Third, to attract better teachers one needs more flexibility in recruitment policies. Now, most universities allow only full-time faculty, whose jobs are secure until superannuation, in exchange for which they must come to work every day and not take outside employment. However, a university in a city such as Mumbai or Kolkata can and must take advantage of the talent available in the public and corporate sector, in the media, and in voluntary organizations. If a scientist in an industrial laboratory, an editor in a newspaper, a senior lawyer in the high court, were all permitted to come one day a week to teach one course a year to young and keen students, there would, I think, be a profusion of volunteers. (A model here is the Social Communication and Media Department of Sophia College, Mumbai, which has made superb use of the multifarious talents of the working journalists of the city.) Likewise, with the increasing drift of the finest Indian scholars abroad, statutes and prejudices must be amended to allow some professors to teach for one term only, while spending the rest of the year where they like. The encouragement of adjunct and part-time faculty would, I think, greatly enrich the intellectual life of the university—and also help towards balancing its budget.
At the same time, with regard to full-time faculty our universities need to more seriously combat the pressures of parochialism. A policy of not appointing one’s own graduates, at least at the lower levels, would aid a cross-fertilization of intellectual approaches and perspectives. A policy of setting apart a certain percentage of teaching jobs—say 30 per cent—for candidates from other states would make each university less parochial as well as more national.
By making one’s teaching staff less parochial one can fashion a student body that is less parochial as well. One function that the best colleges and departments have historically served—and can be made to serve again—was to attract outstanding students from outside the state or region. In their pomp, the Delhi School of Economics, the Department of History at the JNU, the School of Fine Arts at M.S. University in Baroda, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Puné, all had a catchment area that covered the entire country.
Which brings me, finally, to the question of funding. As of now, almost all universities in India are funded by the state and controlled by the state. In the long term, we need to have many more private universities, which might challenge the public universities to reform and redeem themselves. In the shorter term, colleges and universities in the state sector must more actively woo successful alumni and industrial houses for funds. The money, when and if it comes, can be tied to specific programmes and departments, but its ultimate use must be left to the discretion of the institution.
The ideals that I have outlined here are the product of an experience that is individual but I think not unrepresentative. My mind was quickened and shaped by the University of Delhi, which I was lucky to know and experience towards the end of its glorious period. But what I owe my alma mater is merely what other and greater Indians have owed their own universities. The national movement, and the building of a free and democratic India, were both nurtured and sustained by men and women whose minds were formed by the universities of India.
It is commonly argued that the impressive growth rates of recent years will be stalled by poor infrastructure: erratic power supply, potholed highways, inadequate public transport, and the like. My own view is that India’s economic and social development depend as crucially on a renewal of its higher education system. What we Indians make of ourselves will depend, far more than we presently seem to realize, on what we make of our universities.
Chapter Twelve
In Nehru’s House: A Story of Scholarship and Sycophancy
~
I
In the spring of 2005, I was in New Delhi for a meeting of the Government of India’s advisory board on culture, of which I was then a member. Afterwards, the chair of the board—who was the Union minister of culture, S. Jaipal Reddy—invited me into his office. Mr Reddy had been reading a column I wrote for The Hindu newspaper, and people he knew had praised the books I had published. Would I, he asked, be interested in the directorship of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML)? I answered that while I was flattered by his proposal, some of his colleagues in government may not approve of his choice, since I was a critic of the dynastic politics of the ruling Congress party. In any case, I added, I would not be able to take the job, because I could not leave my wife and children in Bangalore, and because I was a lousy administrator.
A few weeks later I wrote to the minister with a proposal of my own. The NMML had been headless for about a year, its affairs taken care of by a bureaucrat in the culture ministry. It certainly needed a new, full-time director; however, I urged that the search be ‘as transparent and open as possible’. I recommended ‘the following procedure for the selection of the Director of the NMML’:
An Advisory Committee be constituted of eminent Indians of unquestioned ability and integrity. This Committee could consist of Professor André Béteille (representing the world of scholarship), Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi (representing the world of public affairs), and Shri H.Y. Sharada Prasad (representing the world of letters). I doubt that you would find three other individuals so widely admired for their intellect and integrity. I should add that all three have a profound understanding of the principles that Jawaharlal Nehru stood for.
An advertisement calling for applications for the post of Director be placed in leading newspapers and journals. In particular, the advertisement should be inserted in the Economic and Political Weekly, India’s leading journal of public affairs and social science research. Since the post is of the highest distinction, there should be no stipulation of minimum qualification (such as an MA in history); rather, all social scientists of quality, whether historians, political scientists, economists, or anthropologists, should be encouraged to apply.’
‘The procedure I am
recommending,’ I continued, ‘will ensure two things: first, it will allow and encourage qualified Indian scholars of all backgrounds (including those currently based abroad) to apply for this most prestigious post; second, it will lead to the best candidate being chosen, by a committee of the highest competence.’
