I was writing on the blackboard in Room 27,
Hindu College, Delhi University, when there was a knock on the door. It was a
man called Rajiv Lochan, not the artist, not the historian, but a Sociology
student from JNU, who wanted five minutes of my time. He quickly told me, in
the corridor, in a few sentences, that he wanted to compile a book of memories
about JNU, and would I write for him? He seemed very young, for such a
difficult task, but that’s the amazing thing about JNU, it produces mavericks
and gives them confidence beyond the common imagination. I called my essay “The
Years” but then Rajiv requested that I change the title to “The Days”, while he
appropriated The Years as the name of
the book of essays on JNU. Virginia Woolf would have been pleased.
Not long after, I went for an interview for
a job to JNU, and was delighted when I got it, a Readership at Centre for the
Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences. Dipankar Gupta and T.K.
Oommen, who usually never agreed on many issues, had agreed to take me on as a
faculty member. The confirmation of my appointment was held in Chandigarh,
according to Prof Mrinal Miri, (who was publisher of a book I had written for
IIAS Shimla,) so that any disputes regarding my appointment could be held at
bay. I just shrugged, since for me, being back at JNU as faculty had been a dream for twenty years.
While I had friends in Hindu College, every alumnus dreams of returning to JNU as if it were not a mother,
but a lover. The iconic sage,Agasthya ,too,
according to legend, was happy in these
low range Arravali hills before leaving for South India. Being married to the job was a
given. My husband was not happy at all when he heard I had applied to JNU. He
knew that as long as I was in Hindu College, I would write, teach, run home in
time for the children’s school bus. Our life together would be unhampered. Now,
a parallel existence would be our fate. I didn’t think about it, I just
presumed we would all manage, and live happily ever after.
My teachers were happy to see me back. Prof
K.L Sharma said, “ Ah yes, the girl who could take down every word in class and
reproduce them in the final exam.” I blanched. What a horrible reputation, but
yes, it was true. Eye, mind , hand and pen co-ordination were unusually good,
and most likely the teachers’ words were returned to them in pristine fashion,
but who would admit to it? The things we do as students, our teachers always
remember. My first experience was to be shown to my office, room 22, which had
so many cobwebs and was so disgusting, that I took a step back and thought,
“Mrs Havisham!” but then it was cleaned up, Dipankar got me a disused table
which was lying in the sun and rain, but
yet undamaged, outside in the open yard in front of my room. I put up, in usual housewifely fashion,
books, pictures, dust collectors, and soon, the room was truly livable in, and
I proceeded to write many books on the once discarded table. One of the first
books that came out from Room 22 was Structure
and Transformation, an edited
work, where I got all the people who had taught me interesting things, to write
for me. They were from four different universities, and it took me ages to
collate it, with lots of disjunctions, since putting together such a motley
crew was hard. K.L Sharma handed me three long essays, and said “I don’t have
time to write an essay for you, but if there is anything you like, you are most
welcome.” So I studiously hammered and
collaged and pinned sections together of the three copious works, abstracting
as I went along. It took me ages. Satish Saberwal agreed to write up his
lectures to us in 1978 in the optional
course I took with him and so nine case studies were presented schematically,
which must have taken him the same time and labour but together, Sharma and
Saberwal gave us interesting vignettes of caste and mobility. Shiv and I were
not on talking terms, since I had chosen career over him, so I took an essay I
really liked because he had promised to give it to me before the Long March and
the Long Silence. Unlike the other essays which I standardised for uniformity,
I left that one alone, and it appears in that collection as a stand alone text.
Teaching was strenuous. My teachers thought
me capable, and immediately, on arrival, gave me a compulsory Mphil to teach,
and like a book end in the afternoon, I had to handle the introductory sociology course to Language
students. Personally, I thought the
Elders were totally mad. I was 39 years old, I had three daughters,
who went to school, and the youngest and the middle went to crèche as well.
Their opinion however was that, since I
had taught for thirteen years in Hindu College, and as J.S Gandhi put it, “You
had a great deal of teaching experience.” Dipankar was clear that everyone
should be teaching three courses a year, and went about with a form and a
checklist, to find out who did not. So Methodology of the Social Sciences,
Introductory Sociological Themes or Basic Concepts and Comparitive Theories in
Gender was my lot in the first year of teaching. It was interesting, fun,
meaningful. It was everything I had wanted, but the costs on the family were
huge. My eldest became responsible for collecting the two younger siblings from
different crèches after school. Since
she was only 13 at that time, it was annoying and too much of a responsibility,
heating their food and settling them into their homework. Suman, my maid, not
finding me at home in the afternoons, dropped all the breakables at home and so
dusting became a task which proved to be risk prone for the children. Shiv
returned home earlier than me, from CSDS on the collective bus which came back
to the residential office cooperative, and could be seen at 7.30 pm, looking
irate, holding a weeping child, or catatonically watching tv with them, while
wanting to get back to his writing. It was all quite a mess.
