In our globalized age when higher education is on a dangerously slippery slope with government highhandedness creating distress among teachers and students alike, when academic and creative freedom is up against walls of indifference and hate, it is heartening to hear Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore delivering his first lecture in English in Madras on 9 February 1919. In ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’ lecture, he raised the question “what should be the ideal of education in India. Instead of holding my listeners’ minds in suspense till the very end, let me briefly give the answer in the beginning…

On each race is the duty laid to keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part in the illumination of the world. To break the lamp of any people is to deprive it of its righ – tful place in the world festival. He who has no light is unfortunate enough, but utterly miserable is he who, having it, has been deprived of it, or has forgotten all about it. “India has proved that it has its own mind, which has deeply thought and felt and tried to solve according to its light the problems of existence. The education of India is to enable this mind of India to find out truth, to make this truth its own wherever found and to give expression to it in such a manner as only it can do. In order to carry this out, first of all the mind of India has to be concentrated and made conscious of itself and then only can it accept education from its teachers in a right spirit, judge it by its own standard and make use of it by its own creative power…

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The next point is that, in education, the most important factor must be the inspiring atmosphere of creative activity. And therefore, the primary function of our University should be the constructive work of knowledge…Education can only become natural and wholesome when it is the direct fruit of a living and growing knowledge.” On 27 March 1919 Gurudev also delivered this lecture at the Empire Theatre, Calcutta. ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’ may be read as one of the finest expositions of Swadeshi intellectual thought, in fact, historians and scholars have un – derlined the ‘internationalism’ and the stupendous growth of projects where ‘knowledge for nationalist ends’ were evident.

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Moreover, the Swadeshi movement was spread in time across three decades, quite clearly from 1903 to the early 1920s and even beyond; seeking to assert indigenous autonomy, social constructivism and cultural productivity at one level, directly challenging the British Empire. At another level, there were knowledge........

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