The Modern Review/Volume 29/Number 2/Prof. Sarkar on the University Problems of To-day (with Reply)
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 think that secrets of the past of ancient India can be wrested by research in Calcutta alone? If the writer had an eye on the days before Aurangzeb he could have easily found out that ancient India has got distinct zones and problems of the Deccan or the Dravidian tracts lie wide apart from those of Bengal and Northern India. So all the Universities of India have got plenty to do in the sphere of Ancient Indian History alone and it is only after some progress has been made on research on independent lines and with different angles of vision that the question would rise of ‘pooling their resources.’ Indeed research cannot be successful at all if parcelled out among a lot of Universities and Colleges as was pointed out by the President of the trustees to the Carnegie Institute. And then to think of the banishment of biology to Lahore, when our country is in urgent need of agricultural improvement. The farmer of India has suffered as much as the small-scale industry-man and if India is once more to take her place among the nations of the world it can ill-afford to ignore what would develop more than half its whole wealth. There is also a higher appeal in Biology to our Caste-ridden country for it is not only extremely useful as a training of our faculty but its truths are no uncertain guides toward higher ideals of human welfare and improvement in social organisation.
However one breathes a sigh of relief when one finds Prof. Sarkar protesting against the old universities of the examining type and welcoming those like Calcutta with its recent assumption of direct post-graduate teaching in many and specialised branches and its organisation of research. Yet without pausing to enquire how this state of affairs could be brought alone he takes a chance cue from Fisher which was meant for the rugged little footnesses of Wales with all the resources of prospering England at her side and tries it at the only research University of India. It is a Vice-Chancellor Micawber always waiting for ‘something to peon up’ thinks he that has brought this about. He is probably right for it is doubtful how little could have been accomplished, say at Calcutta, if in the days of dire distress with relentless persecution of the people in power the sound optimism of Micawber had not deserted him and it needed but a congeniality of environment to make him flower into success. The truth is that in these days of progress, Mr Micawber as a Vice-Chancellor with such a sound optimism and ‘the capacity for forming plans in advance which Haldane points out to be the true essence of greatness’ is a welcome asset to India for the people thinks along with Mrs Micawber that ‘the probability is that this Mr Micawber will be a page of History.”
Reply.
I have tried to make the following point clear in my first article[1] on “University Problems of Today” —
(1) In a province which has one university already, or is connected with a university in a neighbouring province, there is no reason for creating a second (or independent) university which does not undertake teaching work or research, but merely acts as an examining board. It would merely duplicate the administrative machinery and double the “cost of production” of the graduates, their quality remaining the same as before, or (as I fear) growing worse. The only exception to this principle is the case of a province which has an unwieldy overgrown and inefficiently-administered university, or a province joined to a very distant university in another province.
(2) In a centre where the number of men highly educated in English is limited and the annual supply of under-graduates is only a few hundred, it is premature to establish a local university, because the place lacks the raw materials for Honours or research classes and has not enough local talent to work a modern university to a high standard of efficiency.
(3) If the general education imparted by our colleges (and what is of still greater importance, our High Schools) is not considerably improved, the higher teaching and research attempted by our universities will fail to bear fruit, or prove a sham, because the natural basis and indispensable preliminary conditions of such higher teaching and genuine research will be wanting. Our knowledge of English, in particular, is lower than what is required for such work, and in the case of Calcutta it has distinctly deteriorated among our graduates.
(4) In the present state of our national wealth, our lack of universal primary education, and the growing poverty and inefficiency of our secondary schools, no Indian university is justified in opening post-graduate classes (and still less in initiating research) in every possible branch of human knowledge at the expense of the taxpayer. The colleges and high schools, in India today, have a stronger moral claim on the public purse than universities afflicted with megalomania.
If I have followed Mr. Mitra aright—for I have had considerable difficulty in getting at his sense amidst his lofty generalisations, vague rhetoric, and cloud of detached quotations,—he holds (a) that the mere opening of fresh universities in India would create new centres of culture, and would be a desirable end in itself, whether these universities were teaching bodies or only examining boards, (b) that the teaching University of Calcutta [why omit Madras and Allahabad?] should be left free to open post-graduate classes and undertake research in every possible branch of human learning, without waiting for the economic development of our country and the wider extension of English among our people, (c) that both these things should be done out of the public purse, in contemptuous disregard of the state of our national finance, the needs of elementary and secondary education [and I may add, sanitation], and the paucity of the present private donors to our universities; and (d) that our existing high schools and colleges should be denied pecuniary support and left in their present state of inefficiency, till all the demands of the “research” universities are satisfied.
If so, Mr Mitra’s letter only reveals what was probably unknown to your readers before, the existence of a Micawberian school of thought among the temporary servants of the Calcutta University (post-graduate department). We here have an airy comparison of India with England—the immense size and population of our country, the small size of England, the large number of the universities in Great Britain, and the wide range of their activity,—but all this in blissful ignorance of the fact that the average national income in India is only one twenty-second of that in England. According to Mr. Mitra, state expenditure on the universities must depend on the country’s population and not on their wealth, nor on their preparedness to profit by higher and specialised teaching in a foreign tongue. The result of such Micawberian finance would be national bankruptcy and the revolt of the masses against a selfish parasite bhadralog class, monopolising the good things of the State.
