This photo was taken at the house of Professor and Mrs. Seymour, 909 W. Nevada St., Urbana, after a Christmas party on December 25, 1916. This was during Rabindranath’s second visit to Urbana-Champaign. Professor Seymour is in the back row (standing), fourth from the right. Mrs. Seymour is in the front row (sitting), fourth from the left, next to Rabindranath. Two children in front are Lawrence and Lois Seymour.
In April 1983, I was invited for a campus job interview at the University of Illinois. That time I was working in Belgium. My flight was from Brussels to Chicago was already two hours late. When I went to the Ozark Airlines counter, I was told to go straight to the gate and get a seat assignment. I had a definite seat preference: a window seat in non-smoking section. When I asked for that, the lady at the departure gate gave me a sharp look and said, “All seats are window seats and all are non-smoking.”
Growing up in a remote village in India, I marveled at North American technological advancement. Assuming that I already missed my scheduled flight, I asked about the next flight to the Champaign. I was told, my plane had been waiting for me down the stairs for the last couple of hours; all I had to do was knock at the door. That was the tiniest passenger plane I had ever seen. It was a stormy April evening. There were only half a dozen passengers, and we had to shuffle a few times to keep the plane balanced.
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This and the next treasure trove of six pictures were discovered very recently during demolition of an old house in Chicago. These (hundred-year-old brittle) pictures, to the best of our knowledge, have not been published before. In the lower part of the picture, we have the Bengali counterpart of the top. It appears that this is Rathi’s own handwriting. Rathi was also instrumental in establishing the Association of International Clubs, and before he left Urbana-Champaign for India in June 1909, he negotiated with a similar movement in Europe called Corda-Fraters. From the University of Illinois he got a degree in Agricultural Sciences. Now in Santiniketan there is Rathindra Krishi Vijnan Kendra (Rathindra Center for Agricultural Sciences) that provides extension services to farmers and rural youths. |
Anyway, we landed at Willard Airport safe and sound. A future colleague received me and on our way from the airport, he proudly stated that Willard was the University’s own airport and explained the barren fields on the two sides of Neil Street as the most fertile land in the world. He added that my accommodation had been fixed at the tallest building in town, the University Inn on John Street. I was also put at the top floor of the hotel so that I could also get a good view of the town.
After dinner, I went to my hotel room and pulled the curtain to have a view. The narrow John Street was dark and deserted. The only sign of life was a colorful signboard flickering in the dim street light. It read, “Cosmopolitan Club.” Next day I dropped by the club, and met some wonderful students. That was my first introduction to Urbana-Champaign outside the department where I joined in the Fall of 1983. During the 1980s I became more familiar with the Cosmopolitan Club, and over the years my initial impression turned into great admiration for this great institution. Therefore, Cosmopolitan Club has a very special place in my heart.
Let me now get back to the topic and begin at the beginning—100 years ago—Fall semester 1906. A student from India encountered a quad preacher who was popularly known as Billy Sunday. The student was shocked to hear Billy Sunday’s very unkind remarks about other religions. The student did not have enough courage to challenge Billy Sunday on the spot. To fulfill his civic duty, he sent a mild protest letter to the student newspaper, the Daily Illini. It had the effect of throwing a stone at a beehive. The student was assailed from all quarters. Quite frightened, he almost decided to pack up and go back to India. And then there appeared a strong editorial in the Daily Illini, supporting the Indian student’s view and his every right to express it. And that saved the day.
Many of you would know that (assistant) editor of the Daily Illini; he was Carl Van Doren (1885-1950), a senior year student at the University of Illinois. Later, he became one of the most famous literary critics. He was literary editor of the Nation (1919-1922), Century Magazine (1922-1925), The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-1922), The Literary Guild (1926-1934) and Columbia Encyclopedia. And the Indian student was Rathindranath Tagore. I will simply call him, Rathi. He is one of the two Tagores I’ll talk about. The other is Rathi’s famous father, Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate poet, writer, painter, and educational reformer. I will talk much less about the senior Tagore. He is quite well known at least in this town through the annual Tagore Festival.
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| In this photo Rathi is on the far left. Possibly it was taken in front of the Cosmopolitan Club. |
These two students—Carl Van Doren and Rathi Tagore—epitomize what the University of Illinois stands for. Carl Van Doren was born in a small town called Hope, near Danville, just a few miles from here. Rathi Tagore came from Calcutta, the then Capital of India, and the second largest city (after London) under the British Empire, 10,000 miles away.
