Chapter 15

Language, Nation, Freedom:

Rabindranath Tagore and Ludwig
Wittgenstein on the Epistemology
of Education

Rukmini Bhaya Nair

Introduction

This chapter brings together two relatively little known but fascinating texts:
Rabindranath Tagore’s essays on language in Sabdo Tattwo (The Essence of Words,
the first edition in Bengali 1909) and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Worterbuch fur
Volksschulen (Dictionary for Basic Education, the first edition in Austria, 1926).1
The former is a work of philosophy, a long series of reflections on education and
the latter, a work of praxis, a brief spelling dictionary that Wittgenstein compiled
during the five years he spent teaching poor children in rural and semi-urban
Austria soon after First World War. The fact that neither text has been fully
translated into English before—Wittgenstein’s not at all and Tagore’s only partially
—lends, in addition, a certain piquancy, even poignancy to the present endeavour.
This is because, neglected as these texts have been, they have, in my view, pro-
found insights to contribute to the educational dilemmas that confront us today in
the avant-garde twenty-first century. Violence and the will to freedom, nationalist
aspirations and ‘global’ cosmopolitan alliances, rigid grammatical rule-following
and romantic visions of poetic liberation, gruelling poverty and glittering affluence,
cruel dystopias and nostalgic utopias are oddly yoked together in these texts in
ways that, I suggest, are very pertinent to the conundrums that confront us today on
a subcontinent that remains home to half the world’s illiterate population. I shall

1
I would like to express my enormous gratitude to Michael Nedo, the keeper of the Wittgenstein
Archives at the University of Cambridge, for making the full text of Wittgenstein’s ‘Worterbuch’
available to me; to my father, Hiten Bhaya, for agreeing to translate, with meticulousness and
precision, the full text of Tagore’s ‘Sabdo Tattwo’ at my request; and to Chandrika Kumar for his
accurate and scholarly translation of the ‘Worterbuch’.

R.B. Nair (&)

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
e-mail: rukmini.nair@gmail.com

© Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla 2017 219

K.L. Tuteja and K. Chakraborty (eds.), Tagore and Nationalism,
DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-3696-2_15
220 R.B. Nair

argue in this essay that it is most instructive to read Tagore’s philosophy of edu-
cation for children, produced in colonial India, in tandem with the sort of praxis for
primary education Wittgenstein devised in Europe sundered by WW1.
Of the book by Wittgenstein, few are aware that this compact dictionary for
children is in fact among the only two books that he published in his lifetime, the
other being the slim, seventy-five page Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that
established him as one of the greatest of the twentieth-century philosophers. This
difference between the extreme paucity of Wittgenstein’s output and Tagore’s
prodigality is at first quite striking although it is soon apparent that both were
undeniably ‘myriad-minded’ (Dutta and Robinson 1995). Indeed, Bertrand
Russell’s generic description of Wittgenstein would seem to fit Tagore well: ‘the
most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived;
passionate, profound, intense, and dominating’ (quoted in Monk 1990). Not that
there are not major differences.
Wittgenstein, for one, was much the younger savant. Born twenty-eight years
after Tagore in Vienna at the height of its cultural effulgence but soon to be
threatened by war and riven by internal anxieties, he offers in some ways a reverse
mirror image of Tagore, born in Calcutta under colonial domination but animated
by dynamic visions of freedom. Tagore the poet, home-schooled, never went to
university; Wittgenstein the philosopher, intensely involved in exploring the
foundations of human reason, studied aeronautical engineering at Manchester
University and received a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. Such
historical factors alone make their backgrounds perhaps incommensurable. Yet both
were the youngest children born into large, rich, privileged families where art,
music and cultural pursuits were accorded almost fetishistic value; both were deeply
troubled by the events of WW1; and both obsessed about education.
It is this last resemblance on which my essay focuses, although we will return to
other, more general resemblances towards the end of this exploration. One of my
principle aims here is to show that pitched ethical battles were endlessly fought by
both Tagore and Wittgenstein in the epistemic as well as empirical space of the
classroom. The moral goal for both seems to have been a sort of hard-won
metaphorical freedom: mental, spiritual and political. This made the classroom a
place of intense loss and recovery for both. However, the ‘philosophical investi-
gations’, to borrow a posthumous phrase from Wittgenstein, that each conducted
therein and the methodologies they recommended for educational progress turn out
often to be hugely at odds, setting up a difficult tension between their texts. In short,
the pedagogic ‘language-games’ that Tagore and Wittgenstein chose to play had
intriguingly different sets of rules and grammars. I consider some of these con-
tradictions and continuities in the three sections of this essay below. The first
section is on Tagore’s thoughts on language and education as expressed in Sabdo
Tattwo (henceforth, ST); the second is on Wittgenstein’s Worterbuch (henceforth
WB), ending with a brief enumeration of some general similarities and differences
of theme and attitude between Tagore and Wittgenstein; and the third and final
section is a ‘coda’ that brings the ‘narrative time back to the present’ (Labov and
Waletsky 1966; Nair 2002, 2009, 2011a, 2014) on the impact that these thinkers
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 221

have had on a recent research project of my own in the field of education. I should
perhaps add that since this essay contains material that has not, as mentioned, been
published before, it has a larger number of direct quotations than is usual in an
academic essay. Furthermore, the essay is characterized by a certain asymmetry
since there is slightly more emphasis on Tagore’s work than on Wittgenstein’s, for
which the reason is not a lack of material but simply the pragmatic fact that this
volume is primarily about Tagore. I begin, then, with him.

Grammar Lessons

Rabindranath Tagore has often been characterized as a cosmopolitan free spirit who
adamantly rejected a narrow definition of nationalism. He was insistent that a
limited understanding of the nation-state had led to Fascism, wars and disintegra-
tion in Europe (Tagore 2009). In this sense, his view of nationalism seemed to have
been based on an ideal of cultural wholeness and inclusivity that was, in theory,
unbounded and included all members of the human community. His advocacy of
‘The Religion of Man’ in his Hibbert Lectures of 1930 delivered, interestingly, at
Oxford University just a year after Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge and finally
received his doctorate in 1929 offers some evidence of this inclusive attitude.
Likewise, Tagore’s willingness to argue with the most prominent scientists of his
time about foundational concepts such as the nature of reality and truth (see the
Tagore-Einstein dialogues, 1931) and to collaborate with prominent Indian scien-
tists like JC Bose on the making of primers and textbooks for children attest a
similar inclusive urge to straddle conventional divisions such as those between
‘tradition and modernity’, ‘science and spirituality’, ‘the local and the cosmopoli-
tan’, ‘East–West’, and ‘colonial domination and anti-colonial resistance’. ST, in
short, reveals Tagore, the pre-eminent Indian poet of his age, as a philosopher
relentlessly trying to articulate a ‘grammar of the times’—a grammar that is cog-
nitively inclusive, where his focus may be language, but his concern is all of human
society.

