Abstract
The author who had known Professor D. K. Barua close to three decades recalls his very engaging discussion on various occasions with him mainly on teaching and research. Some lesser-known details about Professor Barua’s highly refined tastes and his passion for collecting rare texts also figure in this tribute. Interspersed with the author’s memories are his impressions of scholarly camaraderie and collegiality that Barua’s generation of teachers shared with young faculty. There are passing references here to Barua’s research and passionate pedagogical interests besides his investment in the making of anthologies and his unfailing commitment as the editor of a professional journal at Burdwan. The author reflects finally on what it means for the profession of English in India when one of its cherished leaders leaves us.
Keywords: D. K. Barua, English in India, Teaching and Research.
There are many who will miss Professor Dilip Kumar Barua however briefly he touched their lives. I am one of them. My notes in partial recall here are from his visits to Hyderabad where we had first met, and one other brief but memorable happenstance elsewhere. Our genial conversations never seemed to end those days, the late 1980s through early 1990s. The good old ASRC used to be quite hospitable to learners. Unforeseen exchanges and memorable encounters among the library stacks and in the guest house foyer used to be common those days. But someone like Barua’s warm fellowship was destined to last longer for me than the vanishing glory of those years. My conversations with Barua continued through occasional letters we had exchanged. He was sure to write in less than a week from Burdwan where he then taught. Since he never condescended to young teachers like me, and hardly exploited his professional contacts for personal gains, our relationship grew. In the larger world of academic pomposity, of graces and airs, Barua’s strangely sweet smile was enough to cheer me up even on my worst days.
As far as I can recall, it was Professor Radhe Shyam Sharma of Osmania in whose jovial company I first met Barua. (RSS was my bridge of sorts to other shorter and longer cohorts across the country those days.) I recall joining a conversation with them once on a teacher’s need for illuminating rather than obfuscating texts. I can recall nothing more of all that fun except our consensus that as teachers we had better keep our erasers in order, and make ourselves clear first why certain concepts in literary theory are rather difficult to simplify and readily illustrate in classrooms. Students, we agreed, have a way of figuring out what they should essentially take home despite our ‘teaching.’ Deconstruction was still fancy those days. Very few of us frankly felt drawn to Derridean aporias. Barua once remarked that a short course in philosophy (especially in the western philosophy of language) would have made a little difference perhaps to our teaching English critical thought. Mostly through the 1970s and early 80’s, the Enright and Chickera volume still held sway in our Indian schools.
It has sometimes seemed to me a great loss to the humanist archives not to have been able to record our great teachers at work. To project a teacher’s session in a laudatory retrospective is to commit what in criticism they call “the heresy of paraphrase.” For the best teaching I have known (and now recall only partially) of those I personally adore is a performance akin to a great actor’s on stage. And all I seem to hear of my revered teachers is their voices, not quite so much what they said. What e-album or videotape would catch that immense presence in a classroom, an articulate energy gathered on the spot while talking to an avid class, the teaching itself an “act of the mind finding what will suffice” (in the famous phrase of Wallace Stevens)? Certainly, Barua was one who took teaching as seriously and passionately as the research leading to it, some evidence of which I could easily gather during his work at the ASRC as a Scholar in Residence. I once eavesdropped on a young student at the Centre talk to Barua and his prompt answers to all her worries and queries; basically, what to look for and where in the library; Walt Whitman’s attitudes towards the American blacks he knew; good prefatory discussions of slavery; what ‘VF’ meant on a card catalogue (in the library’s code, Vertical Files/ Folders in alphabetical order holding dust-jackets, programme sheets of seminars, miscellaneous papers on texts and writers), etc. Barua’s method, I sensed, was to leave such students with a few suggestions anyone could begin with, a few ideas to think with, and the courage to adopt or drop them as their work progressed. Of course with such god’s plenty at the ASRC, and long before one could click a biblio-tap open and gush, what better help would one hope for than this? Perspectival errors were corrected on the spot, browsing tips given in appropriate asides, and all this punctuated by keen listening to a worried voice and brief assurances by way of response. Quite adorable was Barua’s decorum in academic exchanges, even with stranger-students. He maintained a respectful difference of opinion. If he disagreed with a student, she always knew why. And, most of all, Barua did all this as though it was not the least bit of trouble.
