COMMENT AND CRITICISM
Prof. Sarkar on the University Problems of To-day
The last issue of the Modern Review contains an article of Prof. Jadunath Sarkar of Patna worthy of our respectful attention, on account of its personal reminiscences alone if not anything else. Himself one of the alumni of the Calcutta University who won its blue ribbon, the P R Studentship, by a work on Aurungzeb, his advice on the pre-requisites of research or ‘the use of rare manuscripts’ is of exceptional value to the growing band of research students especially at Calcutta. But unfortunately he indulges in remarks which would prove obstructive to the progress of University education in India if they pass unchallanged at the present moment. What is it that makes him take such a poor view of the multiplication of universities here? Now if once the principle of the local jurisdiction is allowed can we not realise the utter inadequacy in number of the universities to minister to the needs of the vast Indian continent? Should we forget that India started only with three when the United Kingdom had already eight or nine Universities sixty years ago. The sheer weight of numbers also tells and it is of the utmost importance that there should be as many centres of higher culture as possible. Viscount Haldane has said truly “that if the universities exist in sufficient number then the nation need not despair.”
Strangely enough the Professor who has made his mark by original research comes in with a brief for the deferring of the research till our country is richer or better educated. It is like Principal James speaking in the strain ‘that the encouragement of research has in India a somewhat hazy meaning and its attainment is remote.’ Till our country is richer and better educated, forsooth! We might wait till doomsday then and the prospects will be none the nearer. Have we not waited enough for the last sixty years, and come out of the sleepy hollow to find Darwinism take its rise and lose itself in the folds of Mendel, electricity cought hold of in master-minds and eventually applied to every nook of this earth and last but not least mechanical and technological appliances stamping out the last sparks of our economic life while we were cramming away ever so fast at the text books. But we can take comfort in the fact that we have not belied the wisdom of the framers of the Educational despatch of 1854 who were so much solicitous for our welfare and could see the success of higher education in this country writ large in that “some of the ex-students of the College of Dacca had completely succeeded in the arduous office of a darogha”!
More daroghas and more Colleges and less of new fongled toys of ‘research students to play with’ and the problems of higher education in India stand solved to a nicety to Principal James and Prof. Sarkar. The Universities are too large a order. For ought not the true ones as was pointed out by Lord Curzon ‘to provide the best teaching over the entire field of knowledge, to offer this teaching to the widest range of students and to extend by original enquiry the frontiers of learning?’ Far easier it is ‘to lie in the old straw of our habits’ and to thatch the roofs of the good old Colleges we thrived so well under. Professor Sarkar thinks that the improvement in teaching is to be effected through the colleges alone which should be given the lead. Had Professor Sarkar enquired of the state of affairs at Oxford and Cambridge he could have realised in a trice the utter unwisdom of making much of Colleges apart from the University. The University Commissioners at Oxford could end a miserable state of affairs and make Oxford worth its name only by pruning the authority of the Colleges and making them contribute to the building up of centralised University research. The affairs of Cambridge were none the better and with an experience of these two Sir Napier Shaw in his Presidential address to the Education Section of British Association 1919, pointed out the evils of the Collegiate system thus —“It is this which prevents even the great Universities of Great Britain from taking the leading part they might take in exemplifying the ideals of a Co-ordinated national system and makes the success or failure of those great Institutions something of the nature of a lottery. They may offer ten thousand different avenues from Matriculation to a degree and yet the student may find himself imperfectly educated in the end.”
So if the mantle of higher education and research is to fall on anybody it is to fall on the Universities alone. But Prof Sarkar thinks of allotting to each some few definite subjects for research and restricting the activities of the Indian Universities to them alone. Admitting that India should “be taken as a whole” and ‘all Universities are to pool their resources’ can we
