Рабиндранат Тагор предсказал экологический кризис за столетие до его начала

About a century ago, long before environmental degradation became the crisis of our times, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore had sounded early warning bells about the destruction of forests. Though Tagore was born in the city of Kolkata, he had a deep and abiding contact with nature from childhood, and it shaped his many-sided genius in diverse ways. As an adolescent, he accompanied his father Debendranath to the foothills of the Himalayas, an experience he wrote about in his autobiographical notes. Later, he was a frequent visitor to a zamindari estate in Shilaidaha, now in Bangladesh, where many of his short stories and songs were written while on a boat on the mighty river Padma. He had experienced the vast expanse of nature – in the sky, in the mountains, in the rivers and the flat, verdant lands of the Bengal delta. Simultaneously he witnessed the urbanisation of the sleepy villages around Kolkata and Kolkata itself, and lamented the oppressive bounds of concrete and the lessening of contact between human beings and nature. When he founded his school, now a part of the Central University, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, a Unesco World Heritage Site – he ensured that classes took place under canopies of trees rather than within the confines of four walls. Tagore is widely known as a romantic poet but he was also a social thinker, deeply interested in advances in science and their application for the betterment of human societies. He formed village cooperatives, sent his son Rathindranath to study science-based agricultural studies in the United States, and began to explore modern methods and their viability in local conditions at Sriniketan, a few kilometres from Santiniketan. His concern for the environment blended with an awareness of the needs of an urbanising population. This conflict between the demands of an urbanising, industrialising world and the imperative to preserve our bond with nature is a recurrent theme in his work – most powerfully, perhaps, in the play Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders), where the life-force of nature, embodied in the character of Nandini, confronts the dehumanising machinery of an underground mining kingdom. With these concerns in mind, Tagore had initiated the Vriksharopana Utsav – the annual festival of tree planting – at Sriniketan, alongside the Halakarshana, the ceremonial ploughing of the fields. On September 2, 1938, he gave a lecture at the annual celebration of this tree planting festival. That lecture, translated here for the first time into English, is strikingly relevant – the prescience of a sensitive and great mind. ‘Lord of The Forest’ In the first phase of creation, the earth was rocky and barren. There was no hint of her compassion to any form of life around her. In all directions the volcanoes were erupting; the frequent earthquakes made the ground unquiet. While this was going on, in an unforeseen, auspicious moment, the goddess of the forest sent her messengers to this theatre of the earth. The green grass began to cover what was naked; slowly, shrubs and trees appeared as harbingers of life. Animals were still not upon the scene. In order to welcome and nurture the incipient and precious life, the trees made their own food and provided shade upon the ground. Their greatest gift was to harness the fiery rays of the sun and to store them for future consumption by mankind when, much later, human beings would make their appearance. Even now our civilisation continues to advance drawing from the same source of life and energy. Human beings are prone to being wasteful. As long as they roamed in the forests, they maintained a rich, meaningful, balanced interaction with nature. As they began to form settlements, they started to lose their sense of belonging with the forests. The human beings forgot their very first set of friends who brought to the earth the original and the divine gift of life; instead, they began to attack the forests in the most cruel and thoughtless manner so that they could make their own homes built with wood, bricks and mortar. By ignoring the blessing brought by the primordial green trees, human beings invited upon themselves a curse to spread. Today, parts of northern India are becoming arid and suffering from extreme heat during the summer months. But anyone familiar with the old texts would know that these areas were once covered with forests where the hermits would stay in their simple but beautiful dwellings in the cool shade of tall trees. Human beings dealt with the gift of nature like a vulture; unhappy with the bounty offered to them, they destroyed the forests without any care in the world. Deforestation is leading to gradual desertification. If we are to avoid a calamitous end for ourselves, we have to recall the divine spirit which gave us the boon of the forests and pray that the life force that once sustained us, may the same life force protect our land; may it give us shade for comfort and fruits for sustenance. The problem has not cropped up specifically for us or just today. Everywhere it is a great challenge to save the treasures of forests from the devouring greed of mankind. In the United States too, the timber industry has destroyed forests resulting in sand blown storms destroying fertile fields. The creator of the universe had sent the messenger of life and made arrangement for its nourishment, to which the human beings added the ingredient of death borne out of greed. Human society has been subjected to so much curse because of its superseding the divine intention to nurture life. Wanton self-indulgence and consequent loss of forests have brought about gaping, self-inflicted wounds. Those trees which provided the canopy of leaves that would purify the air, the great mass of fallen leaves which would make the ground fecund, they have been uprooted. Whatever was gifted as life to the good earth, mankind oblivious to its own good has destroyed these very things. It is now time to repent. Though our resources are limited, we will employ them to build an altar to welcome back in our midst the divine forest spirit of life. Our meagre beginning today has two parts. First is tilling the fields; tilling the fields to meet our needs; our needs for food grains. Tilling the land is our unavoidable duty to ourselves. But we must give something back in return so that we lessen the damage caused to the earth. To redress her wounds, to replenish what we take, we have organised the festival of planting trees. It is our earnest hope that the seeds we sow today, the saplings that we plant today will grow into green fields and beautiful shady trees which will make this little corner of our world with fruit laden forests and verdant fields serene and beautiful. Utpal Chattopadhyay, a mathematician and teacher from Kolkata, translates and writes essays illuminating different precious stones strewn around in Bengali literature. He can be reached via email at [email protected]. September 2 is the 87th anniversary of Tagore’s ‘Lord of the Forest’ address.