The Intellectual Context

1909, the date when the first edition of ST was published, was a key year in terms
of the production of texts that have had a lasting influence on thinking about
language and politics in India and beyond. This was the year when Gandhi’s iconic
Hind Swaraj appeared in Gujarati for the first time. The years (1903–1928) were
also when successive volumes of the imperial Linguistic Survey of India conducted
by Grierson were being published. And in far off Geneva, Ferdinand de Saussure,
professor of Sanskrit, delivered his famous lectures on General Linguistics in the
years between 1907 and 1910.
222 R.B. Nair

Tagore’s contributions to these influential debates on language and bilingualism

begin modestly enough with the earliest piece in ST being a review of a definitive
edition of Vidyapati’s verses by Pandit Akshayachandra Sarkar. The volume,
Tagore writes,
is “complete with annotations, commentaries, alternative versions and in places even
grammatical rules” – and yet it is marked by a fundamental flaw. The editors of such
volumes are so full of their own scholarship, of “overweening pride”, that they “do not find
it necessary to waste a thought over some insignificant dwarfs called readers”.

This review was written when Tagore was just about twenty, but we already
discern in it, in my view, traces of a theme that slowly gathers strength in every
aspect of Tagore’s writings, namely the need to ‘democratize’ the Bengali language.
Recognizing that the Bengali of his time was severely diglossic and therefore far
from a language of access, he firmly rejects in ST both the elite blandishments of
English and the virginal enticements of the Sanskrit-based ‘shuddha’ or ‘sadhu
bhasha’ (chaste Bengali). Indeed, there is a dramatic ‘Prometheus Unbound’
quality to the arguments throughout the book because of the running contest Tagore
sets up in it between the young, heroic David of modern Bangla and his two hugely
intimidating but ultimately insubstantial opponents, the Goliaths of English and
Sanskrit. Frequently changing his slingshot metaphors, he suggests that English is
really a false god, a chimera that the Bengali Bhadralok whore after at their own
peril. Then, switching effortlessly to a mechanical metaphor, he insists just as
pithily that Sanskrit is as remote from the ‘kathaya’ (ordinary) speech of local
communities as a broad-gauge from a metre-gauge railway line. Even if a ‘bridge’
is to be built between the two, he avers, it is still a matter of investigation and
debate what the ‘standard’ should be—and every educationist will recognize here
Tagore’s acute anticipation of the classic debates about ‘language standardization’
in post-Independence India. We perceive in this early essay, too, that sharp-tongued
anti-punditry that is to characterize all his remarks on language in the essays to
come. To my mind, it is this strain of passionate rebellion against the hegemony of
the pundits of all sorts that is a primary theme uniting the variegated essays in ST.
Moving swiftly forward now to the last note on ‘body language’ in ST, written in
May 1940, just a year before Tagore’s death, we find here another critical aspect of
Tagore’s notion of what language is. Language, for him, is a culturally indexed
mode of performance, a type of species production that cannot, and must not, be
separated from emotions, norms of politeness or cognitive and conceptual orien-
tations. This last essay demonstrates the tremendous attention that Tagore pays
throughout ST to the details of grammatical form:
There are different ways of bowing (showing respect).
1. The first is to bend your neck a little one side, put your palms together and raise
them to touch your forehead.
2. When we say gar kari tomaar paayey, it implies a gesture of the utmost
humility. The word ‘gar’ refers to a particular posture of meekness; the addition
of the verb karaa (to do) shows that it is so. To bow in that pose is gar korey
pranaam karaa.
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 223

3. We say namaskaar kori (‘do obeisance’), not namaskaar hoi (‘be obeisant’).
Gar is a word of the same class.
4. The words garaai (‘lie down’) and garaagori diy (‘I roll’) bring our bodies to a
certain position. There is no question of the verb (hoi ‘be’) being associated
here.
5. In fact, gar korey pranaam karaa is to fall rolling at one’s feet. This form of
pronaam (‘prostration’) accomplishes this stance.
ST, it is clear, is determinedly all inclusive in the sense that Tagore refuses to
leave any aspect of the Bengali language, however apparently marginal, untouched
in it. Such an exhaustive documentation of Bengali ‘grammar’ over a period of
nearly forty years, from its cultural indices to its cognitive and perceptual stances,
does lead Tagore to concede in the last essays in the volume that some slight
progress has been made in the processes of language democratization that he sees as
imperative. He observes that over this time, ‘literary Bangla has taken recourse to
the current Bangla of Kolkata’ but is adamant that much remains to be done since
‘the norm for the language of our literature based on colloquial Bangla is not yet
firmly laid’. This is a task that lies ahead for future grammarians.
According to Tagore, then, the ineffable ‘spirit’ of a language—Saussure’s
‘langue’—is paradoxically to be found in its down-to-earth ‘rusticity’—its changing
manifestations in ‘parole’. Roy Harris, the well-known Oxford scholar, has argued
that it is in this respect that Tagore is a true linguist in spirit of his contemporary
Saussure, a grammarian who is ultimately interested in the ‘essence’ of words (i.e.
their durable langue-like nature) but chooses to investigate this essential perma-
nence of ‘the word’ via the study of everyday speech (i.e. the changing and mutable
structures of parole). Commenting on Tagore’s philosophy of education, Harris
says:
Tagore… saw that … the tendency to teach each academic subject as a self-contained
province of knowledge to be studied for its own sake [was problematic]. This is because the
‘machinery’ perspective is not enough [even if it is a matter as simple as learning to ride a
bike]…Riding a bike is essentially a matter of integrating the various biomechanical
activities of the rider in order to produce a certain result…

What was this result? In ST, Tagore explains that ‘result’ he has in mind is an
understanding of one’s ‘true identity’. This phrase ‘true identity’ is found repeat-
edly in Tagore’s essays in ST and seems to imply three constant assumptions. First,
that language is the richest but never the sole source of knowledge when it comes to
the search for identity; second, that identity, while rooted in ‘native soil’, is
inclusive in the sense that it, in essence, is hospitable, consisting in the capacity to
host ‘otherness’ even to the extent of taking on words from the colonizer’s language
when necessary; and third, it is important to engage in a dispassionate study of
language but, simultaneously, never give up on one’s strong emotional attachment
to one’s ‘mother tongue’. It is this tough balancing act, achieved through adopting a
‘scientific’ attitude coupled with a passionate desire to learn and to move forward—
so consonant with the ‘bike’ metaphor suggested by Harris—that I come to in the
next section.
224 R.B. Nair

The Science of Language

Tagore’s consistent perspective in ST is that the ‘other tongue’ (English) and the
‘mother tongue’ (Bengali) must complement one another when required. Likewise,
the principles of ‘objective’ observation from an ‘outsider’ viewpoint associated
with modern science and ‘subjective’ knowhow from an ‘insider’ worldview asso-
ciated with cultural traditions that are ‘natural’ to one must support each another.
Through such strategies of ‘reasoning via complementarity’, Tagore then gradually
arrives at a related conclusion that is not so much linguistic or scientific as it is
historical. India seeking to be truly free must promote, Tagore insists, some form of a
nuanced ‘cosmopolitan-nationalism’ or perhaps a ‘nationalist-cosmopolitanism’.
True, he does not use this hybrid postmodern terminology, but he does amplify the
underlying argument time and again in ST via, for example, specific arguments for
why we may sometimes need to deliberately incorporate foreign words into our
mother tongues. An instance:
At present, we use the word jaati as a substitute [for the word ‘nation’] but this only
encourages laxity in our use of language. On the other hand, when we use the adjectival
form jaatiya to describe our literature, history, music and schools of thought, it is very
convenient because the adjective has no other function. So entrenched is this adjective as a
synonym for ‘national’ that there’s no way it can be uprooted. But if we have to specify in
any scientific treatise the terms ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘tribe’ and ‘clan’ we shall be in serious
difficulty. Therefore, I feel the sooner we incorporate ‘nation’ and ‘national’ into the Bangla
language, the better for us.