Barua belonged to a distinguished band of English teachers. They strongly believed that their classrooms could be transformed in such a way that their space was to be ideally shared with the students. This was indeed the gist of his short address to a small ASRC Friday meeting in the late 1980s. Education, he remarked, is both public service and political process. Diversity of the English curriculum, the other insistent passion in which Barua stayed invested all his life, would certainly help the middleclass ‘English’/ metropolitan graduates of India who took their privileges for granted. They, he believed, ought to rethink their positions as unmarked, so they will see that the more powerful among them are apt to use a degenerate rhetoric of justice and propriety to exploit the less privileged, even oppress the powerless. Offered variety and diversity, however, at least a few among them will, in time, be seen to respond enthusiastically to new, reformist ideas. New paradigms redeemed from the old, rusty domains of traditional literary history are slow to appeal at first but students, he felt, are basically open to renascent terms and reasonable texts. Always a believer in drawing upon ancillary resources to counter the heavily loaded, imperialistically biased core courses, Barua made it a mission to build a small library of teaching texts for himself. (He wouldn’t prescribe them, he assured me once!) He seemed almost poised to give a new definition of ‘Further Reading’ by assembling excerpts and fragments collected in rare anthologies of discursive prose and socio-historical documents otherwise unavailable to Indian students.
One such collection Barua was determined to take away from Hyderabad was A Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England, 1381‒ 1914 (Penguin, 1984). It took both of us nearly a week to persuade the then library staff (those resentful employees of a degenerate library management in our country) at the CIE & FL to lend me its only copy. I was a teacher there but my privileges did not extend to books on loan from the REFERENCE shelves. Christopher Hampton’s Radical Reader, we were told, was distinctly marked for use “only in the library.” Sensing strong resistance to our repeated appeal for a few hours’ loan for photocopying, Barua was even willing to make do with his copying out in longhand shorter excerpts. His love for the carrel was such that he was never far from it.
That was when I began noticing something quite unusual about Barua’s thinking. His commitment to the revision of the English curriculum where he was teaching was as steady as it was in line with his unabashed interest in the radical politics of working-class lives. Any teacher who is invested in processes (of education, of institutions of literary learning, of the social life of a language, etc.) will be a lot different from one who is merely service-oriented. That is to say, one’s “teaching experience” so called is not merely metered hours and cumulated years, but something numbers will not tell us: sheer evidence of where one lived, and what one lived for, as a teacher. Barua’s insistence on having a copy of A Radical Reader was now very transparent. Hampton’s meaty excerpts in it from many Victorian/ Edwardian sources had appealed to him so deeply during his Sheffield days as a doctoral student working on Edward Carpenter.[1] They must have still seemed irresistible to him as lead-texts for a new course he seemed keen on developing at the time. He and I were anthology buffs. We relished looking through well-thumbed anthologies of critical prose, collating as we called it, like most browsers noticing the ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ (in the Oxford themed-anthologies of those years), or perhaps how uneven the selections (and notes) still are. But are any anthologies even? Barua used to laugh at such quirky remarks and then, seriously, comment that the anthologies we make tell us a great deal about the pedagogical practices that shape our profession. I couldn’t agree more then, but do they, I wonder. Today I would rather add: only those anthologies less beholden to the market pressures of academic publishers. Barua’s thinking about our pedagogical thrust in shaping young minds (now seems to me) resonated with what Stuart Hall once proposed in “Minimal Selves” (1987). “Identity is formed,” as Hall reminds us, “at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture” (115). Barua used to feel that we do very little in our colleges to make affordable collections for our own “minimal selves,” and helpfully deploy suitable materials for the classroom. In such collections we ought to gather provocative and inspiring essays that conduct intelligent minds through the thickets of basic humanist conundrums. Sadly, our routine College English anthologies are largely mercenary and profit-driven.[2] Like cheap gifts exchanged at middle class marriage-parties, poems and stories complete with their editorial apparatus pass from one anthology to another, none of the editors/ publishers having paid the legitimate copyright fee. India may be the only English-teaching country in the world where we have so many plagiarized texts feeding ‘new’ anthologies in wide shameless circulation. If, in an unlikely instance, a good well-edited and copyrighted text does remain in a proposed collection, an insensitive editor or an overzealous board of studies is apt to throw that potentially creative baby with some ideologically unclean bathwater. All good texts hurt, especially those that still stand exacting critical scrutiny. But the politically motivated cry that only some texts hurt more than others, or that they (are likely to) hurt others more than us. All Indian castes and tribes owe their history and legitimacy to certain social mores founded on touching and the touchable. That explains our still touchy issues that leave commonsense untouched in making usable anthologies for our youth. Balancing social consciousness, local/ regional cultural biases, and linguistic competence is a hard task even for the most qualified teachers of English who know their wards.
