Santiniketan, and the Places We Do Not Quite Leave Behind

There are places we visit and places we merely pass through. The distinction becomes apparent much later.

I had passed through Santiniketan in 2010, on a motorcycle, during a long ride aimed at the mysterious and beautiful North East of India. I remember the journey more clearly than I remember Santiniketan itself. There was a certain restlessness to those days. I was young enough to believe that travelling meant moving from one place to another, collecting landscapes, roads, people and stories along the way. Santiniketan was one of those places on the map. I entered it, looked around, moved through it and eventually left.

Years later, a book of photographs by Bitann Chakraborty and poems by Kiriti Sengupta has made me wonder whether I had actually seen Santiniketan at all.

Perhaps seeing a place and looking at it are two different things.

SANTINIKETAN: Nature's Gateway to Spirituality is, on the surface, a beautiful coffee table book about a place that has acquired an almost mythical status in the Indian imagination. But the more I spent time with it, the less interested I became in the book as a collection of photographs of Santiniketan. What interested me instead was the way it began to behave like a memory.

That was unexpected.

I have always had a complicated relationship with places that have been heavily interpreted before I arrive at them. Santiniketan comes with Rabindranath Tagore attached to it, and that is no small burden. It is difficult to look at its trees, its red earth, its open spaces, its art, its festivals and its people without the presence of Tagore becoming part of the frame. For someone who grew up reading Tagore in Malayalam translation, that presence is even more peculiar. The words reached me long before the geography did.

I encountered Tagore as literature before I encountered him as landscape.

That matters.

My childhood and growing years were shaped by translations. The Tagore I knew did not necessarily speak in Bengali. He arrived in Malayalam, carrying with him a world that was already distant in geography and yet strangely intimate in thought. His poems and stories gave me a sense of a certain kind of inwardness, a way of looking at nature and human existence that was neither entirely religious nor entirely secular. There was always something hovering between the visible and the invisible.

Years later, when I physically entered Santiniketan, I suppose I was carrying that translated Tagore with me. I simply did not know it at the time. Reading this book brought that realisation back with surprising force.

Bitann's photographs are not particularly interested in presenting Santiniketan as a tourist brochure. There are, of course, recognisable elements of the place. There are trees, pathways, red earth, water, people, crafts, dance, architecture and the rhythms of everyday life. But some of the photographs are more interesting precisely because they resist the obvious.

A tree becomes a subject in itself. A fissure in its trunk contains a young plant, and Kiriti's accompanying poem, "Inward", reads: "A deep fissure in the giant tree / nurtures a future colossal specimen."

It is a very small image and a very large idea. The photograph does not need the poem to be beautiful. The tree is already doing enough. Yet the poem changes the direction in which I look at it. I stop seeing damage and begin to see continuity. The fissure is no longer merely an opening in an old tree. It becomes a place from which something else emerges.

That is where the collaboration between the two artists becomes most successful. The photograph does not illustrate the poem, and the poem does not merely caption the photograph. They sometimes seem to look at the same thing from different distances.

This is particularly evident in "A Fair Witness", where a solitary tree is accompanied by the thought, "Do trees record human history? / I wish they did."

As someone with an incurable appetite for philosophy, I found myself lingering there longer than I expected.

The question is almost childlike in its simplicity, but it carries an enormous philosophical temptation. We instinctively attribute memory to things that have outlived us. A tree can stand for decades, sometimes centuries, while generations of human beings move around it. People are born, love, quarrel, create, die and disappear. The tree remains.

If only it could tell us what it has seen. Of course, it cannot. Or perhaps it can, but not in a language available to us. That tension runs through much of the book. Santiniketan becomes a place where nature is not merely scenery. It becomes a participant in human existence. The red soil, the trees, the water, the light and even the apparently ordinary activities of the people living there begin to acquire an almost philosophical presence.

The danger with this kind of book is obvious. Santiniketan is already burdened with reverence. It would be easy to photograph it as an established idea of itself. Tagore's Santiniketan can become so powerful in the imagination that the actual place disappears beneath it. Bitann is at his best when he avoids that trap.

The photograph of the dokra seller, for instance, brought me back to the human world of Santiniketan. The woman sits among her crafts, surrounded by objects that have passed through her hands and will hopefully pass into somebody else's home. Kiriti's poem asks whether she realises that every time she sells a Durga idol, she passes on "a bit of Shakti". Then comes the quietly disarming observation that she has a name, "just like everyone else", but nobody seems to mind. That final movement is important. It prevents the woman from becoming merely an exotic figure in a picturesque landscape. There is a person here, not an aesthetic object. There is labour, identity, commerce and an entire life beyond the photograph.

The same movement appears in the photographs of tribal dance. The image is full of colour and movement, but the accompanying prose locates it within the Santhal community and its cultural traditions. Again, the place becomes more than a collection of beautiful surfaces.

And perhaps that is where a book about Santiniketan must eventually arrive. Nature is not separate from culture here. Culture is not separate from memory. Memory is not separate from the body. And none of these are entirely separate from the philosophical questions that Tagore spent much of his life asking.

Kiriti's poems often work through this territory with remarkable economy. "Resurrection", for example, looks at tiny particles of sunlight scattered in the air and turns sleep into something like an act of liberation. "Beyond the Eyes" looks at the sky through water and speaks of an image being altered by the act of looking. "Experienced Personified" allows a landscape to become almost human, while the tiny droplets that touch the feet become part of the experience.