Again, Mr. Mitra talks glibly of England, forgetting that the university problem there is different from that of India today, because there (i) the highest classes are taught and examined in their mother-tongue and (ii) the English secondary schools are (in most cases) so efficient and well-endowed that before the war-time rise of prices they hardly needed State aid, while the universities were not so well off. In India, on the other hand, a sound knowledge of a foreign tongue (English) is indispensably necessary to enable our boys to follow college lectures or undertake research (where English books and journals have to be consulted and the result written in English), and our schools are at present deplorably unable to teach English well and to give a thorough general education. Our attempt to imitate the universities of England at present would end in disaster to the true education of our people.
For instance, when an M. A., and P. R. S. (not in Chemistry or Botany or Sanskrit), in a carefully revised and corrected MS contribution sent to the press spells ‘caught’ as cought, ‘new-fangled’ as New-Fongled, makes a mess of the definite article, and writes “It is doubtful how little could have been accomplished, say at Calcutta, if the sound optimism of Micawber had Not deserted him,”— then one is inclined to exclaim in admiration, “Here is Micawberism triumphant in education!” though the impenitent Mr H R James would probably be confirmed by it in his heresy that something other than “research” (of the new Calcutta type) is more urgently required for the improvement of higher education in Bengal.
Mr. Mitra’s plea for chairs of Biology at the Calcutta University is still more delicious and will relieve the Bengal parent of a great anxiety. Notes on Botany dictated by old Mr. Bruhl in the Darbhanga Buildings and marginal analysis on Zoology by young Mr Maulick[2] in Ballyganj will “more than double” the wealth of India and also demolish our caste notions! This robust optimism is possible only in a Micawberian. After sixty years of lectures on the critique of Pure Reason, on Hume and Mill, we still see young Bengali graduates nursing the tiki (Hessian tie on the crown of the head) and Madras graduates painting their foreheads lest an Aingar should be mistaken for an Aiyar. The papers read at the Calcutta Astronomical Society have not affected the sale of the Gupta Press almanac. No, Sir, caste is undermined not by lecture-notes nor by doctoral thesises (even when written by Dr Ramdas Khan of the Calcutta school of research) but by the Great Eastern Hotel and Dias’s Goanese Restaurant (Patna). If the opening of a Biological department at the Calcutta University more than doubles the agricultural produce of the country, the Pusa, Lyallpur, Poona and Sabour agricultural colleges ought to be closed as costly superfluities. Or, stay! let the Calcutta University endow its chairs of Biology by means of a loan raised by hypothecating the increase of Bengal’s agricultural produce due to its researches. But spare us, O spare us, the doubling of examination fees, the compulsory purchase of unnecessary monopoly text-books, and the imposition of Chauth on all Matriculation schools. Here is Mr Micawber’s El Dorado, why, then, tax the parents?
Mr. Mitra imagines that the Rt Hon’ble Mr Fisher’s speech at the Education Section of the British Association “was meant for the rugged little fastnesses of Wales.” He has yet to know that the Association holds its annual meetings in different provincial towns (and even South Africa), but it is an all-England institution and the speeches delivered at its annual meeting are addressed to the whole country and not to the locality of the meeting. Curiously enough, while Mr Mitra would give a purely parochial application to Mr Fisher’s speech at Cardiff in 1920, he has no hesitation in using Sir Napier Shaw’s address to the same section of the same Association a year earlier as meant for all English (and foreign) universities! Is this an illustration of the method of investigating truth adopted by the new Calcutta school of research?
In my first paper I had presumed most diffidently to suggest to those responsible for the present condition of the Calcutta University—and others who might be tempted to imitate its methods,—in the words of the immortal exciseman nurtured beyond the Tweed,
“O wad ye take a thought and mend!”
But I now entirely agree with the implication contained in Mr. Mitra’s concluding assertion, namely, that the moral effect of Mr Micawber’s business methods and principles on the rising generations of Bengal and his real achievement in the field of promoting true knowledge can be appreciated only by Mrs Micawber— and men with a similar psychology.
P. S. I apologise to your readers for referring to a small personal matter, but it is necessary to correct Mr. Mitra, who has made a mistake, no doubt on account of my obscure position. I did not (as he says) win my P. R. Studentship by submitting a thesis on Aurangzib, but by passing a long and competitive examination held by Mr. Percival and another scholar. My book on India of Aurangzib: statistics, topography and roads, was written afterwards to continue the scholarship for five years. Mr. Mitra does me undeserved honour. I am not fit to be ranked with the band of reseaich P. R. S’s and Ph. D’s, of the new Calcutta school. My method of work is also different.