But why did Rathi come all the way to a then-provincial town for higher studies? During the early part of the last century it was not common for Indian students to come to the United States. They would rather go to England to study law or to sit for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) Examination for a lucrative job under the British Raj.
Chance played a big role in his coming to the University of Illinois. An Indian charitable organization planned to send some students to the United States to study science and industry. Rabindranath Tagore asked his son Rathi and Santosh Majumdar, son of a friend of his, to join the students, and study at an American University which provided training in agriculture. Rabindranath was convinced that to uplift the rural India, adoption of technology, and scientific methods in agriculture were essential. Rathi and Santosh secured a letter of introduction to a professor at Berkeley.
All the students had to come through Japan, where they were screened by American doctors. Thousands of young Asians were queuing up to come to the United States. The health checkup was very quick. Rathi was eliminated on reason of an eye disease. He then went to a Japanese eye specialist and explained his problem. The Japanese doctor laughed and said he would give him a prescription not for his eye because there was nothing wrong, but how to pass the health checkup. He said it was purely a “law of large number.” The American doctor was screening so many people everyday, he would not remember anybody. The eye doctor advised Rathi to stand in the queue again and again. Rathi got approved on the third day.
Rathi and Santosh had third-class tickets in a passenger ship—twenty-eight people herded together in a cabin, lined with five tiers of bunks. The ship arrived in San Francisco in the morning of the fateful day of April 18, 1906—the day the great earthquake and fire devastated the city. From the ship dock they saw the charred remains of a few skyscrapers and the thick black clouds of smoke. That was the first glimpse Rathi and Santosh got of the United States.
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| Santoshchandra Majumdar (1886-1926) studied Agriculture and Animal Husbandry at the University of Illinois. In 1910 he returned to Santiniketan where he taught English literature and science from 1910 to 1922. Later he joined Leonard Elmhirst at Sriniketan Rural Development Center. His untimely death was a great loss. At Santiniketan, the Children Section where he taught is named after him, called Santoshalay (Santosh Hall). |
The solitary letter of introduction for a Berkeley professor was now useless—since that campus was destroyed too. Then somebody told them there was a good agricultural college at the University of Illinois. They knew about the big city Chicago, and thought the University could not be that far from it. Of course, it was not “near” either. They took a train from Chicago to Champaign. Before that, they had a inspired thought: they sent a telegraph to the Secretary of the YMCA, Mr. J.H. Miner, to ask him to receive them at the Champaign station. They congratulated themselves on such an inspiration, but nobody was waiting for them at the station. After a few days Rathi and Santosh met Mr. Miner and discovered that the telegraph had been changed to “Two students from Indiana.” The lady at the Chicago telegraph office made the correction herself, doubting the existence of any place called “India.” Indiana being the neighboring state, Mr. Miner did not bother to receive the two students.
In 1906, there were only a handful of foreign students in the United States, mostly from China, Russia, the Philippines, and Mexico. Many of them did not feel very comfortable—their fellow American students being either too indifferent or too inquisitive. There were less than 100 students from India in the whole of the United States. All the Indian students were called “Hindus,” irrespective of their religion, to differentiate them from Native American Indians.
Let me here mention the role of YMCA. Large numbers of foreign students came from Asia, particularly from China due in no small degree to the missionaries who attended the University of Illinois and belonged to the University YMCA. The very first student from India to the United States, Joguth Chunder Gangooly was sent by the Unitarian Missionary, Reverend Charles Dall from Calcutta. Gangooly arrived Boston on May 24, 1858, almost 150 years back. After a few years of study, Gangooly was ordained as a minister of the New England Unitarian Church.
When Rathi and Santosh arrived in the University of Illinois Campus in April of 1906, there was already another student, possibly the very first student from India to study here. He was Sudhindranath Bose who arrived Urbana-Champaign on May 2, 1904.
Rathi, with the help of Santosh and Sudhin, got a few more foreign students together and started this Cosmopolitan Club. Assistance came from many quarters, especially from Professor Arthur Seymour. He was a professor of Romance Languages and an advisor to foreign students. There was also a lot of help from his wife, Mrs. Mayce Seymour. Sudhindranath Bose was the first Secretary, Rathi Tagore, the President, and Professor Seymour, the Chairman of the Board of Directors.