Barua once asked me whether bad anthologies or the bad English teachers teaching them accounted for the poor standards of college teaching. Both, I told him, despite (or because of) our ELT/ESL institutes and their annual summer schools. And yet, we are not sure while skimming our English milk what constitutes its creamy layer, and what name we give it: language, or literature.
I think it was at Barua’s instance that I looked more carefully at Frank Kermode’s Classic. He told me that Kermode’s definition of the classic is hard to better: a text that never quite exhausts its plurality of meanings, a “requirement and a distinguishing feature of the survivor” that kept it alive (Kermode 111). When he told me this, given my slowness generally in getting to the nuances of another’s point of view, I did not quite see who or what survives the other. The fitness of survival, in both Darwinian senses, applies to a classic. And that probably was what he explained to me following Kermode’s formulation that a classic is patient, even forgiving like a good teacher, patient of interpretation, of other interpretive challenges. Therefore it stands the scrutiny of any age or reason.[3] Another less-known detail about Barua’s wide reading and retention of informational nuggets was evident to me in casual conversations and asides. Speaking to someone who was working on the “drunkard narratives” in American Literature, he called up Franklin Evans, Walt Whitman’s first novel, a best-seller at that time. It dealt with a boy who is ensnared by intemperance. Wasn’t he pushing his interlocutor, I wondered, to take a little more creative risk than she had bargained for?
As co-examiners once for a Ph. D. dissertation, Barua and I wrote reports. I was privileged to look at his report besides one other examiner’s because I was invited to sit on the candidate’s viva voce committee. As dissertations go, the work we had evaluated was not bad. I remember it as a rather bold and smart piece of research but certainly not good enough to wholly applaud the scholar’s effort. While none of us felt the need to use “original,” “intelligent,” “erudite,” “well argued,” “well researched” etc. in our reports, I caught Barua summing up his, using the phrase “good work.” So I read his sentence once again, only to learn that he just wished the work was good, or good enough, if only the candidate had read a few basic studies of the subject and had shown some awareness of this source or that. Nuancing her critical opinion was the problem with the candidate, as it still is with most doctoral students anywhere. Barua’s grasp of the circumtextualities of the topic in question (samples mostly of Victorian critical prose) was so up-to-date that, had this student cared to revise her work, she would certainly have benefited from Barua’s report rather than from ours. He for one knew where lines should be drawn. And of course, how to draw them without fuss.
