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The case of a £2 million history chair at Oxford

Hasan Suroor

A project that should have been in full steam by now is, seven years after its inauguration, back on the drawing board under new management.

SEVEN YEARS ago, in an intriguingly grand gesture — the sort that would make you want to look the gift horse in the mouth — the Bharatiya Janata Party Government donated £1.8 million to Oxford University for establishing a Chair in Indian History and Culture at the Institute of Oriental Studies.

Jaswant Singh, External Affairs Minister at the time, described it as a "new chapter" in the historical "linkages" between India and the U.K. Personally for him, it was a fulfilment of an old "dream," he said inaugurating the Chair at India House on November 13, 2000, his voice quivering with emotion.

Seven years on, that dream is still struggling to take shape and a project that should have been in full steam by now is back on the drawing board under new management. Polly O'Hanlon, a leading scholar of early modern Indian history poached from Cambridge, is trying bravely to kickstart the programme, stalled since Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the first Chair, left in 2004 after being in the job for barely two years.

Since Professor Subrahmanyam's departure, the programme was effectively in deep freeze though university officials play down the scale of disruption claiming that he continued to be notionally involved until 2005.

The bare facts are:

November 2000: Mr. Singh announces endowment; says the first Professor of Indian history would be appointed in October 2001.

October 2001: Selection process still in progress.

July 2002: Professor Subrahmanyam takes over.

2004: Professor Subrahmanyam leaves.

2004-2006: Faculty remains without a head.

January 2007: Professor O'Hanlon takes over as new Chair.

Not a pretty picture

It is not a very pretty picture, and if Mr. Singh were still in charge I am sure he would have been tempted to have a word with his friends at Oxford. So what went wrong? Was it simply down to a clutch of unforeseen developments and bureaucratic delays?

Or, as the conspiracy theorists suggest, were there political factors at play as well, such as the fall of the BJP Government about the same time as Professor Subrahmanyam left? Post-BJP, were there reservations in New Delhi about an allegedly ideologically inspired history project?

I remember having a rather strange conversation with a senior Indian High Commission official who, I was told, was "dealing" with the subject. This was more than two years after Professor Subrahmanyam had left and there was much speculation about the future of the programme.

So, I asked her if she could "update" me. Sorry, she said, I must "understand" that it was a "sensitive issue" and she could not discuss it.

A "sensitive" subject? "Sensitive" to whom? And why? Was there something we were not being told? When I persisted she suggested that I put in a written request and she would get back. Which I promptly did. This was almost a year ago, and I am still waiting.

Oxford University denies that the crisis had anything to do with the changed political situation in India or that there was any attempt to change the "direction" of research after the BJP lost power.

Which makes Indian officialdom's hush-hush approach even more intriguing.

In fact, given the BJP's contentious interpretation of Indian history, the Manmohan Singh Government was entitled to ask a few hard questions to make sure that taxpayers' money was not spent on promoting a selective vision of India's past.

In an intellectually more open climate, it would have been a subject of legitimate public debate. But India is India.

Unsolved puzzle

Meanwhile, the puzzle remains: what really inspired the Vajpayee Government's "munificent benefaction," to give that grand gesture the name by which it is known in Oxford. Two million pounds is a lot of money for a government struggling to fund its own cash-strapped universities back home.

So why Oxford? Was it just about promoting world-class research on Indian history and culture or was there a larger political agenda? Like promoting the Hindu nationalist interpretation of Indian history?

Sources at Oxford admit that they were "stunned" by New Delhi's offer. "There was stunned silence when we were told that India was going to give £2 million," says a senior academic. Most of Oxford's foreign funding comes from private sources and the university could name only two other countries — South Korea and Greece — who fund country-specific projects.

Officially, of course, there were no conditions attached to the Indian offer and officials claim the university would not have accepted the money if it came with strings.

They insist the Indian Government has no say in the appointment of the Chair; nor does it give any "intellectual brief." Whatever might have been the BJP's intentions, the faculty has remained independent of any political agenda, they argue.

"The only agenda we have here is a scholarly agenda which is to create in Oxford a centre of international research excellence in the history, languages and culture of South Asia," says Professor O'Hanlon, keen to get the Chair back on the rails.

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