Introduction
Welcome!
You're all welcome to my desk. I shall appreciate your enthusiastic and intelligent questions relating to literature.
I'm particularly grateful to Shourabh and Sumon of the old third year for providing me with this opportunity to meet you electronically and universally. It is safe and reasonable to meet thus in times out of joint, when intimacy is misunderstood, misinterpreted and unfairly scandalised. I quote a line from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: 'One must be so careful these days.' Our is a nervous time hag-ridden with paranoia from our hawk-eyed watchful assassins. Our classrooms are mousetraps where every utterance goes on secret record; dockets are collected and dossiers maintained. Days of execution are counted with digital precision. We wait and wait with bated breath for the final hour to strike. Then, we hit the headlines or are consigned to some obscure columns of newspapers, and then mourned in one-minute silence, and by and by forgotten and lost in the mist of time.
An ideal university is, among all other things, is the fountain head of knowledge, not at all of knowledge shored from the frowsty museum or musty annals of history or mouldy pages of dead scholars.But here we create our own version of every piece of knowledge appropriate for ourselves and our time. It is the place where the old knowledge is scrutinized, tested and then retained or rejected with enlightened replacements. We chew the cud like cattle in schools and colleges, because then our brain is watery . Credulity is the sign of idiocy, ignorance and inertia, unforgivable in the adult body. Only those old ideas die that cannot change with changing times. We, too, meet with the same fate intellectually if we get our feet stuck in the quagmire of the past. If we become derivative we get farther and farther away from the original where lies the true force of the creative ferment and thereby become weaker and weaker by the moment; and lacking the vigour and purpose of the original, we collapse in animal rage, slash and tear at each other, thus ending in a spatter and pool of gore. Emerson tells in his celebrated essay Nature: 'Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes.' In principle, university education is expected to save us from degenerating into such thoughtless derivatives, that is, automatons and humanoids.
University is a battle ground of ideas: ideological conflicts are healthy when they do not play into the hands of musclemen, thugs, cut-throats and ruffians. We can only have healthy ideas from healthy debates. There is always a way out if we do not want only to win but are willing also to lose. All universal ideas have been created by consensus; not by dissensus. Before we can make the best pick (the superlative), we had better shop around for check and comparison among a wide variety. Do not buy your pigs in a poke. Open every sack to see its contents lest they should be a bluff. I believe a university academic is a shopkeeper of ideas. It isn't his business to advise his clients but it certainly is his ethical responsibility to tell the whole truth. When he does so honestly, it is the guarantee of his integrity as an academic. Then, no utterance is his faith or belief; it is truly a sin in him to reflect his personal faith, belief or choice, the veritable sin of proselytizing. He ought to be passionate with the spout of his intelligence, far less rather than the surge of his emotion. For a good academic, it's quite possible to be passionate without being emotional or sentimental. He allows classroom colloquy to encourage free speech, courageously faces questions without the mentality of always beating his or her interlocutor and winning points and nurtures no future grudge against their betters. The new knowledge is thus born, and changes the course of human history. Our aim is not personal victory but the good of all. Our personal benefit from there is what we get in the way of wisdom: both tutor and taught learn and develop in the process from their self-knowledge of epistemological dearth. I can think of no other way by which we can know about the dark areas of our mind. I don't think that the purpose of the academic is to read books and translate them for the weak-stomached sickly students pathetically seeking certificates on humanitarian grounds. Nor is it his or her duty to translate difficult texts for God's sake! Surely, this department is neither for him or her nor for those sulking weaklings. God bless them both!!
I might not measure up to all that I have said. But my wistful gaze is upon that distant misty peak.