Among the many things worthy of note in Tagore’s unusual view that Bengali,
and by extension all Indian languages, should take on board crucial words such as
‘nation’ and ‘national’ from the English is his telling use of the phrase ‘scientific
treatise’. Understanding both the grammar of a language and the grammar of
nationhood requires first and foremost an unfettered scientific attitude, an ability to
look facts in the face, Tagore seems to be arguing here. Resistance to the colonial
tongue cannot be knee-jerk; it cannot fly in the face of evidence. If there is a gap,
for instance, in the vocabulary of Bengali that the word ‘nation’, a modern political
term which is simply not equivalent to ‘jaati’ or ‘desh’, can fill, one must not flinch
from incorporating it. In this resides a ‘true’ commitment to the zeitgeist, the spirit
of the age. It is, indeed, in this sense that ST not only appears committed to an
objective description of the ‘facts’ of the language but also seeks to take into
account and explain the historical and social circumstances under which linguistic
items are borrowed. ST is thus probing, curious and unashamedly speculative in a
manner that distinguishes ‘scientific thought’ of a foundational kind. It presents a
persuasive combination of rich observations and strong hypotheses about language.
As Tagore puts it himself, echoing Darwin, Bangla in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries is, like other modern Indian languages, ‘going through a process
of natural selection’. In ST, he therefore makes it his business to examine these
transitions, especially in spoken Bengali. Responding to critics who accuse him, in
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 225

the process, of giving short shrift to the ‘gravity and grace’ of ‘high’ Bangla, he
likens himself to a zoologist observing the nature of animal species, he writes:
There is a language called Bangla but to measure its gravity and grace is not the job of the
grammarian. His job is to discover and record the rules underlying that language. He should
be indifferent to who chooses to use or not use that language. He need not instruct or order
anyone. A zoologist writes about dogs as well as foxes.

And again in the same essay:

My explanation is that nothing is unworthy of notice in Science, like one in love. People
may be amused when a man of literature like me takes refuge in science. But if I submit
lovingly that nothing is trivial to me as far as my mother-tongue is concerned, then I may be
spared the sneer… No doubt it is gratifying to see our mother resplendent in the garb of
Sanskrit, rich in compounds and suffixes, primary and secondary (samaas-sandhi -taddhit-
pratyaye) but it would be a matter of great shame if we fail to recognize her as the gracious
home-maker in her everyday attire, in the midst of her daily chores.

These staunchly held views are confirmed in several other essays including the
following one in which Tagore confesses:
I lack the attributes of a grammarian. I fought shy of grammar from my childhood; but I
revere the image of the Bangla language in all its forms. That is why I am tireless in
researching every aspect of her identity and occasionally present for everyone to see some
of the treasures I find in the storehouse of our language as a result of these humble efforts.
Aashaar-Shraaban Bs.1311 June -July, 1895

The Aesthetics of Grammar

If ‘researching every aspect’ of the Bengali language in order to discover her ‘true
identity’ is Tagore’s scientific goal, he is also keenly aware as a ‘creative writer’
that many aspects of language have to do with the emotional arousal it can induce,
its poetic resonance. Thus, he writes in ST:
…in one sphere my mind was always free. I never stuck to any rules or norms in the writing
of poetry. I was aware that there was a bind in the language and rhythm but it was more like
anklets, not shackles.

Twenty-first-century linguistics can, I believe, with profit take away from

Tagore’s nineteenth-century thoughts on language in ST this game-changing and
provocatively ‘feminine’ image that re-envisages the grammatical rule—the ‘bind
in language’—as ‘anklet’ rather than ‘shackle’. As usual, Tagore then goes on to
present several specific examples of how the grammatical rules of Bengali work as
‘anklets’ to augment its aesthetics so that, very often, no borrowing from the
English is required at all. This is obviously the opposite case from Tagore’s plea
that the words ‘nation’ and ‘national’ be borrowed from the English for the reason
that a conceptual space for these notions simply does not exist in Bengali. I choose
here an example from Tagore’s discussion of English versus Bengali spelling for
226 R.B. Nair

the purposes of this essay because it connects interestingly to Wittgenstein’s

emphasis on orthography in his brand of teaching pedagogy, presented later.
A consideration of the ‘aesthetics’ of grammaticality enables Tagore to examine
the seemingly dull question of why Bengali spelling needs to be reformed from a
perspective that privileges simplicity, harmony, symmetry and elegance (often, as
we know, these features also constitute scientists’ criteria for assessing the relative
merits of abstruse theories in mathematics or physics) over dry functionalism. His
argument in ST is not only that Bengali’s attempt to mimic Sanskrit pronunciation
in its spelling—a move defended to the death by his old enemies, the pundits—is
unscientific because it pays no attention to the actual phonological structures of the
spoken language but also that it is cumbersome, ugly and shackling. Modes of
scientific enquiry are thus brought into alignment with aesthetic requirements.
Speaking of those who attempt assiduously to mimic English punctuation, he writes
colourfully:
Once a doubt crossed my mind that punctuation and other signs are extraneous to a
language …. In the old manuscripts, there was only the full-stop (‘daaRi’). The language
met all its needs within its own resources of style and rhythm. Why does it need so many
aides? A single housemaid suffices for the home of an Englishman but as soon as he steps
into India he is served by a host of peons, messengers, bearers, butlers, guards, sweepers,
gardeners and so on…
Our written language is also acquiring this lordly western style. The sentence key he tumi
announces its question loudly by itself – why do we need to post a hunch-backed footman
after it?… The sign I dislike most is the exclamation mark. Surprise is an emotion. If the
language of the writer is unable to convey it naturally, a hired sign will not cover the lack. It
is rather like the breast-beating of a hired mourner at a relative’s funeral.

Importing signs such as the question mark (‘a hunchbacked footman’) and
exclamation mark (‘a hired mourner’) into the native orthography of Bengali
constitutes a betrayal of one’s ‘true’ heritage, the aesthetics of one’s mother tongue
in which one is truly ‘at home’, according to the Tagore’s merciless reading in this
passage. Sarcastic jibes throughout ST mount a similar relentless, no-holds-barred
attack on colonial intrusions, often in the guise of discussions of subjects as
apparently dry and trivial as orthography.
In a parallel essay, Tagore then links this sort of faux proliferation of shallow
symbols thoughtlessly borrowed from the English to an issue that is central in
contemporary cognitive linguistic, namely the question of ‘untranslatability’ (see
Croft and Cruse 2004). Implicitly contrasting various ‘lazy’ borrowings from the
English with the natural and wondrous polysemy of native Bangla words such as
huujug, naekami and alladey in a chapter on ‘Definitions’ (sanggaya bichaar), he
argues for the central place of such words in the culture of Bengal in what seems
like an independent formulation of the doctrine of linguistic relativism (see Sapir
1983; Whorf 1956; Everett 2013; Nair 2014, 2015), boldly declaring:
As a matter of fact, every language has its own mould and wherever the material may come
from, it moulds them according to its needs. That mould is its natural identity.
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 227

The Trope of Childhood

Under the hegemonic conditions of colonialism, it is, however, not all that easy for
children to fit all that snugly into the ‘mould’ of their native language. The con-
tradictions introduced into the educational paradigm by colonialism are confronted
head-on in ST:
The British do have their guns and cannons but no less powerful are the twenty-six letters
of their alphabet. These are eroding the guts of our youth. There could be no better way,
perhaps, for the British to subdue their subjects. We are deprived of our weapons from our
very childhood. The strength of our muscles, our digestive powers and our eyesight take
leave of us one by one. After this, it is only a formality to snatch away our arms. Law and
order are all pervasive in the British Raj – except in the English Primer…

