‘Event, Metaphor, Memory’ Or A Tale of Two Disciplines
Brinda Bose Event I: At the Social Sciences Building, DU, on an April afternoon Shahid Amin has about a year to go for his retirement from the History department at Delhi University, a base from which he has long been a (hi)story-teller to reckon with. To mark this momentous ‘event’ with a fitting scholarly ‘event’ – ironically putting cart before (retiring) horse, mocking history perhaps – his department colleagues, led by Sunil Kumar, organized a singularly uplifting session on a memorable Wednesday afternoon ‘at home’ – in a packed lecture hall in the Social Sciences building on campus, brimming as much with teachers and scholars and friends and students of history and the university at large as with a precious intellectual sparkle otherwise fast fading at DU in these our dismal times. Partha Chatterjee (Columbia University/CSSS, Kolkata), Neeladri Bhattacharya (JNU) Sunil Kumar (DU) – Amin’s fellow-redoubtable-social-scientists of a particular generation, the likes of which we may not see again soon given the direction which India’s public universities have now been set upon – spoke (seriously and playfully, both) of and to Amin’s oeuvre of work (and play) through his significant intellectual career. The event was chaired by Ravi Kant, social and cultural historian of Sarai-CSDS and ex-student of the department, who was introduced by Sunil Kumar and frequently referred to by Amin with a generosity of spirit that clearly sets the History department apart, still, from the quagmire the rest of DU has willingly sunk into. Indeed, this springfest of nostalgia, laughter, camaraderie and effortless yet cutting-edge scholarship that a quartet of historians displayed on this April afternoon for a scintillating three hours was showcasing the best that DU still – surprisingly enough – has to offer, a space where sharpest scholarship fences with a laconic wit (the latter inspired, as each recalled, by a long history of much partaking together, including post-sundowners, through many a waxing and waning moon). I doubt whether anyone in that overflowing room was left unmoved and uninspired by such a display of a joyous shared-and-interrogated scholarship, if for different reasons. I would think that the increasingly-demoralized host department received a fervent shot in the arm: a reminder that a department that has the gumption to make a point by bringing these incisive fearless historians to gather and speak in an ordinary large room on campus to a gratifyingly-huge university audience, despite the administration’s relentlessly-fascist warfare on intellectual thought, is not moribund yet. (It discarded an option to have these academic ‘stars’ ‘perform’ for Delhi’s gluttonous glutinous culturati at the IIC, one heard). For the shamefully-miniscule number of us who were there from the English department, teachers or students – and I cannot speak for all of the few there either, of course – it was a doleful reminder that there was once a time when we had aspired to be, along with the History department, bravely the ‘last departments standing’ in the very warfare referred to above. But English retreated, while History has – even if momentarily – resurrected itself. Why should we be surprised? In the history of DU, English has been consistently an erudite but tame department, priding itself on goode olde Englishe ‘good form’, that self-righteous ‘stiff upper lip and all that’, as Bertie Wooster might have said, in the face of grievous alarm. And prided itself for being that most apathetic thing, ‘non-political’. (Is literature ‘ethical’ and apolitical? What a laugh. Of course we are going to write ourselves out of any history of reckoning, then.) While History, as history has it, has been fragmented but always fomenting. And such intellectual effervescence as this event is its proof and reward. Event II: De-touring via the Arts Faculty, this ‘cruellest month’ The English department, in contrast, has wilted and withdrawn, folded over into its own sense of ethically-outraged hurt. When one of its most academically-acute faculty members, Rochelle Pinto, in a brave but grim gesture of protest handed in her resignation a few days ago, the department collectively greeted it with what has become its most potently ineffectual message: a shifty silence. A teacher so popular and revered, a colleague so precious and dedicated, has not deserved even a collective formal request from her own departmental fraternity to reconsider her decision. (And consider this, instead, from a few minutes away and the same imaginative training: an English faculty member’s resignation at Hindu College some weeks ago was received with such an outpouring of shock and concern that it resulted in the combined forces of the college’s teaching and non-teaching staff lining up to convince her, Suroopa Mukherjee, to withdraw it. A retired administrative officer of the college came in to campus especially to explain to her what she would lose financially upon resigning, the one argument that he knew best.) But the most respected scholars in our department, so many of whom the world outside Delhi looks up to, appear paralyzed at a moment when leadership is needed most. The non-teaching staff, of course, is possibly merely miffed at having one less teacher to be habitually rude to. We are all coiled in our own cocoons, some agonizing, some uncaring, some deliberately distanced. And those who sit pretty with the administration smile harshly into crevices and corners like April’s sunlight, and have the last crafty laugh. Metaphor I And so life in the English department carries on desultorily: students creep in and out of classes warily; there are hardly decent numbers of listening heads at talks and workshops any more (that once not so very long ago overflowed just as much as the History lecture hall at the Amin event); meetings are hijacked by self-important new recruits who are clearly empowered by the vice-regal lodge to pass judgment on meticulously worked-out departmental activities and procedures (and no doubt, to pass on vital statistics about who resisted what diktat at what moment of which discussion). Classrooms are the only havens to disappear into to forget what we were