Soon after, the exhaustion levels caught up
with me, and I started to break bones, by falling off flat surfaces and even
ones. My husband began to escape to office, as the tv crews had started looking
out for him, and the invitations to travel abroad were consecutively coming in.
On one occasion, Sucheta Mahajan and I had taken our children to Lodi gardens
together, and since I had just come out of plaster for three broken bones in my
right arm, we were celebrating this, with pastries and an outing. I was so
delighted to be out in the park with the kids, that I came down an incline with
a pastry box in my hand, and fell, breaking six bones, with my hand stuck into
my wrist in the most alarming fashion. We went to the bone setting clinic which
had fixed my other arm just three weeks previously, and the doctor wanted to
admit me with anaesthesia, but I said “No, the kids have school tomorrow, and I
have to go to work.” So he gritted his teeth, and pulled my hand out from its
self enforced groove. I was in plaster again, this time my left arm, but since
it was winter holidays we went to Chennai, and it was not as hard as the
previous accident, since I had previous experience of being single handed and
appropriate clothing and skills.
JNU was always magical for me. To touch its
ground was to be healed, to be happy, and the students were so wonderful, and
still are, that I was dazzled. Shiv had
started travelling non stop, and going to office on week ends as well, and
soon, the invitations to speak were so
plentiful, that he just boarded planes in continuity, with loyal friends and
conference mates in tow. I understood that it was a situation which was fait
accomplice. I would not give up JNU, he would not give up the success, and it’s
symbols which included absorption into corporate academics, though as a young
man in the late seventies,he had been so
much against projects and multinational funding. We were not judgemental of
each other, though both of us felt deeply, that the loss to the family because
of our career choices were tragic in themselves. When I told him that I wanted
to shift out with the girls to become a warden at a hostel in JNU, he looked
aghast, and said “But I wash all your clothes, and I pack the kids’ food, and
drop it at the crèche, what more can I do , and I send the clothes for ironing,
and do the shopping every morning, and see the kids to the bus stop, and I help
them with their homework, and phone every evening to see what they need for
crafts class.” All in one breath, and as a memory list of good husbanding,
perfectly true. But then, after this plaintive plea, he went off to England,
and was not seen or heard from, as was customary among jhola carrying academics
in the corporate funded international rat race. I packed the books which I
needed, the clothes, and the children, called a truck and went off to JNU. When
he came back from his tour, he came to JNU and stared bleakly at me, but we
fell into the whirl of our mutual obsessive workplaces, and didn’t look back.
Becoming warden of Ganga was an amazing
experience. I was in charge of three daughters of my own, and three hundred
daughters of others. Those three hundred who were residents never stopped
ringing my bell at all hours of day and night. It was really perplexing. I
thought, first, they were over-dependent
on us wardens because they didn’t have a life of their own. But it was more than bizarre. One night, a total hulk of a man student, and an equally well built
woman student, both in the Phd programme rang my bell at mid night, saying they
were married, and she was a resident of Ganga, but she often stayed the night
at his hostel, but the men students were troubling them, and could I intervene
at the men’s hostel? Then there was the
case of the young woman who rang the bell at 8 am, on a winter morning,
and when I opened the door, she presented a crisp masala dosa on a plate, with
the cook standing nervously behind her. “So?” I asked in taciturn fashion. “Open
it, Ma’am.” So I flipped the dosa open, and saw a fat green chilly. “So?” The cook explained it was not a chilly, but a
caterpillar that had fallen through the chimney. Another time, a woman rang the
bell irate because they had not got eggs in the morning. I asked the cooks why
not, when I went to do the rounds, and they said laughing, “One day a week
sandwiches are the rule.” What a learning experience. It was endless. They
would ring my bell if they had lost the key to their rooms, they would ring it
if they did not have ten rupees to pay for some fine, they would just want to
see me in the afternoon for no known reason.
My mother came to live with me, but then, the school buses were being targeted by
terrorists, so she was 84 years old and
got quite frightened. The children were in three different schools, as their
father had the grandiose idea that they should not be growing up in each
other’s shadow, so I was attending parent teacher meetings and my appearance as
a single parent was very visible. From being “looked after” as a companionate wife for twenty years, I became responsible for everyone, including a very vulnerable old mother,
who had locked up her Kerala residence and come to be with me and the children. There were 900 students
in the vicinity, (two men’s hostels adjacent to Ganga where we lived) so she
actually enjoyed it, including the eager calls and cries of the men students,
as they waited for the loved ones they courted so assiduously. Some of them
parked their motorcycles downstairs, and the beautiful Rapunzels would comb
their hair on their balconies, and carry
on desultory conversations, above my bed room, at all hours of day and night.
