MUSINGS
JNU: a memoir
|
The pioneering spirit of competitiveness, originality and learning abilities made it an outstanding institution. . SUSAN VISVANATHAN
|
Photo: Shanker Chakravarty
Long battle: A placard on campus.
I came back to JNU in 1997, after 20 years. I had been an M.A. student in 1977, and had enjoyed the uncluttered ambience of the Aravalli hills for two years. After that, I shifted back to the Delhi University, where I had earlier spent three years as
an undergraduate student of Sociology, in Miranda House. I enjoyed the years as a scholar at the Sociology Department, Delhi School of Economics. As a teacher at the prestigious Hindu College, for more than a decade, there were intense years of training that allowed me to become the lecturer I now am.
But JNU always remained in my mind. I longed to return, and content or discontent variously though I was in the teaching and the research, I yearned for greater fulfilment. So at last JNU became possible, in spite of the bitter struggle to be allowed in, I entered the system vaguely innocent of the battlefields that existed. Basically I was an old student who had come back.
JNU’s Silver Jubilee was being celebrated at that time. We got the promise of many new grants and much attention: promises that were kept by the Government and its Human Resources Agencies. Nothing could dispel the sense of optimism and vitality. Yet, the everydayness of academic life cannot be controlled by either existentialism or power hunger, so there are no winners or losers in the game. Academic freedom is the only gain in this vile dispute and, by blocking off each other’s progress, the winners and losers learnt to co-exist. What some gained in this order of things was the right to make decisions affecting hundreds of others; what others gained was the right to teach and write without fear.
The consequence is that in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems there is a democratic ability to represent all the many ways of thinking, writing or teaching Sociology. Of course, the feminist assumption was that phallic supremacy was not a problem, if you considered it as only a metaphor and not a threat. In real life and politics (how to separate the two?) the University was biased and tended to marginalise the women for no particular reason.
Actual joys of teaching
Leaving aside this murky question of thinking about promotions, for we were protected by the Merit promotion scheme, a direct consequence of Teacher’s Union struggles in the 1980s, the actual joys of teaching in JNU were many. The students came from all parts of the country and proved to be as committed to the discipline as we were! Each year brought us a crop of brilliant young people, and whatever their difficulties, they persevered. Sometimes there were ideological problems of language use, but since the rest of the class would look baffled when some partisan interest was voiced, the adaptation process was easier.
Further, as faculty, we made it clear that we never expected perfect grammar or usage, but that ideas must be clear, innovative and original. Most of our scholars went back to the Universities, from where they had been originally trained, to impart the JNU method as faculty. Sometimes the form of protest from Hindi ideologues was so severe that I was forced to suggest that they learn French and German, then read and translate the classics into Hindi for themselves and proceed accordingly. After a week of lying low on this suggestion, they appeared in class, all ready to learn and score well.
The pioneering spirit of competitiveness, originality and learning abilities made JNU such an outstanding institution. The scholars who came to us from every nook and cranny of India had struggled to be here, and saw great value in the platform provided to them. This dialogicity became the JNU stamp. In other universities, there was either elitism or provincialism. Here, however, young people learnt to talk to one another, and to their teachers, about everything that went into making them part of the Indian dream of modernism, where tradition was a dialectic that would invigorate how the debates came to us from the West.
I came back after 20 years of learning other ways of doing Sociology, and found that the campus had become incredibly beautiful. By artificial dissemination, a young and beautiful natural forest had grown.
We hope the PWD imagination which has suddenly surfaced on campus with ugly green painted fences and cow-barriers will go away, but that is part of the frills of government funding. Also, I suspect it was the SBI’s largesse of Rs.1,00,000 for sponsoring a garden in JNU, which suddenly produced a conventional garden where there were only bare rocks once and humble wild poppies and daisies. This is to make up for the State Bank of India’s relationship to us as academics dependent on them for drawing our salaries. We have stood in long queues for hours trying to get out money that is rightfully ours. They have the grievous contempt that bankers show to the poor, and neither our conferences nor our books, or our loving and respectful students mean anything to the SBI banker. All 10,000 of us who populate this 1,000-acre wood are chattels to the SBI, who treat us as incompetent clients. Worse is the situation of the workers: a generation of whom is still illiterate. The SBI’s attitude to common people is very evident in their advertising rhetoric.
Why do I raise the institution of banking in relation to academic life? Primarily because we are only 400 faculty, who are protected by the State for the work that we do, we receive every comfort, every form of respect and attention. Yet, standing in the queue to draw out our salaries, we are rendered insignificant.
However I must assert the love of the gardeners in JNU for growing hibiscus and lemons and roses. The air and light on this hill are such that things bloom easily in the months after the rain. Ambitious residents try to grow grass but the straggling greenery is embarrassing for all. The hostellers have had the hardest time. In the summer months, writing theses, they have to lug buckets of water, got with difficulty, up three flights of stairs. They survive the heat, writer’s cramps and writer’s block, but after many years they all have spinal defects from lugging water and crouching over computers. Some of these scholars leap off, just before submission, to join the Police, the State Services or the IAS. The unfinished theses remain the Banquo’s ghost in their life. Five per cent of the administrative services is supposed to be successful JNU candidates, and we hope that, over the decades, we shall contribute substantially to India’s betterment.
Embarrassing moment
My most embarrassing moment as a JNU academic came two years ago when Swami Agnivesh informed us that there was bonded labour on our campus. Some of us accompanied him and at the first stop, there was an infant sitting alone near a pile of bricks, while its parents worked nearby. The baby was eating rice and chilli powder for lunch. Agnivesh was accompanied by a camera crew, and they recorded all the labourers who communicated below minimum wages. Swami Agnivesh was doing his job as a human rights activist against modern slavery. The students mobilised support among themselves over the last year. Many apprenticed with Magsaysay Award Winner Aruna Roy and were quite conversant with the success of the workers’ movement in Rajasthan.
The JNU Administration says it is the PWD’s responsibility. But surely it is the responsibility of the administration (and teachers are part of the administration in many capacities) that JNU is not deficit on issues of human rights. The students have risked their lives and studies to communicate the importance of the relationship between teaching and practice.
The 12-day hunger strike finally concluded with the Vice-Chancellor asking for “mutual trust”, and breaking the long fast. PUDR’s question on the long battle is still valid: “Who is the ‘paymaster’ in JNU and how many wage labourers on campus in all categories of work still receive less than minimum wages?”
The writer is a Professor of Sociology, and teaches Classical Sociological Theory.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