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| In this photo, Professor Seymour is in the front row, second from the right. Nagendranath Gangooly is in the third row, fourth from the left. |
All the publications I have seen on the Cosmopolitan Club at the University of Illinois mention 1907 as the founding year. Let me humbly say that is not right. I have a precise date: October 28, 1906. That was the day the club was organized. My main reference for this is a 1908 article published in the Bengali magazine Prabasi (meaning foreigner), written by Nagendranath Gangooly, another Indian student who joined the University of Illinois in 1907 and who was also a son-in-law of Rabindranath Tagore. Nagendranath also took an active part in the Club and was elected its Assistant Treasurer in 1908.
The first Cosmopolitan Club on an American University campus was formed in Madison, Wisconsin, March 1903. Then came Cornell in November 1904. The next one was established in Michigan, January 1906. After that came Illinois, October 1906, then Purdue, September 1907, and so on. The year 1907 is often believed to be the originating year because in that year, the Association of the Cosmopolitan Clubs was founded and the Illinois Chapter joined the association. If indeed 1906 is the founding year, that calls for a centennial celebration this year!
One may wonder why Rathi and Santosh undertook the task of establishing the Cosmopolitan Club. There were already quite a few fraternities on campus. A fraternity brings together men with similar ideals, tastes, and social background. The Cosmopolitan Club brings together people of different nationalities, political ideas, and religions. Rathi and Santosh were among the first batch of students from the experimental school that Rabindranath Tagore established in 1901 at Santiniketan, India. Rabindranath gave a different dimension to nationality by arguing for universal humanity. In a poem in Gitanjali, Tagore expresses, in a beautiful way, his generous tribute to the West and the contributions the East can make:
The West has today opened its door
There are treasures for us to take
We will take, and we will also give.
I am sure that, imbued with his father’s ideas of national unity, world embracing universality, and international brotherhood, Rathi set out to organize the Cosmopolitan Club with the help of other foreign students and Professor and Mrs. Seymour. When foreign students come here, they are not here merely to get degrees; they come with different languages, cultures, customs, and views. As Rabindranath Tagore said, they are here to receive and as well as to give. The Cosmopolitan Annual (1909) had an article, “American and the Foreigner”—it ended with: “It is incredible to think that Americans see men with such diversities of life, creed and customs in their midst without taking advantage of the opportunity to learn something about them, to form a firsthand opinion, and to broaden their minds and views.” In fact, the situation changed very rapidly. So many domestic students wanted to join the Cosmopolitan Clubs that at many places their quotas were limited to 20% of total membership.
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A few other important things happened here in 1906. That same year, a small group of University of Illinois faculty members were engaged in organizing the Unitarian Church on campus. Foremost among them were Professor and Mrs. Stephen Forbes. In fact, Mrs. Seymour met Rathi and Santosh at an informal Unitarian reception that Mrs. Forbes organized. In September 1906 the American Unitarian Association sent a young and gifted graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, the Reverend Albert R. Vail, to become the first minister of the newly formed Unitarian Church of Urbana. Reverend Vail personally invited Rathi and Santosh and a few other foreign students to his religious sessions, which included reading from the Koran, the Buddhist Sutras, and Hindu texts. Rathi also acted as a student-pastor at the Unitarian Church.
Through Rathi and Santosh, Revered Vail, Professor and Mrs. Seymour, and some others in Urbana-Champaign came to know about the great literary works of Rabindranath Tagore. A small group of people from the newly established Cosmopolitan Club and Unitarian Church started meeting every week at the home of Mrs. Mary Kelley to discuss religious matters and Rabindranath Tagore’s work. Thus an informal club, called the Tagore Circle was born. This was long before Rabindranath Tagore himself arrived here on November 1, 1912. To introduce the poet, then quite unknown in the United States, Leslie Carrol Barber, a student at the University of Illinois wrote an article, “Rabindra Nath Tagore” in the December 1912 issue of The Cosmopolitan Student, a publication of the Cosmopolitan Club. And Mayce Seymour published a translation of poet’s three poems along with a photo and a short biography of him in the Illinois Magazine (December 1912), then a monthly publication by undergraduates of the University of Illinois. I think, this is the first publication of Tagore’s poems in any western media, and in which our town and the University can justifiably take pride. During his stay in Urbana, Rabindranath gladly read many of his Gitanjali poems at the Tagore Circle meetings. The audience deeply appreciated the beauty of his poetry and nobility of his character.
