Visva-Bharati (later University) was inaugurated on December 22, 1921 at a ceremony presided by Dr. Brajendranath Seal, one of India’s foremost philosophers. Rabindranath Tagore donated the land, buildings, library, copyrights of his books and interest from the Nobel Prize money to Visva-Bharati.
The constitution drawn up by Dr. Prasanta Mahalanobis, a pioneer of statistical research in India, designated Visva-Bharati as an Indian, Eastern and global cultural centre whose goals were:
• To study the mind of Man in its realisation of different aspects of truth from diverse points of view.
• To bring into more intimate relation with one another through patient study and research, the different cultures of the East on the basis of their underlying unity.
• To approach the West from the standpoint of such a unity of the life and thought of Asia.
• To seek to realise in a common fellowship of study the meeting of East and West and thus ultimately to strengthen the fundamental conditions of world peace through the free communication of ideas between the two hemispheres.
• And with such ideals in view to provide at Santiniketan a centre of culture where research into the study of the religion, literature, history, science and art of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Islamic, Sikh, Christian and other civilizations may be pursued along with the culture of the West, with that simplicity of externals which is necessary for true spiritual realisation, in amity, good-fellowship and co-operation between the thinkers and scholars of both Eastern and Western countries, free from all antagonisms of race, nationality, creed or caste and in the name of the One Supreme Being who is Shantam, Shivam, Advaitam.