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RIGHT
ANGLE
Restoring
The Balance
It's good
to be generous in Oxford but it pays to remember the past
By
Swapan Dasgupta
 Depending
on which way you approach the subject, the Government has either begun
to think big or has been derailed by misplaced priorities. Last week,
Minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh announced the country's bequest
of £1.8 million (Rs 12.1 crore) to the Oriental Studies Institute
of Oxford University for the establishment of a chair in Indian history
and culture. Speaking to the media in London, Singh said it was an "exciting
moment" and the fulfilment of a "dream". It would, he said,
be the first such chair in Oxford.
Singh is
both wrong and right. This may be the first professorship in Oxford sponsored
directly by the Indian state but it isn't the only chair in the university
devoted to Indian studies. There is the Boden chair in Sanskrit, the Beit
professorship in Commonwealth history, both at Balliol, a readership in
South Asian history at St Antony's and a Beit lecturership at Nuffield
College. Not to mention the fact that eminent Indologists like S. Radhakrishnan
and Bimal Matilal have at various times held the Spalding chair in eastern
religions and ethics at All Souls College. Indeed, in terms of the combined
resources at Oxford, Cambridge and SOAS in London, Indian studies are
thriving in Britain. The bleakness of the 1970s and 1980s has been replaced
by buoyant optimism and swelling student numbers.
Questioning
Singh's need-based argument doesn't, however, detract from the overall
wisdom of the bequest. In the past, particularly under the Nehru-Gandhi
dispensation, India's relations with the West combined shameless beggary
with guilt-tripping. It fuelled an unequal relationship that couldn't
be offset by the sanctimoniousness of our foreign policy pronouncements.
After Pokhran-II and the economic self-confidence acquired with liberalisation,
the A.B. Vajpayee Government has set about restoring the balance. The
self-effacing Third Worldism of the past is being quietly replaced by
a more dignified stress on reciprocity. The Oxford bequest is a clear
sign that India is beginning to play its role as an emerging world power.
It is beginning to engage with the West, not as a supplicant but as an
equal.
Yet, in
establishing India's own chair in Oxford, Singh was guilty of over-magnanimity.
He chose to gloss over a shameful chapter in Oxford's otherwise abiding
link to India. It concerns the first large bequest made to the university
in the 1880s by the Indian princes for the establishment of the Indian
Institute. Built in 1883 on the corner of Holywell and Catte Street and
located in an ornate building of stone with some Hindu motifs, the Indian
Institute aimed at "fostering and facilitating Indian studies in
the University; the work of making Englishmen, and even Indians themselves,
appreciate better than they have done before the languages, literature
and industries of India". Apart from a library and lecture rooms,
the Indian Institute contained a museum of Indian treasures. It was a
symbol of India's commitment to Oxford. It was everything that Singh dreams
of now.
In 1968,
in utter disregard of the bequest, the university commandeered the building,
moved the library to the penthouse of the New Bodleian and relocated the
museum in the Ashmolean. Indian studies was shown its place. Today the
building houses the Modern History faculty and only an evocative plaque
tells the story of a trust betrayed. It's good to cement an old relationship
but making it meaningful also involves the restoration of trust. Gentlemanly
understatement doesn't always pay, not even in Oxford.
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The
Indian industry has increased its decibel level of whining. Instead, it
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