The Difference Between Gleaning and Accreditation

In Rabindrath Tagore’s story, “The Postmaster,” (1891) a young, Bhadralok (middle-class) man from Calcutta is sent to perform his undemanding, low-level civil service job in “a village of no consequence.” Ratan, a “parentless girl from the village” does his housework in exchange for food. But in the evening, the bored postmaster begins to call for the girl, to bring his hookah…and then they begin to talk. He asks her about her mother. “Things that he always remembered but couldn’t speak of in any circumstance to the agents at the plantation were what he would talk about with this illiterate, insignificant girl, without thinking it in any way inappropriate.” 

One day, during the monsoon, as a warm breeze blows, and a fragrance rises from the wet grass and trees, “as if the warm breath of the exhausted earth were falling against one’s skin,” it gradually occurs to the listless postmaster asks what it would be like if there were someone near who  would be his own: “a human figure that was a tender object of love.” The postmaster then calls the village girl, Ratan, and spends the afternoon teaching her to speak the alphabet. In a few days, they have gone past the compound letters.

In Tagore’s story, this idyll is interrupted by the postmaster’s illness. Ratan cares for him like his mother would. But when he rises from his sickbed, he sends a request for a transfer, and soon leaves the village. Ratan is left broken-hearted. She circles the building of the post office, perhaps tending a hope that the postmaster will return. At the story’s end, the narrator asserts that the human heart, delusive, “embraces false hope with both arms and all its might to its breast,” until, its blood drained by loss, “there is a return to one’s right senses, and the mind grows restless again to its next delusion.”

The postmaster, progeny of Bhadralok society, dreams of skyscrapers and significance while in the province. For a moment, his meandering conversations with Ratan, deep into the night, seem cause him to imagine that she might become significant — to him. But to facilitate this unlikely liaison, he must to teach her to read.  

“And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go, pray, to the field, and glean from among the ears of grain after I find favor in his eyes. And she said to her, “Go, my daughter.'” And she went and came and gleaned in the field behind the reapers” (Book of Ruth, Hebrew Bible)

Tagore’s story very precisely captures the logic of many educational projects which aim to spread ‘opportunity,’ by offering tutoring, skills, or even great books courses to ‘underserved populations.’ Like the bhadralok postmaster, the credentialed, degreed instructors volunteer their services in order to lift up the deprived students – in the best case, to their own level of educational or social attainment, or even beyond. But as Tagore’s story shows, the bhadralok teacher is just needful of the “experience data of mankind” – of an education in conviviality –  as his student.

In a world organized from above, the artifact of significance is determined by an artificial lack that must be managed. Loneliness and boredom are the by-products of resource management. It is these by-products that also bring forth a fear of the silence of solitude: “that human situation in which I keep myself company” (Hannah Arendt).

To bring the insignificant to the level of significance is always an act of pity or contempt, denying the commons of conversation that led to our becoming tailless bodies. The conversation becomes a managed resource rather than a source of life. In true conversation: “There is no symposiarch or arbiter; not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy” (Michael Oakeshott)

But ‘delusions’ of the human heart are protests against the suffering of a managed, artificial life. Only a convivial life, one created from below, can be lived.

Jean-François Millet Des glaneuses (1857)

The convivial gleaner salvages the debris that is left on the ground after the official harvest. The resources of the farmland once again revert to the commons. The gleaner picks for life. The combine harvester picks for profit.