Resumption of Sino-Indian Educational Exchanges Marks 100th Anniversary of Tagore's China Visit

As this year commemorates 100 years since Rabindranath Tagore's first visit to China, educational and cultural exchange programs between Visva-Bharati and Chinese colleges, which have been suspended since the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, are probably going to resume.

In honor of Tagore's first visit to China in 1924, the Chinese Consulate General in Calcutta and the Cheena Bhavana, the center of Chinese studies in Visva-Bharati, jointly organized a two-day international conference on April 1 and 2 in Santiniketan. During the conference, topics including the process to resume such exchange programs were discussed.

"We anticipate that this year will see the return of the exchange programs. On the fringes of the meeting, a round of talks was held with representatives of the Chinese embassy "The head of Cheena Bhavana, Abhijit Banerjee, told The Telegraph.

Tagore made two trips to China in 1924 and 1928. The first Asian Nobel laureate spent 49 days in the nation on his first visit, interacting with a number of Chinese intellectuals and scholars, including Chinese poet and writer Xu Zhimo (1897–1931) and Liang Quicho (1873–1929), the Republic of China’s minister of justice.

After making two trips to the nation, according to an official, Tagore founded the Chinese department at Visva-Bharati in 1937 with the goal of advancing Chinese language and culture as a sign of Sino-Indian cooperation.

The poet asked Chinese scholar Tan Yun-shan, who was traveling in India in the late 1930s, to serve as the department's first director.

Among the attendees of the most recent two-day international conference were Qin Yong, the acting consul general of China in Calcutta, and Ma Jia, the chargé d'affaires of the Chinese Embassy in India. Along with acting vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati Sanjoy Kumar Mallik, experts and researchers in Tagore research from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Banaras Hindu University, and the Vivekananda International Foundation attended the full conference and gave keynote presentations.

Banerjee claims that senior representatives of the Chinese embassy have already extended an invitation to a Visva-Bharati group to participate in celebrations of Tagore's first visit to China in a few months.

"We will extend an invitation to professors and students from Chinese universities as soon as our group returns from China. By October, we expect to resume the exchange program," he continued.

Delegations from about 20 Chinese universities, including Peking University, Yunnan University, and Yunnan Minzu University, visited Santiniketan as part of the exchange program between 2010 and March 2020, when all such programs halted due to the epidemic, according to a source.

"Exchange programmes used to play a very significant role for the Indian students studying Chinese here," he stated.

According to Ma Jia, the Chargé d'Affaires of the Chinese Embassy in India, Tagore's trip to China was historic and continues to be significant in fostering mutual understanding and exchanges between the two great civilizations of China and India.

"China and India should deepen people-to-people and cultural exchanges between China and India, inherit and carry forward Tagore's great spirit, and add more positive factors to China-India relations," she stated at the start of the two-day meeting.

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