The very first week Rabindranath was in Urbana in November 1912, Reverend Vail invited him to speak at his church on Upanishads. At first Rabindranath declined the invitation since he came to this quiet town mainly to take rest after hectic days in London. However, when he found out that a student from India who knew very little about Upanishad was ready to volunteer, to fulfill his sacred duty to the ancient sages of India, Rabindranath agreed to give the talk. On Sunday, November 10, he gave his first public address in the United States at the Unitarian Church of Urbana, at the corner of Oregon and Mathews. The talk was very well received, and at public demand he also spoke at the church on November 17 and 24. The church community befriended the poet throughout his stay in the University Community. Today, many of you know this Chapel as the Channing-Murray Foundation where we celebrate the Tagore Festival each October.
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On March 19, 1913, the day before Rabindranath left Urbana, the Cosmopolitan Club organized a farewell party where he read an essay. Reverend Albert Vial missed that and on April 1, 1913 in a letter to the poet he “complained” that “It has been one of my great regrets that no one informed me of your reading at the Cosmopolitan Club just before you left, for I was eagerly hoping I might hear that paper. But they say the meeting was arranged on very short notice.” This says a lot about how much Rabindranath became popular in the Urbana-Champaign community. During his several trips to the United States, the poet traveled widely. But, as Harold Hurwitz (1961) stated, “of all the American cities that Tagore visited during his trips to the United States, in none did he stay longer or make more friends than he did in Urbana, Illinois.”
1906 is indeed a very auspicious year—with the establishment of the Cosmopolitan Club (and, related, the beginning of the Unitarian Church and the formation of the Tagore Circle). These institutions, along with YMCA and YWCA, have welcomed the foreign students at this University, and enriched the culture of Champaign-Urbana.
Few of the Cosmopolitan Clubs survived the 20th century. Other than this one, I know of only two: one at the University of Colorado at Boulder, founded in 1924; and the other at the University of Delaware, started only about 35 years ago. Some have changed names, for example, the Cosmopolitan Club at the Southern Oregon University is now called the International Student Association.
We are so lucky that the Cosmopolitan Club here at the University of Illinois not only survived but also flourished over the century. Over the years the club has made an immense contribution to the spiritual and intellectual culture in Urbana- Champaign, with its already existing superb “agriculture.” Let us all hope, that a hundred years from now, the Club will still be embodying its evergreen motto: “Above all Nations is Humanity.”
References
Cosmopolitan Annual (1909), Published for the Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs by the Wisconsin International Club, Madison.
Rathindranath Tagore (1958), On the Edges of Time, Orient Longmans, Calcutta.
Mayce Seymour (1959), “The Golden Time”, Visva-Bharati Quarterly.
Harold Hurwitz (1961), “Rabindranath Tagore in Urbana”, Indian Literature.
Harold Hannah (1973), One Hundred Years of Action: The University of Illinois YMCA 1873-1973.
Ingrid Kallick (1992), “Tagore and the Urbana Unitarians 1906-1921”, in Rabindranath Tagore for the 21 st Century, Tagore Center, Urbana.
Prasantakumar Pal (1993), Rabijeebani, Volume 6, Ananda Publishers, Calcutta.
Biography
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Anil K. Bera, Professor of Economics and Adjunct Professor of Finance, and Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was born in a remote village Paschimchak, West Bengal, India. He attended his village schools, Narendrapur Ramkrishna Mission College, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta and Delhi. Anil received his Ph.D. in Econometrics from the Australian National University. Before joining the University of Illinois in 1983, he was a CORE Fellow at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
Anil is named to the List of Teachers Rated as Excellent almost every semester he teaches. He received the Economics Graduate Students’ Organization (EGSO) Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching eight times since 1989, the College of Commerce Alumni Association Outstanding Teaching Award for Graduate Teaching in 1991 and Honorable Mention of the Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching in 2005. Even after so many years of living outside, Anil is very nostalgic about his village. He visits there regularly, and is currently engaged in some development projects, such as building a Free Library and a Primary School building.