Shantiniketan

(“abode of peace”) Town in the Birbhum
district of West Bengal, about ninety
miles northeast of Calcutta. It is most
famous for Vishva-Bharati University,
founded in 1921 by the Indian poet and
Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore
(1861–1941). As an educational institution, the university was dedicated to
providing an education that would satisfy
people’s material and spiritual needs
and thus develop an integrated human
being. It did this in part by promoting
the arts and by stressing the interconnection between nature and human
beings, both themes that were close to
Tagore’s heart.