JNU is all that a top-class university should be

I did my undergraduate education at an elite college of Bombay University. Many of my teachers were intellectual agent provocateurs. My classmates were driven, enthused in this environment. I scored a high first class in college and became a high rank holder in the university exam that year. That year, alongside my undergraduate finals, I had prepared for and wrote the Jawaharlal Nehru University entrance test. I got through one of its sought-after courses, the Master’s in Modern Indian History. Due to my demanding BA degree, I thought I’d be inured to academic rigours. Nothing readied me for what would unfold soon.

Over four terms of MA, my cohort did a minimum of four courses per term, including one core on ancient, medieval, modern Indian and world histories. Each course extracted two 1,800 to 2,000-word essays, followed by a group discussion and individual presentation (a la Oxbridge tutorial system) and an end-term exam. The essays, individual presentation and performance in the group discussion, weighed more than the exam in the overall grade break-up.

Each student worked on submitting an essay (‘tutes’ in JNU argot) almost every week. Each essay was framed in a way that demanded critical engagement with at least 2-3 of the compulsory monographs in the course reading list along with class notes. If a student had to well, they needed to put in a minimum of eight hours of work per day, at least six days of the week, excluding class lecture hours. Attendance was not mandatory. But missing class felt like missing a rock concert. We had faculty that were at the peak of their powers with the subject, and often jousting and differing on historical debates with colleagues within the department. It was an ideas feast.

Not all my classmates were proficient in English. It didn’t matter. The pressures of the system kept those fluent and not so fluent in English on their toes. The onus of doing well was on the students, while all the intellectual and educational aides were afforded to them. The process left its imprint. Regardless of how good or average my peers turned out to be in class, some of them cracked the Civil Services examinations; some made a mark in journalism; at least two who struggled with English went on for doctoral work at British and American universities; some became tenured faculty abroad. Many of my classmates came from families where they became the most educated people. One of them went on a fellowship to Yale, returned to start an NGO with his social activist partner in Vidarbha.

When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Bombay had plurality coursing in its veins in ways Mumbai doesn’t anymore. But the national and international diversity of its population paled in comparison to JNU. I saw and befriended my first friends from almost every state of India’s north-east, Ladakh, Kashmir, and people from many parts, communities, castes and ethnicities of India. It had international exchange students from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and, of course, from the more prosperous parts of the world, like Western Europe and North America. In the mid-2000s, JNU had a student union president, a scholar of the Hindi language, who was American.

In the public imagination, JNU now has the heinous ‘anti-national’ tag stuck to it. But even students who may not have liked their time there will tell you, it was a tent for all comers. Freethinkers, liberals, libertarians, the ‘apolitical’, all shades of feminists, Marxists, Ambedkarites, Hindu, Muslim and Christian conservatives, neo-cons, all jostled for graffiti and poster space on its walls and dissented on public fora. Intellectual engagement in JNU spilled out of the classroom onto public spaces like Ganga Dhaba.

Filmmakers, economists, social scientists, journalists, editors, poets, writers, politicians, activists, ideologues, addressed gatherings at hostel messes where half an hour earlier around a hundred students had had their dinners. Post-dinner events ranged from student reading groups on critical theory, swerving from post-modern literature and historical methods to the latest anthropological quandaries or philosophical quagmires. In between assignment deadlines, JNU students quizzed in the hostel messes, which hosted some of Delhi’s best contests, with students from many colleges and universities in Delhi. There were clubs on mountaineering, sports, food. International film and food festivals came as a two-in-one package on campus.

As in the most genuine educational institutions, the teacher-student equation was one that changed into the teacher-student or teacher-cohort bond. It’s unsurprising that former and current JNU faculty have been vocal in defending what it stands for in the face of a prolonged onslaught, slander and populist media labelling. Like many of my classmates, I have kept in touch with many former teachers, who are now retired. They have told me they run into former students when they are invited to deliver a lecture or talk at a school, college, university or research centre in India or abroad. Many open their homes to them. The contemporary media framing of JNU is a far cry from what I know it to be.

Despite reports to the contrary, JNU still remains one of the safest public spaces for women in Delhi: That tells you a lot about both JNU and Delhi. One of the redeeming features about Delhi is that it houses many creditable government-run educational and research institutions, JNU being one of its best.

Among the many things India stands to lose by toying with JNU and its fee structure are the many rich intangibles, the unquantifiable elements that make for an enriching and empowering education. It isn’t just about acquiring a degree but gaining a whole life experience that prepares one to have the temperament to face the vagaries of the world. For the future,wone hopes India creates many more JNUs. But the way the government is handling the one that India has now sounds the death knell to one idea of India.

(The writer is an Associate Professor at Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, OP Jindal Global University, Sonepat)