In 2004, I visited Jadavpur University (JU) as a Visiting Professor on their DSA Programme. A handful of my hosts in English apart, I knew no one else on the campus. Two senior colleagues outside JU whom I was keen to go the proverbial extra mile to look up were Dilip Barua and Arup Rudra. Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri had then promised to arrange my meeting with Barua who was probably domiciled in the city after his retirement. Both of us however regretted that I was not to meet Arup Rudra who passed away a year or so before my visit. There indeed was a connection among the three of us: Barua first mentioned to me Rudra’s monograph on the Modernist Romantics in 1991, work which had probably originated in JU as a doctoral thesis. I agreed to review the monograph for Barua’s University of Burdwan Journal. A well-written and sensitive reading of English Romantic poets and T. S. Eliot, Rudra’s monograph showed a rare brilliance in matching ideas with apt citations, and occasionally inveigling readers into re-reading the poets in question. Rudra later wrote to thank me for my review [4], and (as I recall) since then we had exchanged a couple of letters, one of which wondered whether I would mind examining a doctoral dissertation he was then supervising for Calcutta University, again on T. S. Eliot and his French inheritance. A few years later, I was a little surprised that Rudra and I stopped writing to each other. His silence used to sadden me because he was unusual among the English teachers I knew; his critical thinking was one that rubbed up against my notions of the given and the known. Of course answers to questions we dare not ask reach us rather late.
When Barua and I met on the JU campus finally, we seemed to have stepped into a penumbral zone. We looked around. We first noticed unspoken all the posters and placards that dot the scene. “By hammer and hand all things do stand,” as carpenters say. Barua looked pretty run down. The shopping basket he carried was ripped on the side. Somehow, he was not quite himself. Midsummer weather. A crowded and busy street adjacent to a line of irregular kiosks and the JU post office. We were just a few yards away from one of the JU main gates opening on to an awfully traffic-busy, dusty road. What with all the rattle around, loud protestors and hawkers from near and the far, and frequent disruption of our conversation on a sidewalk, we still kept talking. Both of us were distracted by the thickening and thinning crowds that jostled by, nearly everyone smoking; he more than I observing people who did not know they were being observed, probably looking for a profile he would somehow recognize. I cannot now recall whose hearing was the poorer, but occasionally I recall his yelling to me a word or phrase for clarity or emphasis. Poor quality of vegetables, dearer prices. We exchanged notes on our respective Visiting Professor assignments at JU and elsewhere, common friends he remembered to ask after at Hyderabad, the decline of the ASRC, the poorly-tended stacks and the buildings there, our recent adventures in desultory reading and writing. So much else of our conversation then on is now a blur but Barua was still careful to remind me that good food was practically unavailable around the place. The canteens, he remembered, were under repair. He suggested a few decent joints on the main road, and was keen that we sit down to share a meal some day before my brief visit ended. That, alas, was not to be.
Marilyn Strathern, the author of the acclaimed Relations: An Anthropological Account once remarked that the nicest thing about culture is that everyone has it. She assumed its quintessential difference rather than its sameness in all tribes and communes across the world. I sometimes think we might extend that to talk about our Cultural Studies business in English departments. We all have it, but we mean it differently depending on how our disciplinary training allows us to afford it, and then teach it the way we like. Barua and I occasionally used to talk about the materials teachers use for teaching English: the culture, the language, the literature of a people with whom the Indians continue to have ideologically troubled relationship. (Probably our terms of reference in the 1990’s were not so much the Birmingham School, Stuart Hall and others but their progenitors, Richard Hoggart, Denys Thompson, and Raymond Williams.) I still recall one short conversation we had once had about our “complex fate” as English teachers in India. For all our very strong, unwavering subnational, regional and linguistic commitments as Indians, English is strangely the subject, the discipline, the specialty we call ours, and perhaps tangentially the ‘Department’ to which all of us seem immured for life. The essentially conflicted nature of our profession owes not a little to the subcultures that we engage with in our classrooms. They are fed by numerous linguistic resources and folkloric traditions of India. All this perhaps arose subliminally in us as we both flipped through a volume called Subject to Change edited by Susie Tharu we spotted among the ‘new arrivals’ display at the CIE & FL Library in the 1990s. We did, as I recall, also talk then about a few unfortunate tendencies among teachers who profess English: the unnatural, largely mistaken, notion that language teaching versus literature teaching is still pedagogically tenable; philological scholarship versus aesthetic commitments is still admissible. Barua then mentioned to me some cases where the selection panels for university teachers were split in the middle regarding what to them was more crucial― a candidate’s good scholarly background with proven capacity for publishing research papers, or their absolutely creditable, honest-to-goodness pedagogic skills at once flexible and appropriate for undergraduates and postgraduate classes. As our discussion progressed, we were rather discreet in not inviting others into our discussion because we were then located well within the precincts of CIE & FL (now EFL University) that believes that “need-based courses” can (and will) turn out good teachers.[5]
To any reader who may still be wondering why I miss English teachers of Barua’s stature, let me offer this. I do not want English on our ethnically-diverse and linguistically affluent campuses to be a laughing stock, a subject to be pitied or pilloried. Given its checkered colonial history, English has nothing in fact to prove except that in India its purchase is not/ has never been in doubt. That is a fact despite, perhaps because of, its fulsome lovers among us disguising themselves as nativists. In any case, the dissimulators among us certainly have studied the aerodynamics of kite-flying. The English kite soars highest against a turbulent Indian wind, not without it. And if English now hopes to prove Browning silly by having its heavenward reach exceed its mandated grasp, and if it is trying (in vain) to do what bhasha departments (for long envying us) are, or have been, doing quite well among themselves, we ought to think again about the road mistaken. This is a fact we seem to be missing in our deliberations about the English curriculum, but our detractors, a legion, are laughing with good reason. Perhaps we have been ‘reading’ the wrong things in culture with thicker English lenses for Indian astigmatic eyes. The research we encourage in English evidence our ridiculously scanty knowledge of realities that make Indian cultures vibrant: the forests, hills, lands, and rivers; our indigenous folklore, myths and legends; and the tongues that bespeak tribal tastes and languages that are centuries older than the English we teach. And of course with (perhaps excusable) poorer competence and performance in English across India, we hardly care to ask whose culture we seem to be studying (and why so shabbily) when we seem to be ‘doing’ cultural studies. (The question to pose more urgently here is the pop culture that our youth seem to have acquired thanks to their English. Is that ours or theirs?) For the life of me I cannot imagine why English should recommend a research degree for a candidate’s work on Telugu film music, or on the revolts against the Armed Forces Special Power Act in select regions of our country, unless of course the thesis concerned establishes that English plays, if it indeed does, a significantly clear role in understanding the research problem, and that it would be impossible for any Indian to formulate such a thesis without English. If we cannot establish the inevitability of English in such researches, we shall, in time, reach a point where anything passes. By then, our very few funding agencies will regrettably realize that they have used up obscene amounts of money, and spent them in equally obscene ways, on projects that have absolutely nothing to do with English even by the most powerful remote sensing intellectual equipment. We shall then see no more angels who fear to tread our thinning English floors.[6]
Of course there are limits to English in India to which the Anglo-American academy never tires of directing our attention, but those limits imposed from there need not always be limitations. Sometimes those limits can be our strengths, scarcity engendering creativity in those who strengthen their English in order to seek viable workaround solutions for hard-of-access materials and means. The commonest form of human stupidity, as Nietzsche once remarked, is forgetting what one is trying to do. I sometimes think that we are very close to something like this when we ‘do’ English by other means.
Given such long art and short human life, we need help. Barua offered his, with no strings attached. He has lit a way for us. I am sure he would have agreed that humanist scholarship will certainly pass any peer review tests but cannot be judged solely on the basis of “productivity” and “citations.” He would, like most of us again, have wondered how a teacher’s insights could be told apart from a researcher’s, and how quantifiable they might be. Teachers like him are forever. “Is there any meaning in life,” Leo Tolstoy asks in Confessions, “that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” Teachers of the world hardly need to worry. The students who live after them will find that meaning. As we all would, in Barua’s life.