His trademark sarcasm does not take away from the strength of Tagore’s central
argument here, which is that the colonial imposition of English in the seemingly
flimsy shape of a child’s primer is in fact corrosive in nature, unhealthily eroding
the gut. This pervasive threat to ‘our youth’, in turn, makes it all the more necessary
for Tagore to roundly condemn that imitative Anglicization and what might be
called ‘colonial mimicry’ after Bhabha (1994) to which some Bengalis of his time
have enthusiastically resorted. The irate poet pulls no punches when he writes:
Even if our own Bengali gentleman appears with a hat on his head, a pair of boots on his
feet and with a tie, collar and English dress, his complexion and stature will still give away
his parentage. The work of the grammarian is to discover the natural profile of a language…
To discover this true identity, it is necessary to step out of the artificially constructed
language of the books and enter the domain of spoken language. Those words may be
rustic, untouched by printing ink and considered unsuitable for formal use, yet a profes-
sional grammarian must need frequent them.

Anti-colonial linguistic subversion and sartorial self-parody combine in these

analyses with a serious view of the ‘work of the grammarian’—which is to ascertain
the ‘true identity’ of a language because that language is always a fine measure of
what it means to belong to a nation. In short, no matter how one dresses up the
matter, Tagore never once retreats in ST from his baseline position that identity
inheres in the transactions, emotions and intimacies of spoken language in the here
and now rather than in the elevated language of literary texts. This is followed by a
further—and surprising—self-reflexive step in ST. Tagore informs us that he began
with the assumption that in contrast to English and the inadequacy of its ‘26 letters’,
Bengali orthography was perfect. However, as he investigated, he slowly began to
discover flaws, gaps and inadequacies in the match between the written symbols of
Bengali and the phonemic patterns of spoken Bengali.
As I came across this disorder in Bangla pronunciation I began to wonder if there was a
method in this madness. I had at hand one or two Bangla lexicons, and I began to carefully
gather examples. When I had a sufficient number of them, I tried to find if they followed
any pattern. These examples and notes filled reams of paper and I carried them back with
me when I left England. I was happy to see them safely put away in a leather case.
228 R.B. Nair

After a couple of years, when I dusted and opened the case, I was surprised to find in it a
whole family of about ten yellowing dolls reigning supreme, oblivious of the incom-
pleteness of their limbs.
But where were my papers? They were nowhere to be found. A little girl had thrown out
my scribbles in disdain and established her own dolls with the greatest care. Their beds,
dresses, utensils and even the smallest items of comfort were there—nothing was missing.
Only my papers were not to be seen.
An adult’s playthings were dethroned by those of a child. If every grammarian had a
daughter like mine, then idol-worship would be preached vigorously and life for the
children would be free of trouble from conjugations and primary and secondary suffixes.

The story of ‘lost notebooks’ is by no means an unfamiliar one in the annals of

literary history—but how often are the lost notebooks of a grammarian replaced by
a family of yellowing dolls belonging to the author’s daughter? It is in this
estranging metaphor of language as a child’s ‘plaything’ that one of the key per-
sonae that Tagore created in his writings over the years comes into its own. This
was the fearless, unconstrained and ‘creative’ yet ‘powerless’ figure of the child,
curiously mimicking the adult inheritors of rich local cultures infantilized by
colonialism. Tagore criticism of the ‘modern’ system of education is trenchant
critique in ST and elsewhere:
From our very childhood… we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information
instead. We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him
grammar…Children’s minds are sensitive to the influences of the world…This sensitive
receptivity allows them, without any strain, to master language, which is the most complex
and difficult instrument of expression, full of indefinable ideas and abstract symbols… In
childhood we learn our lessons with the aid of both body and mind, with all the senses
active and eager.

When it comes to the ‘best’ education for all children, Tagore makes sure to ally
with the most gifted artists of his time. For example, his Bengali primer Sahaj Path,
still in use today, is illustrated by the great Nandalal Bose and is a compelling work
of art but surpassing even Bose is the ‘school of nature’. Nature, in Tagore’s view,
is nonpareil as the finest of nurturer, of teachers.
Nature, the greatest or all teachers, is thwarted at every step by the human teacher who
believes in machine-made lessons rather than life lessons… Of all workshops, the one
provided by Nature herself is the most commodious and helpful. Under her skilled stim-
ulation and guidance there is out-of-doors an unlimited field for experiencing and experi-
menting with life.

Three concepts we find repeatedly triangulated in Tagore’s writings in ST that

‘naturally’ work together to define the ‘true identity’ of individual and nation are as
follows:
i. the figure of the child;
ii. the trope of mother tongue; and
iii. the idea of a ‘natural’ education in the mother tongue that serves as a ‘natural’
antidote to colonization.
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 229

Not only was the mother–child relationship central to Tagore’s local yet uni-
versalist imagery of deshbhakti (reverence for the country) and deshprem (love for
one’s country), but such a localized universalism was intricately linked to language
use. Partha Chatterjee, the historian, has pointed out that Tagore was voicing not
just his personal opinion in taking this view that native speaker knowledge was
essential to the construction of a grammar and that the work of the grammarian lays
in attempting to discover ‘true identities’. Such a perspective, Chatterjee argues,
was shared by, or at least widely discussed among, the bilingual elite of Bengal
from the mid-nineteenth century, who made it
a cultural project to provide [their] mother tongue with the necessary linguistic equipment
to become an adequate language for ‘modern’ culture… belonging to that inner domain of
cultural identity, from which the colonial intruder had to be kept out; language therefore
became a zone over which the nation had first to declare its sovereignty and then had to
transform in order to make it adequate for the modern world.

In a larger sense, then, the detailed discussions of grammar in ST can be related

to the complex critiques of colonialism and nationalism that we find in so many of
Tagore’s famous novels. His penetrating linguistic analyses in ST are, after all,
written during the same stretch of time that he was engaging with the future of the
Bangla language in his creative works. Consider here the case of Gora, perhaps
Tagore’s best-known novel. Astutely chosen by Tagore, the common Bengali
proper name ‘Gora’ actually means ‘white, fair’, and in an interesting comparison
with Kipling’s ‘Kim’, Gora also features as its hero an Irish orphan. Brought up by
Bengali Brahmin parents, Gora believes himself to be Bengali by birth and is,
ironically, an intense nationalist—somewhat unlike his creator. Through the figure
of Gora, Tagore is therefore able to examine the complex dilemmas that the ideals
of nationalism can throw up. A powerful story that has been repeatedly translated
into English as well most other Indian languages, Gora was once wittily described
to me by the contemporary writer UR Ananthamurthy as perhaps ‘the best
nationalist novel written by a fervent anti-nationalist’. Here is an illustrative extract
from it:
And where is this India of yours?’ pursued Binoy. ‘Where the point of this compass of mine
turns by day and by night,’ exclaimed Gora, placing his hand on his heart. ‘There, not in
your Marshman’s History of India.’ ‘And is there any particular port to which your
compass points?’ continued Binoy. ‘Isn’t there!’ replied Gora with intense conviction. ‘…
that Port of a great Destiny is always there. That is my India in its fullness - full of wealth,
full of knowledge, full of righteousness. Do you mean to say such an India is nowhere? Is
there nothing but this falsehood on every side! This Calcutta of yours, with its offices, its
High Court, and its few bubbles of brick and mortar! Poof!’