When, a month later, I met the minister at the next meeting of the advisory board on culture, I asked why he had not replied to my letter. He said he had no answer to give, for (as he put it) ‘sometimes one could not follow the highest academic standards’.
I now asked whether he meant that since the NMML was named after Jawaharlal Nehru, and located in what was once his official home, it was Nehru’s granddaughter-in-law and heir, Sonia Gandhi, who would decide who would be its next director, rather than a committee of scholars chosen by the ministry of culture, which funded the institution. I took Mr Reddy’s silence to mean that my surmise was correct.
Not long after I met Mr Reddy, one of his Cabinet colleagues, K. Natwar Singh, took a senior journalist out to lunch. Mr Singh, then foreign minister, had, apparently, taken it upon himself to recommend a suitable new director for the NMML to Sonia Gandhi. He asked the journalist, whom he presumed to be more in touch with intellectuals than himself, for likely names. The journalist suggested mine. ‘Ramachandra Guha has been critical of Indira Gandhi and the Emergency,’ responded Natwar Singh; ‘we
can’t have him.’ His lunch companion then offered the name of the distinguished Kolkata historian and political theorist, Partha Chatterjee.
‘I don’t know Chatterjee’s views on Indiraji, but he
has been critical of Panditji [Jawaharlal Nehru],’ said Mr Singh; ‘so we can’t have him either.’ *
II
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library is located in the grounds of Teen Murti House which, in colonial times, used to be the home of the commander-in-chief of the British Indian Army. It was the second grandest residence in New Delhi, smaller only than the viceroy’s palace on Raisina Hill. When, in September 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru joined an interim government in the last year
of colonial rule, he was assigned a decent-sized bungalow on York Road. After he became prime minister of India in August 1947, he stayed on in it. It was only in the middle of 1948 that he moved into Teen Murti House.
Cynics said at the time that Nehru had his eyes on the commander-in-chief’s house all along, but so long as Mahatma Gandhi was alive he did not dare live in it. To be fair, Nehru’s own needs were modest (if not quite as modest as the Mahatma’s); he probably felt that his new home was better suited to the parties and official receptions that the prime minister of a large and sovereign nation would have to host. At any rate, when Nehru died, in May 1964, his daughter Indira Gandhi was determined that her father would be the first and last Indian occupant of Teen Murti House. Shortly after the mourning period was over, it was announced that Nehru’s official residence would become a memorial to him.
There was a precedent, of sorts—in the shape of a house half a mile to the east, which had once belonged to the millionaire Ghanshyamdas Birla. After Gandhi had been assassinated there in 1948, it became a museum to the memory of the Mahatma.
Fortunately, the man assigned to give shape to the Nehru memorial was the great Bombay jurist M.C. Chagla, who was then minister of education and culture in the Union Cabinet. Chagla thought that he had to do justice to Nehru the scholar and writer as well as statesman. So, Teen Murti House itself would become a museum; while in the spacious grounds a new archive and library would be established. Chagla and his advisers chose, as the first director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the historian and biographer B.R. Nanda.
Nanda had been a senior official of the Indian Railway Service, who in his spare time had written first-rate biographies of Mahatma Gandhi and of Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru. He knew how to manage men in an office; and he knew the value of primary source material.
On assuming charge, Nanda decided that the new museum and library would focus on the history of the Indian freedom movement. In the grand old home, Nehru’s books and other artefacts would remain as they were, whereas in the rooms once devoted to state banquets a pictorial exhibition depicting the various stages of the independence struggle would be mounted. Meanwhile, a new building tucked away behind the mansion would house books, journals, magazines and private papers. Manuscripts and letters were sourced from families of nationalists all over India. The soldiers of freedom who were still alive—and there were then very many of them—were interviewed at length about their memories. Editors of journals and newspapers were encouraged to have their collections microfilmed; in exchange for their cooperation, they were given free copies of the microfilms for their use. Scholarly Indians with no heirs—or with heirs who disdained books—were asked to donate their collections. (Among the collections so acquired was that belonging to the Gandhi biographer, D.G. Tendulkar.) By the time B.R. Nanda demitted office, in 1980, the library was well established. It was widely used by scholars living in Delhi, from other parts of India, and from across the world. Dozens of doctoral dissertations and books were being written on the basis of its collections. Nanda was succeeded as director by Ravinder Kumar, author of an important history of western India in the nineteenth century, and editor of a pioneering collection of essays on Gandhian protest. Kumar too knew the value of primary sources; moreover, he had interests beyond nationalist history, in such subjects as anthropology, social theory, cinema, art and literature. Nanda was a skilled and productive historian of the Indian freedom struggle; whereas Kumar was a genuine intellectual, whose scholarly concerns were unbounded by discipline or country.
