and sham research work, both in India and outside.
The totally unnecessary Post-Graduate Councils in Arts and in Science should be abolished altogether. The most important advantage from their abolition will be the removal of an unnecessary cog in the machinery. The members of the teaching staff who are now represented in their entirety on it, will have a certain amount of representation in the committee of their own section and will be represented in the executive committee by one of their members. It is not necessary for them to be present once more in a council to revise the comments of, or the action taken on, the measures initiated by them in the Boards of Higher Studies, in the shape of a Post-Graduate Council. The removal of this autocracy of the teaching staff of the Post-Graduate sections is a crying necessity. The present system was evolved by the late Sir Ashutosh Mookerjee to ensure the permanancy of the measures initiated by any board of higher studies. If a particular proposal is accepted by the Board of Higher Studies in History and is opposed by the executive committee in the Arts Department then the opposition is reconsidered by all members of the body from which it originated plus the entire teaching staff of the Arts Department. Thus the accused in a particular case form a part of the first court of appeal. It is true that the final court of appeal is the Senate, but while the number of teachers in a subject forming the Board of Higher Studies in that subject possess the advantage of being the initiators of a proposal and seconding it again in the Post-Graduate Council, the condemners can speak only once and the double proposal and advocacy with the single condemnation goes before the final court of appeal, which, as a rule, is impressed by the support given by the Post-Graduate Council in Arts to a proposal initiated by the Board of Higher Studies. Besides this, there are many other disadvantages resulting from the existence of this unnecessary body.
The plea has been advanced more than once that it is necessary to have a larger number of lecturers in the Post-Graduate departments than is ordinarily necessary for the purpose of Post-Graduate teaching, in order to allow the members sufficient time to be devoted to research work. The report of the Post-Graduate Reorganisation Committee emphasises this point while speaking about Ancient Indian History and says:
“We might here observe that this department labours under a disadvantage, because generally speaking, Lecturers in the department of General History and in the department of Ancient Indian History and Culture are not mutually interchangeable. The courses of study are also highly specialised and a specialist appointed, say for the teaching of Numismatics, or for the decipherment of Indian inscriptions, cannot possibly be asked to undertake instruction in other subdivisions of subjects included in history. This department offers boundless prospects for advanced studies and research, and the output of original work in this department is considerable.”—p. 51-52.
This statement is singularly untrue regarding its conclusion. With the exception of Prof. D. R. Bhandarkar and former members of the staff like Dr. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar and Surendra Nath Sastri, who have left, none of the remaining members except Dr. Hemchandra Roychaudhury have done any research in the true sense of the term, nothing better than compilation or rechauffe, nothing which will last. I am speaking of the teachers of the section on Ancient Indian History only. In the section of General History Dr. Surendra Nath Sen is the only professor who has attempted to do original work (on Maratha polity), Although this section on Ancient Indian History possesses a very extensive and well-chosen library, very few of its teachers have taken seriously to research work. Their work is entirely confined to the publication of books by the University and stray contributions to the party organ, the Calcutta Review.
A significant illustration is furnished by the contrast between now and a few years ago, when Sir Ashutosh Mookerjee was alive and Prof. D. R. Bhandarkar was the Philological Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the joint-editor of the Indian Antiquary. A large number of papers, trumpeted forth as original, was contributed by the members of the teaching staff of the Post-Graduate Department in Arts of the Calcutta University to the Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, Bengal. The late Sir Asutosh Mookerjee as the defacto chronic President of that ancient institution possessed the advantage of booming the work of the University people in his annual presidential addresses to the disadvantage of other scholars. Professor Bhandarkar, as the joint-editor of the Indian Antiquary, published a number of contributions of the University teachers. As soon as Professor Bhandarkar left the Indian Antiquary, the contributions from the University teachers to that Journal ceased abruptly. Immediately
