By Ritambhara
Tagore’s tree-planting festival began at Santiniketan in July 1928, when Rabindranath Tagore gathered students and teachers to plant saplings around his school. Within days he held a ploughing festival at nearby Sriniketan and gave an address that presented both rituals as the repair of damaged land.
Tagore (1861-1941) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and founded Visva-Bharati at Santiniketan, in Birbhum district of West Bengal, in 1921. In 1922 he set up the Institute of Rural Reconstruction at Surul, a few kilometres away, with the Englishman Leonard Elmhirst as its first director. His son Rathindranath, trained in agricultural science at the University of Illinois, worked with Elmhirst. The rural campus became known as Sriniketan.
A festival to replace felled trees
The 1928 address, titled Halakarshana, appeared in the Bengali monthly Prabasi. Parantap Chakraborty’s English translation gives Tagore’s account of what tree loss had done to the country. “The earth was being rendered naked by the culling of trees for various purposes,” Tagore said. He argued that the felling “turned the air warmer and nearly depleted the fertility of the land.”
He tied that loss to heat as well as soil, describing northern India as a country that had “lost the shelter of the forest” and now faced harsh sun. Tagore then gave the new tree festival a moral purpose. He called it “the sacred festival of replenishing the wasted treasure of the mothers by prodigal children.” The mothers were the earth and its forests, and the prodigal children were the people who had spent them.
The plough as a public ritual
The ploughing festival, Halakarshana, gave farm work a ceremony of its own. In a 1928 letter to Nirmalkumari Mahalanobis, Tagore linked the ritual to Balarama, an early agricultural deity shown with a plough. He told his audience that the ceremony revived the memory of the beginnings of agriculture.
The pairing was deliberate. Sriniketan was meant to help the villages around Santiniketan study their own problems and solve them. Planting trees and ploughing well were two parts of the same practical work on the same ground. Both festivals are still held at Visva-Bharati every August, close to the anniversary of Tagore’s death.
The gap Tagore described
Tagore measured the damage by heat on the skin and thin harvests. India now measures it by satellite. The Forest Survey of India’s State of Forest Report 2023, released in December 2024, put forest and tree cover at 827,357 square kilometres, or 25.17 per cent of the country’s area.
The National Forest Policy of 1988 set a national goal of “a minimum of one-third of the total land area of the country under forest or tree cover.” On the 2023 figures, India would need roughly 268,000 more square kilometres of forest or tree cover to meet that goal.
Tagore’s festival made replanting a yearly duty for everyone who used the land. Nearly a century later, the national figures show the debt he named in 1928 is still unpaid, and his instruction to plant back what was taken applies with full force.
