The Home and the World:

 

Exploring, reflecting, debating, defining and creating the notion of “What is home?”

What is “home”? Is it a kind of space? Is it fixed or changeable? Given or chosen? Personal or collective? One or many? Real or unreal? Who defines what is home? Where is the location of one’s home? Is it a construct?

2015 marks the 100 years of Mahatma Gandhi’s return to India from South Africa. On that note, we tried to delve deeper into the idea of returning home in today’s context through reading, reflecting, writing and connecting, in a general studies course done at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology facilitated by Sudebi Thakurata. 

 

The notion of ‘home and the outside’ was explored by a critical reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s controversial novel “The Home and the World”, juxtaposing with its cinematic representation by Satyajit Ray. The metaphors of used in the film and the novel were unpacked in the process linking them to contemporary settings and personal experience. One explored several ideas and questions, while critically analyzing not just the text, but the context of the novel. The relationship between home and identity was looked at, along with the notion of diaspora, in terms of movement of people and ideas.

 

The novel, a projection of Tagore’s belief of an interactive, dialogic world and his critique of the obsession with nationalism, was read in the current setting of a “globalized world” with so many borders and conflicts. The ideological and philosophical conflicts represented in the novel was explored through two differing points of view, with an emphasis on the powerful questions of gender that come up in the story. A lot of other articles, videos, songs, poems and thoughts were also connected while reading the novel.

The reflection  involved a movement between the political and personal, which amalgamated into a telling or re-telling of narratives, dichotomies, confusion  and significance of “our home and the world” in our times. This blog is a space that captures some of these reflections and insights done by the Foundation Studies students, designed by Himanshu Bilochi, Archana Bilgi and Parina Dhruve  under the guidance of facilitator Sudebi Thakurata. Students involved are:Archana Bilgi, Athang Samant, Esha Basu, Himanshu Bilochi, Inês Barros, Parmita Mukherjee,Riya Patel, Smriti Haldia, Shivani Bapna, Satyadeep Shekhar and Sidharth Saxena