A nation is a people in continuing conversation. I’m sure there are other places in the country where the Indian nation is forged daily. But for me, JNU was the pre-eminent site where this happened.
A microcosm of India
In my early education in Delhi, I encountered students and teachers largely from Punjab and U.P. and occasionally from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra. But in JNU, every living minute of my years as a teacher between 1980 and 2005, I encountered scores of people from every nook and cranny of India. A university, by definition, is an ecumenical, all-inclusive institution but how many universities manage to attain this ideal? JNU was able to do this by being hospitable to women and minorities and because of its sensitive admission policy that inducted candidates from virtually every region of India, aspiring men and women from economically deprived areas, and those historically disadvantaged by their place in the caste hierarchy. JNU was a microcosm of India with all its beauty and warts.
An equally attractive feature of JNU was its democratic culture. Where in India would you find a university in which student union elections were held with only hand painted posters, and no money power? Political talk from one side was countered with more talk from the other. These often turned into verbal duels and intellectual fisticuffs but never physically violent. JNU elections were a lively festival of discussion, argument, polemic and discursive contestation that harvested alert, engaged citizens many of whom found a home in national politics and went on to become public officials committed to the Constitution.
But perhaps the most enticing feature of the university was its academic programme. Teaching was a serious undertaking; no teacher dared miss a class. Classrooms overflowed with students, many of whom came voluntarily from multiple departments, across disciplines. Large M.A. classes could last up to two hours with students concentrating on every word uttered by the teacher. Yet, if a point needed clarification or an argument some elaboration, a raised hand could gently, uninhibitedly interrupt the lecture. Then the class would join in an exciting, unexpected conversation. The art of listening, conversing, discussing and debating would be taken to new heights. In smaller M.Phil classes, neither the teacher nor students would want to leave the classroom until the caretaker arrived to lock up the building. Even as some discussants left for home or the hostel, others would trundle down to a nearby dhaba to try and unravel the mysteries of the social and political universe. I reckon most teachers earned the respect and affection of their students who, without being overawed, looked up to them for intellectual guidance.
Perhaps I am overstating my case and should nuance it. Undeniably, many students in their first semester were intimidated by students from metropolitan cities, fluent in English and with superior academic preparation. How much more anxious and daunted they must be in the presence of highly qualified teachers? This must be particularly true for Dalits and students from ‘backward regions’ who barely spoke English and when they did, spoke with a heavy local tint. These students, struggling to keep their head above water, could manage a grade no higher than B Minus. However, by the end of the second semester they grew in confidence, spoke up in class and improved their grades. Their transformation was exhilarating, a teacher’s triumph no doubt, but also a victory of the culture of the university that encouraged learning from peers.
In the school and college where I studied, the brightest students were seen to produce results without hard work, as if by innate ideas or else by tuning into a satellite of knowledge from which ideas beamed directly to their brain at the speed of light! But in reality, knowledge production and acquisition are qualitatively different. Real ideas grow and are learnt with patience, hard work and commitment. Books and journal articles have to be read over and over again. One has to sweat it out in the library. The engagement with ideas has to move beyond the library and the classroom into small, intensive, friendly groups. Then, a retreat into monkish solitude is needed for transcribing research, and to learn to throw away more words than one eventually keeps. A coherent piece of writing emerges after years of arduous labour. In the best universities of the world, scholars win respect and admiration by this dedicated effort. JNU competed with the best in the world because it taught everyone the value of such intellectual toil.
Original ideas germinate when research and teaching are creatively connected, when teachers test their burgeoning ideas on young productive minds that, untamed by disciplinary protocols, raise adventurous, hitherto unasked questions. For this cutting-edge research, teachers need the freedom to design and restructure their courses every other year. JNU gave us this opportunity. Moreover, impartiality was not conflated with impersonality. Anonymity was set aside and question papers were set and marked by the same teacher who taught the course — a new form taken by the guru-shishya parampara. In JNU, learning occurred in creative in-between spaces where a complex dialectic was at play between formality and informality, equality and legitimate hierarchy, friendship and civility, unilateral instruction and unregulated discussion.
Shortcomings
Of course, JNU had its share of weaknesses too. First, an unwholesome reliance by some on jargon, abstraction, and ideology. Theoretical abstraction counted for more than lived experience; seductive ideologies mattered more than what the eyes could see and the ears could hear. What I say might ring untrue in the face of stories by JNU students on how they learnt the tools to grasp the social, political, economic and historical reality of their country. Yet, a tearing hurry to connect ideas to interests of social groups, as if they are born to serve only one or another class, marred their understanding. Very often this led, on the one hand, to a failure to detect multiple possibilities in ideas and on the other, to a disconnection from the real world.
To be sure, good academic research requires a degree of disconnection from the world — at least in phases. But eventually researchers must find a way to reconnect. This is one of the big mysteries of JNU: how could this happen simultaneously — the connect and disconnect with reality? And while the production of knowledge is accompanied with intellectual waste, to have grounded a painfully self-righteous and incestuous politics on this undigested excess of abstractions was self-indulgent, delusional and exclusionary, unworthy of a great centre of learning.
My second issue is with the mindset behind a glaring omission. It took JNU 40 years to launch a Department of Philosophy, usually the mainstay of universities around the world. I guess this was due to the pervasive social scientism in the 1960s, when JNU was established. Equally disturbing is the absence of a deeper collective study of Indian religions. We may more easily omit the teaching of what is called religion in the West but not what is ‘religion’ in India. For good or for bad, multiple religious cultures partly constitute social reality in India. A refusal to engage with them is to get a partial, distorted picture of Indian reality. This only plays into the hands of those who wilfully manipulate these profoundly plural religious experiences for their own nefarious political benefit.
Rajeev Bharagava is Professor, CSDS