When Jhelum Night happened, or festivals and fairs pertaining to student
elections, Holi or demonstrations, or carnivals of food and rollicking, the
walls of my bedroom would actually shake from the voltage of the megaphones.
When Meera, my eldest had her 10th board exams, we had to ship her to friends’
houses, in Dakshinapuram, since February to April the sociability level of JNU
students is noticeably higher than other times.
Unfortunately, I had a very serious cerebral stroke in October
of 2000 which changed all our lives. I was quite maimed by it, but slowly
recovered with L-dopa and cortesone treatment for ten days at Apollo Hospital, and the attention of excellent physicians,
and in time there was no sign of the stroke, which initially had a scarring facial paralyses to go with
it. The Centre gave me six months as “non-teaching semester” since the clerk at
administration said sabbatical was only for those who had taught seven
years. Dipankar said in a very kind way,
that I.P Desai never left his campus, and the world came to see him, so it
would be the same for me, even if I never travelled. He had tea with me most
mornings till he developed a clot, several years later, in his leg from too much airplane travelling,
and found teaching three courses a year beyond his physical capability, which
is sometimes a function of time and endless committee meetings and selection
board responsibilities of older faculty. Two decades previously, when I was
a research student at Delhi University,
working with Veena Das, Andre Beteille
had said to me sonorously one morning when our paths crossed, “Lecturers
lecture, Readers read, and Professors Profess.” Both he, and T.K, Oommen in JNU
have always maintained that they
prioritised teaching over travelling in their active years in the University.
I continued to teach my three courses a
year, and to write and publish. My healing was not rapid, it was slow and
steady. I continued with my duties as
hostel warden thanks to the really wonderful support staff whom we had. The
Manager of the Ganga hostel was a
retired army havildar with a very neat writing,
who drove in on his scooter from Gurgaon every morning, and who was
paid, in 1999, very low wages a month, for his onerous duties. I was never able to solve some of the
mysteries of of JNU, but they were probably generated by the UGC since when VC
Asis Datta paid the cooks 10,000 rupees
a month as he said they worked very hard, the bureaucratic backlash was huge.
So the student audit for daily wage
workers, on behalf of JNUSU, was a typical revolutionary act for which I was
always grateful.
I
asked Asis Datta for a house on VC quota a year after I had the stroke, because
ABVP students took a procession through my house since I was chief warden and
did not permit out of quota accommodation. ABVP students wanted to be on par with AISA, who had an age old
adda in Ganga. Since rooms were
allocated on the bases of an administration prepared list, (and not on the
whims of political parties,) by refusing to give in to the political cadre, my
action brought daily protests, and I thought I should look out for myself as an academic and the children’s future.
Asis Datta gave me a neat little house
in Poorvanchal, though committee members
said since I had recovered from my stroke, why should I be accommodated out of
turn? I lived there happily for ten years, though unfortunately my mother who
was 86 had to go to an old age home in Kerala, because she could not climb
stairs and the clerks in administration said, “Madam, rules are rules, you have
to live in Poorvanchal for two years atleast.” The children were distraught
when Mum left because she had put me on my feet, after my illness, and every
morning, she was always ready with breakfast, missing notebooks, and the lost
belt or the vanished socks, triumphantly producing them as morning anxiety
built up before the school bus turned up
at 7 am. The parents of children at the bus stop became my support group, and
all of them were eminent scholars and writers, so in a way, the children grew
up in a commune of intellectuals who safeguarded them. I can never forget Avijit
Sen turning up in his red bulb ambassador to pick up Meera from her exam on his
way to the Planning Commission, but I had also turned up in an auto rickshaw,
and he said irritably, because he was probably late on his deputation work “But
Jayati told you I would pick her up.” Neeladri Bhattacharya and Chitra Joshi,
Praveen and Smita, Ashwani Deshpande, Chitra Harshvardhan, the Rathis, so many
who just picked up the younger siblings and took them to sports day and other
functions, while I took class, walked home, refused cakes and celebrations and
fried foods, and read in bed. I owe the
benediction of keeping my job equally to my friends, Ratna and Mani, who
were almost local guardians to me and my children, and my visits to
Ramanasrmam twice a year, and to my homeopath and confidante Mohammad Qasim,
every month, and to my yoga teacher Ajay Shastri, who worked in some underpaid
capacity in the JNU sports stadium, but was friend, philosopher and physician
to so many of us.