Clearly, Tagore is making a bid in Gora for rights over history. Marshman’s
English textbook is suspect, and so is the entire apparatus of Empire—its systems of
justice, education and administration. The British picture of India is not just
ill-conceived; it is false, illusory and worthless, just ‘a few bubbles of brick and
mortar’. The political geography Gora portrays in its vehement denial of political
230 R.B. Nair

boundaries is obviously meant to facilitate a sort of reverse expansion of intellectual

territory.
Much the same is true, I suggest, of the strategies adopted in ST. By mapping so
closely and lovingly the terrain of Bengali, its inadequacies as well as its strengths,
its alliances with as well its differences from, the colonizer’s language, Tagore is
outlining a free future. At stake is India’s ‘Destiny’ and that of her ‘children’. All
his sophisticated descriptions of the Bengali language, its syntax and the nuances of
changing word meanings that he documents are clearly geared to this overarching
objective. Freeing Bengali turns out to be a metaphor for freeing India.

Language-Games

In contrast to Tagore’s romantic vision of a free, untrammelled and ‘natural’

childhood where a reverence for the ‘mother tongue’ is a sine qua non, we now
examine Wittgenstein’s far less romantic ‘Worterbuch’ in this section. Published in
1925/6, this rare text, of which only a few copies survive, has never been translated
into English.
Like Tagore, Wittgenstein wrote almost exclusively in his native tongue,
German. Curiously, however, his ‘Author’s Preface’ to WB was written not in
German but in English. This odd move by Wittgenstein seems, at least in part, to
point to a perspective on language that looks beyond the local context in which WB
was conceived. It seems to gesture in the direction of Wittgenstein’s adopted
country, England, a matter that will be discussed in greater detail when we get to the
complex, sometimes tortured, relationship between Wittgenstein and his take on
‘nationalism’ later in this section. As in the section on Tagore, this section also
attempts to briefly lay out some putative connections between Wittgenstein’s ideas
of nationhood and his praxis of education.

The Agony of Divided Loyalties

Like Tagore, Wittgenstein was very much, on the face of it, a cosmopolitan. His
adopted country was England, and many of his best friends—as the saying goes—
were English. By the time he wrote the WB, he had already spent some years in
England and his circle of Cambridge friends included Frank Ramsey, Bertrand
Russell and others. Nevertheless, it seems Wittgenstein still found it agonizing in
personal terms to accept the defeat of his country, fighting for most of the Great
War in the German trenches and receiving several medals from the government for
his bravery. All his cosmopolitanism, in short, did nothing to deter Wittgenstein
from feeling that he was a German first and foremost and would defend his country
to the death. He wrote:
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 231

I feel the terrible sadness of the German race’s situation. The English—the best race in the
world—cannot lose. We, however, can lose, and will lose, if not this year, then the next.
The thought that our race will be defeated depresses me terribly, because I am a German
through and through.

Also, it should be noted that Wittgenstein was literally carrying the manuscript
of the Tractatus—that completely universal document—in his pocket while he
fought in the trenches; but, once again, this did nothing to counter his primal
nationalism. In this context, we might recall the well-documented fact that
Wittgenstein was born within six days of Adolf Hitler in the 1889 and that they
studied in the same Realschule in Linz and were thus a product of the same period
of history, dominated by that ringing super-slogan Deutschland Uber Alles.
All this pent-up nationalist agony led to a firm resolve on Wittgenstein’s part
after the war in which he fought so courageously on the German side. Inspired, like
Tagore, by Tolstoy’s ideas on village education, Wittgenstein decided to teach for
five years in poor rural schools in some of Austria’s most deprived districts such as
Puchberg am Schneeberg and Otterthal between 1919 and 1924. However, we soon
discover that Wittgenstein’s attitude to the children he taught is markedly different
from Tagore’s romantic vision of the ‘free’ and ‘creative’ child.

The Real World of Education in Rural Austria

His favourite sister Hermine reported that she strongly discouraged her younger
brother Ludwig from going off to teach in Austria’s far from advanced rural
schools, telling him that applying his genius to teaching the children there was like
using a ‘precision instrument to open crates’. She also notes his response:
You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot
explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm
is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his
feet.

In other words, there is a sophisticated metaphoric ‘language-game’ afoot here

between the siblings where Wittgenstein’s vivid metaphor battles his sister’s
equally graphic description. Hermine’s point is that her brother’s well-honed
intellectual skills would be inappropriate in a context where brute methods were
likely required to instil learning. Wittgenstein’s response is one that is familiar from
his philosophical writings. He suggests that his sister has misidentified the problem.
It is not that he is overqualified, but that it is essential to go out there into the
‘storm’—the awful context of schooling in rural Austria—rather than speculate
about the goings-on ‘out there’ by surveying the scene through a glass window and
finding the movements of a passer-by in the storm ‘strange’. Only by experiencing
and assessing such stormy conditions for oneself, can a true explanation be prof-
fered of the ‘strangeness’ that is witnessed. One finds in this extended
Wittgensteinian metaphor a faint echo of the ‘scientific’ value of experience that
232 R.B. Nair

animates Tagore’s writings on education but Wittgenstein seems more willing to

dirty his hands in his ‘experiments’ with prevailing educational conditions. For
example, although he is quite as cosmopolitan as Tagore in his education and
outlook, he dismisses out of hand the first Austrian school where he is offered a
position on the grounds that it is ‘too cosmopolitan. (It had a park with a fountain in
it.)’ (Robins 2015). It is hard to imagine Tagore rejecting a school to teach in
because its surrounds were moderately sylvan. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is
uncompromising in his search for epicentres of the ‘storm’ in Austrian education.
Those were the dread places he wanted to be—with not very happy consequences,
as we are shortly to observe.
‘I am to be an elementary-school teacher in a tiny village called Trattenbach’, he
wrote to his mentor Bertrand Russell in a letter dated 23 October 1921. Trattenbach,
we are told, was a small farming and factory town in semi-rural Austria with few
distinguishing features except its dire poverty. It was exactly the sort of place where
Wittgenstein wished to teach. A month later, in another letter, he describes his
circumstances in Trattenbach as reeking of ‘odiousness and baseness’, declaring
frankly, ‘I know human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but
here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere’.
Similarly, during his teaching stint at Hassbach, another dismal school location
where he stayed only about a month, he wrote: ‘These people are not human at all
but loathsome worms’. And teaching at Puchberg am Schneeberg in the mountains,
he informed Russell in no uncertain terms that the villagers there were ‘one-quarter
animal and three-quarters human’.
One cannot but admire Wittgenstein’s painful honesty as well his staying power
in situations he found so utterly repulsive—after all, he persevered for no less than
five years in his attempts to teach the children in the very backward communities he
had identified. At the same time, the violence of his language and the unconcealed
contempt he displayed for the children he taught as well as their parents would
hardly bear the scrutiny of any sort of political correctness, even the most liberal.
Despite such discomfiting harshness, we might argue, however, that Wittgenstein’s
reports of his teaching experience have more in common than Tagore’s with the
actual circumstances of teaching in schools across India today. This is a theme to
which I return towards the end of this chapter, but there is no doubting that an
educational scenario in which enclaves of extreme privilege and pampering in a few
early twentieth-century Austrian schools existed side by side with appalling
deprivation, a severe lack of amenities and violence in many others is far from
unfamiliar in present-day India. This is certainly one of the reasons that it could be
important to read about Wittgenstein’s experience in these schools, including his
resort to considerable physical violence in his treatment of the children he taught.
While teaching at these poverty-stricken schools, it is extensively on record that
Wittgenstein often cuffed and slapped the children he taught, with apparently little
self-reflexivity about his methods of corporal punishment. This led to the notorious
‘Haidbauer’ incident, where he hit a sickly child who subsequently collapsed. After
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 233

