world trees from different parts of India
In this occasion the society cordially invites you to join in the Expedition ‘How Art Thou Liveth?’
Exploring the sites where trees have been planted in Vriksharopan.”
So some of the members of the MonoGobbet Society ,initially students of Kala Bhavana which also included me, made a research on locating the places and the kind of trees that were planted in Santiniketan.The informations are available in the old Visva bharati Quarterly journals from Rabindra Bhavan ,which is the oldest community journal from Visva Bharati that documented its annual events. On basis of these information a map of Santiniketan was created demarking the possible sites of Brikhsharopan in the last 80 years. Two big Flex prints of this map were installed around the campus referring 1st of August as the expedition date and requesting all the community members to join the expedition.
The members of the monogobbet society then prepared individual placards referring individuals sites of planting and also the names of the trees (where it is available).All the names of the trees were available from the research. On 1st of August, 2007, on a rainy day all the unofficial floating members of Monogobbet society assembled in front of the Mandir Gate(the main entrance to the campus) and the expedition was officially started. Printed version of the map with names of the location and trees were distributed among the assembled people .Together with the students some of the faculty members also joined in.Shamalidi a noted environmentalist also joined in to share her memory of her father Sri Sudhir Khastagir, who planted one of the trees in 1950s.So the expedition started with Shamalidi’s memory. Then slowly we collectively started moving around the campus following the map. As we followed the map we visited sites and places where we have never ventured to travel earlier. So the location of the trees almost became a new route and way of looking at the site Santiniketan. Moreover it also provided us with opportunity to understand how the campuses have expanded and also how it has transformed. As we followed the map we realize because of the expansion of the campus and the increase of the number of the departments many of the roads have now been fenced to demarcate the campus of the individual departments.\, as such many of the site of Briksharopan have become inaccessible today. Moreover in many places the trees were not visible as some have died ,some uprooted due to storm and some vanished. So accordingly the explorers planted those individual placards with name and year of plantation and also referred the stated of the tree and wrote missing where they were not found. The whole process continued for almost three days and it generated lots of enthusiasm among the young participants as it became an opportunity for them to know the place and its extension and for those who have seen it everyday a new position to understand it on a new note.
So in this project my role as a pedagogue got transformed into a participant both as an explorer and also as an insider being part of the community of Santiniketan.This project provided me to relieve from the fixed position of a teacher to also a learner as my position was also equally vulnerable as the other participants in relation to the information of the trees and the history of the site.There were no experts only memories and apprehensions to operate with.
