Gandhi came to Santiniketan for the first time on 17 February, 1915, when Rabindranath was away. Gandhi left on 20 February, without meeting the poet, when he received the news of Gokhale’s death. Gandhi came back to Santiniketan on 6 March and stayed till the 11th.
It was during this period that he and Rabindranath not only met for the first time but also had their first interactions. Gandhi recalled this visit thus in his autobiography: “As is my wont, I quickly mixed with the teachers and students and engaged them in a discussion on self-help. I put it to the teachers that if they and the boys dispensed with the services of paid cooks and cooked their food themselves, it would enable the teachers to control the kitchen from the point of view of the boys’ physical and moral health, and it would afford to the students an object-lesson in self-help. One or two of them were inclined to shake their heads. Some of them strongly approved of the proposal. The boys welcomed it, if only because of their instinctive taste for novelty. So we launched the experiment. When I invited the Poet to express his opinion, he said that he did not mind it provided the teachers were favourable. To the boys he said, ‘The experiment contains the key to swaraj.’”