These are not poems that attempt to compete with the photographs. That is probably their greatest strength.

I found myself thinking about photography while reading them. Photography was once a profession for me. It is still a hobby, although I suspect that "hobby" is too weak a word for something that has permanently altered the way one looks at the world. A camera teaches you to notice. It teaches you that looking is an active act. You begin to recognise light before you recognise the subject. You start noticing the relationship between what is present and what has been deliberately excluded. The photographer makes a frame. The poet makes another kind of frame. Both are acts of selection.

What makes this book interesting is that neither artist appears to want to dominate the other. Bitann's camera gives us the physical world. Kiriti's poems create a second interior world around it. Sometimes the two meet beautifully. Sometimes I preferred the photograph to the poem, and sometimes the poem took me somewhere the photograph alone could not. I actually like that unevenness. A collaborative book does not need every pairing to produce the same intensity. If anything, a little friction between the two forms keeps the reader awake.

There is also something wonderfully appropriate about a photographer and a poet making a book about Santiniketan. Bitann photographs places such as Rishikesh, Varanasi and Santiniketan when he is not writing or editing. Kiriti, meanwhile, divides his time between New Delhi and Santiniketan and has a direct literary connection with Tagore through his translations. Their relationship with the place is therefore not that of two outsiders arriving with cameras and notebooks for a project. They have inhabited it. That makes a difference.

The book's own introduction describes the project as an attempt to behold Santiniketan's natural abundance and move beyond the sensory towards the sacred. I am usually suspicious of declarations of spirituality attached to landscapes. Nature has suffered enough from our determination to make it represent something larger than itself. Yet I understand what the authors are attempting.

Perhaps spirituality here need not mean religion. It can mean the moment when our attention becomes larger than our immediate purpose. It can mean standing before an old tree without asking what it is useful for. It can mean noticing the red earth beneath one's feet. It can mean watching a community dance and recognising that the event belongs to people whose history did not begin when a visitor arrived to photograph them. It can even mean admitting that a place might contain more than our eyes can immediately register.

That brings me back to my motorcycle journey in 2010. I wish I could remember Santiniketan as these photographs now allow me to see it. I wish I could remember the trees more carefully. I wish I had noticed the texture of the red soil, the light falling through the branches, the people selling things, the quietness between the more obvious attractions. But perhaps that is an unfair demand to make of my younger self. We travel differently when we are young. We move. We look forward. We want the next road. Only later do we understand that some places require us to stop moving long enough to become visible. This book has, in a strange way, allowed me to return without returning. That may be one of the more valuable things art can do.

I have also spent enough time with poetry to know that writing a poem is not necessarily about producing something that deserves to be called poetry by somebody else. Sometimes it is simply a way of satisfying an internal hunger. Photography can work in much the same way. We photograph because something has caught our attention and we need to preserve the encounter. We write because something has remained inside us and needs another form. Perhaps that is why this particular book affected me more personally than I expected. It brought together three things that have followed me for years without necessarily meeting one another: the Tagore I first encountered in Malayalam, the photographer I once was and still remain in some corner of myself, and the poet I occasionally become when words seem to be the only way of settling something within.

And then there is Santiniketan, which I had thought I had visited sixteen years ago. Perhaps I had only passed through it. There is a beautiful irony in that. Tagore's Santiniketan was founded around an idea of learning through an intimate relationship with nature, culture and the world beyond the narrow boundaries of conventional education. A book created through photographs and poems now asks me to relearn the place through looking. Not through information. Through attention. That distinction is important.

A good coffee table book is something one can leave on a table and occasionally pick up. A better one makes you forget that it is sitting on a table. You begin to inhabit it. You turn a page and pause. You return to a photograph. You read a poem again. A tree that looked like a tree ten pages ago becomes something else now because of the words you have just read. That is what happened to me with Santiniketan: Nature's Gateway to Spirituality. I began by looking at photographs of a place I had once visited. I ended up looking at a younger version of myself, travelling through Bengal on a motorcycle, carrying an inherited Tagore in Malayalam, not yet knowing how much photography would matter to me, not yet knowing that poetry would eventually become another way of thinking, and certainly not knowing that philosophy would become such an enduring hunger.

Perhaps Santiniketan has been doing this all along. It waits. Trees grow. People pass. Artists look. Poets write. Travellers leave. And sometimes, many years later, a book arrives and quietly tells you that you had left something behind. P.S: This is not a review. More like fragmented and withered thoughts while reading the book. Most of my reviews are like that. Except when they are about films, for which I get technical, book-reviews are not book-reviews but a reflection of my inner-self. Happy Sunday, folks! Manu #Santiniketan #RabindranathTagore #Tagore #VisvaBharati #Bengal #WestBengal #IndianLiterature #IndianPoetry #PoetryAndPhotography #PhotographyAndPoetry #Photography #Poetry #Literature #BooksAndReading #CoffeeTableBook #BookReview #BookstagramIndia #IndianPhotographers #IndianPoets #TravelWriting #TravelAndMemory #TravelPhotography #ArtAndLiterature #NatureAndArt #Reflections #MemoryAndPlace #HawakalPublishers