My teachers were in the first decade of the
21st century beginning to retire. One by one, with grand farewells
and acknowledgement of 25 to 38 years of service they went on to do other
interesting things, and have alternative careers as catalysts of the state and
the Sociological Association. We had eight departures during the years 1997 to
2011, and were fourteen teachers for many years, so the work load was huge. Each one of us, who
remained and graduated to be Elders ourselvers, were responsible for 12 to 20
Phd students at any given time. After seven years of waiting in the threshold
when T.K Oommen retired in 2004, I got the Classical Thinkers Course to teach,
and it was a great moment, since that was what I liked best as a course. I also
taught Historical Method in Sociology, a paper which our teachers Yogendra
Singh and T.K Oommen had passed as an optional Mphil course, many decades ago
when they founded the department. I
taught Gender Studies, Sociology of Religion and Modes of Cultural Analyses. One year, I taught Economy and Society, since
my former teacher M.N. Panini wanted to
go for a stint abroad, and it was tough, but
by chance I was blessed with a class which had ten students from
Presidency College that year, so everything took a natural Marxist turn towards
understanding the market and consumption.
The students were always scintillating,
respectful and hardworking and continue to be. Even if I had personally missed
the Marxist boat, though my father was a card carrying Marxist in the 1950s,
and now the Ambedkarite one, no one taxed me about it, as writing was a form of
practice for me. I learnt a great deal from the students, both the M. A as well
as the researchers. They came with their hopes and aspirations, some had four
years, others seven in JNU, to fulfil their ambitions. I helped them as best as
I could, since my mentor Leela Dube, who was my colleague at NMML in 1989 to
1993, had instilled in me a certain tenderness toward younger scholars by her
own behaviour to those of us who were perhaps thirty or forty years younger
than her, but were treated as equals. My JNU teachers were also very much
around, and both Y Singh and T.K. Oommen brought to the Centre their grandeur
and their memories. They made the Centre seem like a legacy, and though they
were growing older, they kept up the momentum of conference appearances by
saying something new everytime they were on the platform.
When a phalanx of women first joined in the
90s, beginning with Patricia Uberoi, the old guard were a little hesitant about
our polemical perspectives as feminists. The stance that “gender neutrality was
value neutrality” was slowly whittled away by the presence of so many of us who
were recruited in that decade, who brought the intense strands of anthropology,
feminism and dalit experiences. Our teachers adapted very fast, and distilled
these into their own teaching curricula. Nandu Ram had been a very steadfast
voice since the late 70s of the crucial interventionist method of secular dalit
interpretations. He would begin his first M.A class to newcomers by saying, “Is it possible that humans can be
born from the feet or the mouth?” As Dean of School of Social Sciences in
2011 before he retired, his term
coincided with my chairpersonship of CSSS. He was meticulous with ledgers and
records. The Ambedkar Chair which never found an occupant after his departure
had been vitalised by his experience as an intellectual who knew hundreds of people whom he networked
with and invited to his conferences.
All
our teachers in CSSS gave us the feeling that the inviolability of work was the
only refuge. We really knew nothing about them personally, and Nandu Ram often
complained that the generation, ( which is today the “old generation”) never
bothered to drop by to the Professors rooms
and chat. We just did not have the time and to tell the truth, nor did
they as they were famous intellectuals constantly writing or managing the
Sociological Association. We were busy with duties at home and at work, and had
no social skills. Just getting past the details of the day’s work was
exhausting. Our teachers had wives who ran the house, paid the phone bill, and left them free to read, write and travel.
We were run off our feet with doing both, chores at home and work, whether men
or women. To admit to this, may be politically incorrect, but then, that’s the
Sociological imperative, for Feminists, to speak of the hidden.
When I joined in 1997, the faculty meetings
were like football matches. The men raised their voices, there were
contestational spaces, and if the women intervened they would shout louder to
drown out our voices. It would get quite noisy, and on one occasion when the
different opinions became a site of public display, Nandu Ram almost wept
because of the lack of courtesies. What our teachers managed very well, and
which we are not yet perfect with, was the façade. They had huge differences
among themselves, and they were open about it in faculty meetings. At public
occasions and in the corridors, they would greet each other with politeness and
yes, affection. It’s a tribute to these courtly manners that we, the middle generation, tried to keep up
appearances but the relationships were much more brittle, given the general
climate of distress and psychological turmoil in the city in which we lived in.
However, the students were never pawns in the display of differences, and the
ability to keep the Centre cohesive depended on the sophistication of our
cultural abilities to hide our feelings. Centre for the Study of Social Systems
was always run on the smooth, oiled and natural bureaucratic abilities of our
teachers. The managerial administrative staff was always very supportive and
even if there was the natural turn over of secretaries and Administrative
Officers, the spine remained constant, allowing for both memory and filing
cabinets to be in synchrony.
We can only thank the Fates for their
generosity in keeping the “just balance”, as Simone Weil called it, and when CSSS was ranked as one of the
best Sociology departments in the world, it seemed a chance but opportune
moment to thank our teachers, across the different universities in India and
abroad, all still alive and working,
innovating and thinking, though edging into their seventies and eighties.
Susan Visvanathan