this, a group of parents brought a case against Wittgenstein, who was acquitted at
the hearing but later confessed that he had lied to protect himself. This offers
another instance of his often shocking honesty; indeed, years later, Wittgenstein
returned to ‘the scene of the crime’ to apologize but, understandably enough, this
post hoc gesture did not result in expiation. All his life, Wittgenstein seemed to
have remained troubled by what he saw and did in those post-war Austrian schools.
But where he differs greatly from the average, ill-qualified teacher in the average
deprived school, is what he did to resolve the solution. A ‘precision instrument’, as
his sister so aptly described him, he laboriously worked to produce and publish a
dictionary for the very children for whom he possessed so little empathy.
The unusual children’s dictionary that Wittgenstein wrote to aid the highly
deprived children he taught sets him apart from any run of the mill teacher and
brings him much closer to Tagore in his vision of what a good mother tongue
education can do to uplift individuals. The text of WB suggests some fruitful lines
of future intellectual enquiry, including a possibly deeper understanding of
Wittgenstein’s widely influential philosophical analyses of the relation between
word meanings and written signs in the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations.
It is quite plausible, to my mind, to suggest that Wittgenstein might have derived
some of his insights into the problems that language creates from the primary
materials he gathered during his schoolteacher year about how meanings are formed
and signs remade in contexts where every kind of learning resource is severely
attenuated. For, it is quite apparent that the WB, compiled in the learning context of
highly impoverished classrooms not to mention the wider context of Europe in the
troubled period between two World Wars, embodies some quite basic conflicts. As
we have witnessed, Wittgenstein, a teacher both highly qualified and highly strung,
was not averse to soundly assaulting the ‘backward’ children he taught. The por-
traits he presents of his student are far from complimentary. However, he does show
singular resolve in confronting the hard question of how their perceived problems
with literacy are to be addressed. This is what sets him apart as a teacher and as a
thinker. For all its brevity, the WB, like the Tractatus, is not a slapdash work. It
may arouse hackles and provoke argument but, as in the case of Tagore’s ST, it
does not shy away from laying out certain fundamental premises concerning the
manner in which language deficits are to be tackled in classroom teaching. We now
turn to the WB.

The Function of a Dictionary

In the ‘Author’s Preface’ to the WB written, as I’ve mentioned, in English, the

principles that animate Wittgenstein’s dictionary and the methodology used to
construct it are laid out with great clarity. These include the following five
principles:
234 R.B. Nair

Only words that students of Austrian elementary schools are familiar with should be
entered
No word is too common to be entered
Compound words should be entered
Foreign words should be entered if used universally, if necessary, they should be translated
into German
Dialectal expressions should be entered only if they have entered the educated language.

This prescriptive list of injunctions in WB differs from the loving descriptions of

language that Tagore offers in ST in a number of ways. First, it focuses on what
Wittgenstein calls ‘educated language’ as well as on the written form of German,
whereas Tagore is quite insistent that it is spoken Bengali that should be at the
centre of language study; second, the WB contains singular words and alphabetical
word lists rather than any extensions of the provenance of word meanings to other
forms of communication such as ‘body language’ as in the ‘inclusivist’ method
favoured by Tagore; and third and finally, the child is never the romanticized
initiator of language activity as in Tagore’s text but, rather, the recipient of firmly
administered language instruction in Wittgenstein’s dictionary.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that the child in Wittgenstein’s classroom is
inert and passive just because he assigns the children in his class the very specific
role of language recipients. For, the method Wittgenstein devises to get his children
to master the meaning and spelling of the words in his dictionary consists in
instructing them to correct each other’s spelling errors. In this respect, his peda-
gogic method does in fact involve his children in playing a sort of language-game—
that of ‘reciprocal correction’, of ‘exchanging errors’, as it were, and learning from
this painful process. During his own schooldays, Wittgenstein was quite isolated
from the other children in his class. There was little in the way of ‘vocabulary
exchanges’ in his privileged classroom. This lack he now determinedly remedies in
his own teaching. That is why I would go so far as to say that ‘corrective gram-
maticality’ is at the core of Wittgenstein’s praxis of education in WB. The
‘Author’s Preface’ to WB also makes this amply clear.
The goal of this dictionary is to fill an urgent need with respect to the present teaching of
orthography. It is a result of the author’s practical experiences…The spelling of words
becomes an interesting and urgent problem for the student mainly when it comes to the
writing and correction of compositions. But the frequent questioning of the teacher, or of
the fellow students, disturbs the other students. [It] also promotes a certain mental
sluggishness…

Wittgenstein’s view here seems to be that the inability to spell gets in the way of
understanding ‘meaning’ and thus children’s abilities at ‘composition’.
Consequently, the student resorts to questioning the teacher at all times which has at
least two deleterious effects: it disturbs the other students and also leads to ‘mental
sluggishness’. Without wishing to overly psychologize Wittgenstein, this anxiety of
his concerning spelling, in particular, has been noted in quite a few historical
accounts of his own schooldays as mentioned above. More broadly, his stutter and
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 235

his aristocratic difference from the other more plebeian boys in his class (Hamann,
Monk) cruelly set him apart from his fellow classmates. Monk, for example, states
flatly in his standard biography of Wittgenstein that he was the butt of jokes among
the other boys in school who mocked him in sing-song: ‘Wittgenstein wandelt
wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts’ (‘Wittgenstein strolls wistfully
Vienna-wards due to adverse winds’).
When Wittgenstein finally left his school in Linz (the one he and Hitler both
attended), his scores across a range of subjects from geometry to German were
decent but not outstanding. His highest score, tellingly, was in religious studies and
his lowest, equally tellingly, in conduct and English, which may quite possibly be a
pointer to his later conflicted moral stances. Be that as it may, what is indelibly on
record is his especial difficulty with spelling and his failure at his written German
examination on this account, which he admits in one of his letters of 1931: ‘My bad
spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the
rest of my character (my weakness in study)’ (quoted in McGuiness 1988). Given
his intense, unwavering honesty and his reference to his own ‘practical experiences’
in his compilation of the WB for the children he taught in the poor semi-urban and
rural regions of Austria, it does not seem unlikely that Wittgenstein was affected in
his prescriptive choice of the teaching method in the WB by his memories of his
own upper class but, by all accounts, far from idyllic schooldays.