Under Ravinder Kumar’s
direction, the scope of the NMML expanded in two important ways. First, the collections became more diversified—apart from politicians, the private papers of scientists, artists, social workers and performing artists were also acquired. This wider range of interests was also reflected in the journal and book collections. Second, a new Centre for Contemporary Studies was established, which gave three-year or five-year fellowships to historians and social scientists to write books on subjects of their choice. With thirty or so active scholars in residence, the NMML hummed with intellectual activity. A weekly seminar series was inaugurated, where the Fellows of the Centre for Contemporary Studies presented their research. Other speakers included university teachers in Delhi and beyond, and also visitors from abroad. Under the director’s direction, the NMML became quite the liveliest place for scholarly work and debate in all of India.
In two respects, Ravinder Kumar stood out from the other Indian scholars of his generation. First, he was a genuine liberal, who encouraged quality work in all disciplines and from different points of the political spectrum. Second, he had a deep interest in the young. He chose the most promising scholars as his Fellows, and then encouraged them to host conferences on topics of their expertise.
The core strength of the NMML under Ravinder Kumar in the 1980s and 1990s was its intellectual diversity. This diversity was of five kinds: disciplinary, ideological, methodological, geographical and generational. Where B.R. Nanda and his team had focused on political history, now anthropologists, literary scholars and political theorists were as visible as historians, and social, cultural and environmental historians as likely to speak as students of the freedom movement. All varieties of intellectual and political opinion were represented.
Liberals, Marxists, anti-Marxists and conservatives, all spoke. The only criteria were rigour and quality (and, especially, newness and originality of research).
Presentations were based sometimes on archival research; at other times, on fieldwork or survey data. However, papers that were theoretical rather than empirical in nature were also welcome. Very many seminars were given by Indian scholars who came from outside Delhi, from Madras, Kolkata, and smaller towns.
European, American and African scholars visiting India also spoke at the NMML. Those presenting papers ranged from young PhD students to emeritus professors in their seventies.
These multiple diversities were expressed in the regular Tuesday seminars, as well as in the thematic workshops held once every few months. The range of topics discussed was staggeringly wide. Social history, environmental history, labour history, gender studies, the history of art, educational reform, religious politics—on these and other subjects the most active debates in the Indian academy in the 1980s and 1990s were initiated or carried forward by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
These seminars gave rise to papers and books of enduring quality. For instance, Aijaz Ahmad’s widely discussed work on postcolonial literature, In Theory, and Sumit Sarkar’s classic Writing Social History were both based on seminars first given at the NMML (and attended by a hundred or more eager if sometimes critical listeners).
Likewise, many other fine books and papers were produced as a consequence of this regular, diverse and rigorous seminar culture. A by-product under the NMML’s own auspices were the couple of hundred Occasional Papers published by it, many of which later appeared in refereed journals in India and abroad. This production of books and essays was closely connected to the other major activities of the NMML—the augmentation of the manuscript collections, the conduct of new oral histories, the collection of new runs of old newspapers, and the publication of new series of historical documents.
B.R. Nanda and Ravinder Kumar came to the NMML in the right order. Nanda was a man of administrative detail who, with his civil service background, laid the systems in place. Kumar was a polymath and visionary, who through his range of interests and his own attractive personality took the work of the NMML beyond mere empirical accumulation into cutting-edge areas of scholarly research and argument. Both were helped by their staff, by the librarians, archivists, oral historians, and even clerks, security personnel and gardeners—all committed to their work and their institution. The NMML was also fortunate in having a series of excellent deputy directors—among them V.C. Joshi, D.N. Panigrahi and Haridev Sharma—who worked closely with the director in augmenting collections a
nd guiding research. Their cumulative impact was colossal—one survey of published books found that as many as eight hundred had been based on the collections of the NMML.
III
I first entered the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in the summer of 1982. I was just beginning research on my doctoral dissertation, which dealt in part with the social history of the princely state of Tehri Garhwal. In the files of the All India States Peoples Conference—one of several hundred separate collections housed at the NMML—I found fascinating material on peasant protests in Tehri Garhwal. In later years, the NMML proved crucial to the books and essays I was to write. My biography of Verrier Elwin drew in part on a collection of Elwin’s papers that were housed at the NMML. My social history of cricket was based very largely on the fabulous newspaper archives maintained at the NMML, which included rare runs of Pakistani papers. My book India after Gandhi drew upon some forty collections of private papers at the NMML, as well as upon its microfilms of newspapers, its books and pamphlets, and its holdings of parliamentary proceedings.
By the time I met and wrote to the minister of culture, I had been working in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library for more than two decades. I had known the place as a young student, as an experienced researcher, and, in between, as an employee. Between 1991 and 1994 I had been a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Contemporary Studies, when I had attended a series of stimulating seminars, argued with and learnt from my colleagues, and dipped into the archives in between. Among the thousands of beneficiaries of the selfless work of B.R. Nanda, Ravinder Kumar and their colleagues, I was but one individual, albeit, in my own eyes, a somewhat special one. In an intellectual and professional sense, no one owed more to the NMML than I. To be sure, there would be very many others who would insist that their debt was as great as mine—as great, perhaps, but certainly not greater.