Notes
[1] Barua feels his way into his topic with such fine discriminating care that his Ph. D. dissertation submitted to the University of Sheffield in 1966 is worth close look by young researchers. His insights continue to feed western scholarship on Edward Carpenter. One recent evidence is Michael Hatt’s “Edward Carpenter and the Domestic Interior” that cites Barua’s work to argue that notwithstanding the Victorian socialist thinker/ writer’s aversion for material indulgence, he was hardly an uncompromising ascetic (Hatt, 410n). Besides such discernment of finer details of Carpenter’s intellectual makeup, Barua’s reading of India by the west unmistakably anticipates the gist of Edward Said’s Orientalism. His notice of the circumambient nuances of Carpenter’s spiritual affinities, Indian Vedantic thought, democratic socialist lore filtered a little through Walt Whitman etc. is richly textured and engagingly detailed. Among such examples, I would particularly recommend Barua’s pages beginning173 of his dissertation. Further, we shall find it fascinating to go over pages beginning189 of his chapter on Carpenter’s India which also includes a fine commentary on Carpenter’s sketch of Indian streets, 203 ff.
[2] I would advisedly make one exception for Statements if only because I taught the prose pieces in this anthology with great relish as a TA at IIT-Bombay in the mid-1970s. Among the unusual excerpts that gave the students and me great opportunities for long and live discussions included F. N Souza’s “Nirvana of a Maggot,” Ashok Mitra’s “The Story of Indra Lohar,” and D. D. Kosambi’s “Science and Freedom.” I have never since seen or read such unusually provocative pieces in any Indian prose anthology.
[3] I am tempted to go off at a tangent here to consider the fortunes of The Waste Land at 100. Ever since its first appearance, Eliot’s poem has been inviting serious and non-serious cavils and critique. Right from the compositional details of its urtext (such as the poet’s convalescence at Lausanne; the number of typewriters and the British bond paper he was believed to use; the postage, persons, publisher contracts …) to the people and places that figured in its making and the first reactions, The Waste Land has intrigued its readers to no end. I have sometimes wondered whether it was only Eliot and Pound who collaborated in making The Waste Land a poem, or it was the steadily growing work of the successive structuralist and poststructuralist academic press that was complicitous in sustaining its curricular appeal through a whole century. Such compulsions are hard to beat. If there was an English classic that never existed but for its monument-mongers, The Waste Land deserves that isolated distinction. Shored against the explicatory and exculpatory ruins of a hundred years, the poem seems to re-echo its own Upanishadic thunder: “DA / Datta: what have we given?” Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, its teachers may ask misquoting Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock” a little, and where, the knowledge we seem to have lost in information?
[4] My review of Arup Rudra’s book Modernism’s Romantic Journey (Calcutta: Sarat Book House, 1991) appeared in the Journal of the Department of English (The U of Burdwan), Volumes VII & VIII (1), 1991-1992, edited by D. K. Barua.
[5] I forget whether Barua or I first sighed in relief that Tharu’s Subject to Change had nothing to do with “teaching aids” that obsessed ELT teachers then. It did indeed focus however on the unaided teachers and their students. It seemed customary to many of us that the “teaching aids” literature overemphasized expensive gadgets and flashy equipment to the near total exclusion of the teacher who must after all assume a pivotal presence in any classroom. If, on a rare occasion, the teacher received a straight look in such studies, it was in his/her ministerial role as an operator of the teaching-aids machinery.
[6] The hypocrisies of English pedagogy in India may require another article. Mostly, we pretend not to see the disparities and discrepancies that plague our systems that mange professional teaching and research. Compulsions, such as the need to retain models and templates, and outmoded pedagogical practices; the urge to publish in areas and topics in which we have practically no stakes or investment as Indian teachers, are among the least discussed issues that create a lot of confusion among our young teachers. The divided commitments to our bhashas and English again need no elaboration. Not being able to tell our profession from the imagined communities of propagandist nativism will only prolong our self-deception. The bhasha writers among our English teachers are a strange breed. I recall an old O. V. Vijayan cartoon in Malayalam where we see Krishna Kanhaiya bowing in supplication before a tall figure strikingly resembling someone like the then-owner /publisher of the Writers Workshop. The toddler lifting up a heavy tome, its jacket-scribbled The Bhagavad-Gita in Devanagari, wonders whether the publisher would show mercy and make him an Indo-Anglian. He avers that he is no mean writer, his book will be liked by many if they read it in English. (This cartoon appeared around the time P. Lal published The Condensed Mahabharata of Vyasa transcreated in English.)