Literacy as an Entry Point into High Culture

Wittgenstein’s severity in judging both himself and the children he taught

notwithstanding, I have argued in this essay that it cannot be doubted for a moment
that he was wholly committed to his mission of introducing the lost children he
taught into a world where literacy is not merely a utilitarian tool but one that led to
an enraptured appreciation of the beauties of art, music and complex intellectual
investigation. Robins (2015) tells us that Wittgenstein and his students ‘designed
steam engines and buildings together, and built models of them; dissected animals;
examined things with a microscope Wittgenstein brought from Vienna; read liter-
ature; learned constellations lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vienna,
where they stayed at a school run by his sister Hermine’. Such imaginative and
innovative ‘scientific’ enthusiasm, once again, seems to align Wittgenstein’s per-
spective on education with Tagore’s inclusivism.
The idea of the ‘language-game’ that Wittgenstein developed in Philosophical
Investigations and made jottings about in various other notebooks would also have
appealed strongly to Tagore given his emphasis on the ‘playful’ elements in
learning, although we are in the realm of pure speculation here. As it happens,
Wittgenstein is both specific and blunt about the role of ‘language-games’ in
children’s learning:
236 R.B. Nair

Children learn their native language by means of such games, and here they even have the
entertaining character of games.

He adds that:
The word language-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of
language is part of an activity or a form of life.

Tagore is likely, once again, to have agreed heartily with Wittgenstein on this
ideal of language. Among his list of typical language-games, Wittgenstein includes
a plethora of activities such as giving orders and obeying them, reporting an event,
forming and testing a hypothesis, making up a story and reading it, guessing
riddles, telling jokes, asking, thanking, and praying. He then goes on to comment
that ‘it is interesting to compare the multiplicity of tools in language and of the
ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of words and sentences, with what
logicians have said about the structure of language’. Robins (2015) augments this
same point when he points out that:
LW’s Philosophical Investigations opens with a long discussion of how children learn
language, in order to investigate what the essence of language is. And Wittgenstein is
sometimes explicit about the connection; he once said that in considering the meaning of a
word, it’s helpful to ask, “How would one set about teaching a child to use this word?” If
nothing else, the style of his later work is absolutely teacherly; his post-return writings are
so full of thought experiments phrased in the imperative that they can feel like exercises in a
textbook or transcripts of a class discussion. The style reflects Wittgenstein’s new aim,
which was pedagogical.

It is indeed this ‘new’ pedagogical aim that is also reflected in the austere
structure of Wittgenstein’s WB, which consists of a core vocabulary of 2,500 words
which he believed every German schoolchild should know. But what sort of a
language-game does a dictionary initiate? This critical question is raised for future
reflection but not answered in this essay. However, as a tentative starting point for
discussion, here translated into English for the first time are the first twenty words
as well as the last twenty from the WB.
das Aas, Aase oder Äser—n. carrion, devil, beast or bitch (slang)
ab—adv. off, away, exit pre. from; ab und zu—adv. occasionally, once in a while
die Abbildung—n. mapping, depiction, image
das Abc—n. alphabet
der Abend—n. evening
heute Abend—adv. this evening
abends—adv. evenings/in the evening
das Abendmahl—n. Eucharist, supper
das Abenteuer—n. adventure
aber—conj. but, however, though
der Aberglaube—n. superstition, superstitiousness; abergläubisch—adj.
superstitious
abermals—adv. again, anew, once again
das Abführen—n. Purging
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 237

der Abgeordnete—n. representative, delegate, lawmaker

abgespannt = matt—adj. worn out, exhausted
der Abgrund, Abgründe—n. abyss, chasm, precipice
abhanden kommen—v. get lost
der Abhang, Abhänge—n. slope, precipice
abhärten—v. toughen, harden;
die Abhärtung—n. hardening
And, now, the last twenty words in the ‘Z’ series:
der Zweifel—n. doubt; zweifeln—v. Doubt
der Zwerg—n. dwarf, gnome
die Zwetschke—n. plum, damson
der Zwickel—n. gusset, spandrel
zwicken—v. pinch
der Zwicker—n. pince nez
der Zwieback—n. rusk
die Zwiebel—n. onion; j-n.
zwiebeln—v. give hard time to someone
das Zwielicht—n. twilight
das Zwiesel—n. fork
der Zwilch Zwillich—n. ticking
der Zwilling—n. 1. twin, 2. Gemini
zwingen—v. force, compel; zwang, gezwungen
der Zwinger—n. kennel, compound, cage
zwinkern—v. blink, wink
der Zwirn—n. twine, twist; zwirnen—v. twine, twist
zwischen—prep. between, among
zwitschern—v. twitter, chirp
zwölf—adj. twelve;
It is likely just my overactive imagination, but the first impression that one gets
from this random sample of forty words from the WB is that it is rather a gloomy
text. If we glance, for example, at the seven verbs in this sample, they consist of the
meanings ‘get lost’, ‘toughen or harden’, ‘pinch’, ‘give a hard time to someone’,
‘force or compel’, ‘blink or wink’ and ‘twitter or chirp’. Only the last two verbs in
this list are slightly cheerful, and even then, one is associated with birds rather than
humans. The nouns tell a similar story. Of the twenty-eight nouns in the list, four
have to do with evening and twilight; four concern religion and the supernatural;
four others suggest the mental state of doubt or represent concepts such as danger
and confinement; and much greatest number have to do with work and mechanical
activity such mapping, hardening, fork, pince-nez, twine, cylinder, gusset and
spandrel. I would probably include the ‘alphabet’ and the number ‘twelve’ in this
last category of the ‘lexicon of work’. There are, in addition, about four food terms
and a couple of neutral words such as ‘lawmaker’, but the only unreservedly happy
term which might lighten children’s hearts that I can find in this arbitrary list of
238 R.B. Nair

forty is the word ‘adventure’. If discovering language is an adventure, Wittgenstein

seems to make it a pretty hard one to embark on.
The point is that a modern German dictionary contains millions of words, per-
haps up to nine million, and while it is always a hazardous enterprise to estimate the
number of words in any language, even the Grimm brothers included 330,000
headwords in their classic dictionary which Wittgenstein would surely have known
well. So when Wittgenstein cuts this huge forest of words down to a mere 2,500, he
must have made hard choices, such as choosing to start off his children’s dictionary
with the depressing word/words ‘das Aas, Aase oder Äser’, meaning carrion, devil,
beast or bitch (in slang). Why on earth would he choose this of all words to flag off
his dictionary for children? These mysteries need further exploration, and scholars
such as Yasushi Maruyama and Spencer Robins have already begun on the fasci-
nating task of recovering the figure of the child in Wittgenstein’s writings. For the
time being, however, we could tentatively suggest a different triangulation in
Wittgenstein’s pedagogy of education from the one in the earlier section on Tagore.
Tagore’s nationalist triad, his vision of ‘true identity’ in the sphere of education
as set out in ST involved, we recall, the figure of the child, the mother tongue and
nature as the best of teachers. These three nodes in Tagore’s work are paralleled in
Wittgenstein’s WB by another set of educational vertices. They are as follows:
1. The figure of the ‘real’ post-war Austrian schoolchild (rather than the romantic
‘child of nature’),
2. The written dictionary as a proper tool for education (rather than the spoken
tongue),
3. The strict environment of the classroom (rather than the open school of
experience).
To summarize and repeat, it goes without saying that a. both Tagore and
Wittgenstein were gifted geniuses with an unflagging interest in mother tongue
education and child-centric pedagogy; b. both saw themselves as investigating
language as ‘scientists’ who brought experimental methods into the classroom; c.
both saw ‘language-games’ and interactive play with language as central to learning
‘forms of life’; d. both saw buildings, architecture and the visual arts as revealing
attitudes towards culture and civilization even if they have diametrically opposed
views on the type of architecture that offers the best environment for living—for
Tagore, it is a humble matir ghar (mud house), whereas Wittgenstein is far more
ambitious, saying: ‘I am not interested in erecting a building, but in […] presenting
to myself the foundations of all possible buildings’; and e. both were inspired
doodlers, combining writing with drawing in several of their texts so that the visual
and aural senses, in particular, were cognitively enmeshed and language was
conceived of as interactive multimodal capability that could both enhance and
impede an understanding of the world around.
Were we now to assign slogans and soundbites to Wittgenstein and Tagore on
such a basic reading of their texts, ST and WB, we could speculate that while
Tagore’s slogan might be ‘Free Language, Free Nation!’, Wittgenstein’s would
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 239

probably be ‘Correct Language, Correct Nation!’. As for soundbites, Wittgenstein

might today champion the ‘Dictionary as a Classroom Tool’, while Tagore might
root for ‘Grammar as a Classy Aesthetic’. Both sorts of stances—Tagore’s
emphasis on ‘creativity’ and Wittgenstein’s on ‘corrigibility’—are, in my view,
worth reconsidering in our own troubled times when ‘nationalism’ and educational
pathways have become contentious concepts once again in India. In the next and
final section, I end with a coda that briefly describes an educational project of my
own, conducted in the Indian context, that has, albeit indirectly, been inspired by
their thoughts.

Coda: The Classroom as a Cognitive Space

in the Twenty-First Century

Taking my cue from ST and WB, the following research question is pertinent, I
would maintain, in many Indian classrooms today, namely: How can the twin
principles of creativity and corrigibility be applied to everyday situations of
learning in the often severely deprived Indian classrooms of today?
In India, it appears that the strict ‘corrigibility approach’ to teaching suggested
by Wittgenstein is still, by and large, prevalent. Many Indian classrooms bear an
uncanny resemblance to those savage ones in which Wittgenstein, despite his best
intentions, participated actively. As our news media bring us fresh reports of the
abuse, physical and mental, of children by their teachers from every corner of the
country, our belief that current Indian classrooms display a Wittgensteinian
propensity for violence seems justified by overwhelming evidence. How then can
we hope to introduce ‘creativity’ into such classrooms? Is this not a pipe dream?
It is here that I extend what we learnt from reading Tagore and Wittgenstein to a
large-scale research project we at IITD have recently carried out. This piece of
research derives its immediate impetus from an approach to education not in
principle dissimilar to Tagore and Wittgenstein’s, namely the ‘Capabilities
Approach’ outlined by the Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen and
the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who have both written extensively on Tagore.
These theorists advance a view that is often seen as an alternative to ‘Social Choice
Theory’ in economics which privileges individual freedoms and legal rights.
Capability theorists argue, on the contrary, that the perspective of ‘Social Choice
Theory’ is inadequate in a cultural context where groups of individuals (lower
castes and classes, unborn girl children, the physically disabled or the mentally
challenged) have been historically deprived. According to them, it is meaningless to
talk about conferring ideal ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ when people do not possess the
capacity to enjoy any of those rights in practice. Nussbaum (2013) therefore pro-
poses a partial list of ‘basic capabilities’ as a foundation for conceptualizing a new
‘language of rights’ including the specific ‘Right to Education’ passed as a statutory
240 R.B. Nair

bill by the Indian Parliament in 2009. The most discussed of these capability
attributes have been the following ten:
1. Life
2. Bodily integrity
3. Bodily health
4. Senses, imagination and thought
5. Emotions
6. Practical reason
7. Affiliation
8. Other species
9. Play
10. Control over one’s environment
But how might one measure such a set of abstract ‘capabilities’? This was our
challenge. Supported by a major grant from the Indian Council of Social Science
Research (ICSSR), we set out to operationalize the list of ‘capabilities’ suggested
by Nussbaum and Sen (Sen 1979, 1985, 1999; Nussbaum and Sen 1993). What our
current research has done is to ‘create’ a standardized bilingual (Hindi/English)
picture-based scale, tested on about 6300 Indian children between the ages of 9–13.
This is in fact one of the largest tests of its kind ever carried out, especially in a
non-Western context. Each booklet of the test contains 27 questions answered by
each child, in addition to a voluntary ‘qualitative’ page where children describe
themselves and draw a picture if they care to—and most children did. Administered
in ten northern states of India, which together comprise about 44% of the popu-
lation of the country, this first-ever Children’s Cognitive Capabilities Scale (CCCS)
actually presents a very surprising but robust finding that would have delighted both
Tagore and Wittgenstein. However, we do need at this point to address the ques-
tion: What exactly do we mean by ‘cognition’, in the first place? And how might
this quasi-Tagore−Wittgensteinian scale that we claim to have constructed be
introduced into classrooms in a meaningful way, especially in contexts that are
highly deprived?
Well, very briefly, the word ‘cognition’ comes from the Greek word for ‘sun-
dial’. One way to interpret this root would be to argue that it implies recourse to a
natural system of making inferences—a system that enables all human beings to
derive, construct and measure abstract concepts such as the concept of ‘time’ from
very concrete particulars—such as the movement of the Sun, a pole and the shadow
that it casts on the ground. And it is this capacity that, as both Tagore and
Wittgenstein would have recognized, is at the heart of linguistic logic. It is an exact
metaphor for how children reason holistically. Combining evidence from various
senses—sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste—they put two and two together to
achieve a host of imaginative and intellectual feats that are not based on rote
learning or on punishing examinations. What we have found in our research is that
we can actually ‘measure’ abilities such as ‘imagination’ and ‘thought’ listed by
Sen and Nussbaum to a considerable extent in young children using very simple
15 Language, Nation, Freedom 241

means that are neither labour-intensive nor time-consuming and most of all—that
children enjoy! Of course, few scales are perfect and our scale is only meant to
complement the regular systems of school examinations; However, our scale does
appear to very plausibly demonstrate that all children—whether they belong to high
socioeconomic groups or low—possess advanced capabilities which allow them to
make sensitive and sensible judgments along parameters such as ‘bodily integrity’,
‘memory’, ‘attention’, etc. that go well beyond conventional reading and writing
skills, especially those associated with a ‘superior’ knowledge of English. Keeping
in mind variables such as gender, class, high-end and low-end schools, rural and
urban settings, and tribal and non-tribal communities, Indian children’s perfor-
mance on the reasoning scales that we have created shows that when it comes to
making ‘correct’ inferences, children at the ages of 11–13 do not differ very much.
They get the ‘right’ answer, even on complicated questions, on average about 80%
of the time—and when they get things ‘wrong’, they get them wrong in similar
ways. This is an important as well as heartening finding because it establishes an
alternative framework for studying ‘cognitive equality’. It gives us a very useful
aperture looking through which we should be able to discuss numerous other
inequalities in our educational systems such as the endemic problem of access and
social discrimination faced by so many of our school-going children. Thanks, then,
to Tagore and Wittgenstein’s ur-inspiration, we have found the courage to rethink
some basic educational issues and have managed to take some first steps towards
building a robust bilingual psychological measure or ‘cognitive scale’ for children
that can, in principle, illuminate certain aspects of ‘creativity’ while still being
‘corrigible’. The pair of texts Sabdo Tattwo and the Worterbuch have thus proven
themselves a wonderful challenge to decode and to draw upon to this day. And, just
as Tagore and Wittgenstein predicted, the lessons we have imbibed from the
children in our study have been invaluable.

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