Barua, Dilip Kumar. The Life and Work of Edward Carpenter in the Light of Intellectual, Religious,
Keywords: D. K. Barua, English in India, Teaching and Research.
There are many who will miss Professor Dilip Kumar Barua however briefly he touched their lives. I am one of them. My notes in partial recall here are from his visits to Hyderabad where we had first met, and one other brief but memorable happenstance elsewhere. Our genial conversations never seemed to end those days, the late 1980s through early 1990s. The good old ASRC used to be quite hospitable to learners. Unforeseen exchanges and memorable encounters among the library stacks and in the guest house foyer used to be common those days. But someone like Barua’s warm fellowship was destined to last longer for me than the vanishing glory of those years. My conversations with Barua continued through occasional letters we had exchanged. He was sure to write in less than a week from Burdwan where he then taught. Since he never condescended to young teachers like me, and hardly exploited his professional contacts for personal gains, our relationship grew. In the larger world of academic pomposity, of graces and airs, Barua’s strangely sweet smile was enough to cheer me up even on my worst days.
As far as I can recall, it was Professor Radhe Shyam Sharma of Osmania in whose jovial company I first met Barua. (RSS was my bridge of sorts to other shorter and longer cohorts across the country those days.) I recall joining a conversation with them once on a teacher’s need for illuminating rather than obfuscating texts. I can recall nothing more of all that fun except our consensus that as teachers we had better keep our erasers in order, and make ourselves clear first why certain concepts in literary theory are rather difficult to simplify and readily illustrate in classrooms. Students, we agreed, have a way of figuring out what they should essentially take home despite our ‘teaching.’ Deconstruction was still fancy those days. Very few of us frankly felt drawn to Derridean aporias. Barua once remarked that a short course in philosophy (especially in the western philosophy of language) would have made a little difference perhaps to our teaching English critical thought. Mostly through the 1970s and early 80’s, the Enright and Chickera volume still held sway in our Indian schools.
It has sometimes seemed to me a great loss to the humanist archives not to have been able to record our great teachers at work. To project a teacher’s session in a laudatory retrospective is to commit what in criticism they call “the heresy of paraphrase.” For the best teaching I have known (and now recall only partially) of those I personally adore is a performance akin to a great actor’s on stage. And all I seem to hear of my revered teachers is their voices, not quite so much what they said. What e-album or videotape would catch that immense presence in a classroom, an articulate energy gathered on the spot while talking to an avid class, the teaching itself an “act of the mind finding what will suffice” (in the famous phrase of Wallace Stevens)? Certainly, Barua was one who took teaching as seriously and passionately as the research leading to it, some evidence of which I could easily gather during his work at the ASRC as a Scholar in Residence. I once eavesdropped on a young student at the Centre talk to Barua and his prompt answers to all her worries and queries; basically, what to look for and where in the library; Walt Whitman’s attitudes towards the American blacks he knew; good prefatory discussions of slavery; what ‘VF’ meant on a card catalogue (in the library’s code, Vertical Files/ Folders in alphabetical order holding dust-jackets, programme sheets of seminars, miscellaneous papers on texts and writers), etc. Barua’s method, I sensed, was to leave such students with a few suggestions anyone could begin with, a few ideas to think with, and the courage to adopt or drop them as their work progressed. Of course with such god’s plenty at the ASRC, and long before one could click a biblio-tap open and gush, what better help would one hope for than this? Perspectival errors were corrected on the spot, browsing tips given in appropriate asides, and all this punctuated by keen listening to a worried voice and brief assurances by way of response. Quite adorable was Barua’s decorum in academic exchanges, even with stranger-students. He maintained a respectful difference of opinion. If he disagreed with a student, she always knew why. And, most of all, Barua did all this as though it was not the least bit of trouble.
Barua belonged to a distinguished band of English teachers. They strongly believed that their classrooms could be transformed in such a way that their space was to be ideally shared with the students. This was indeed the gist of his short address to a small ASRC Friday meeting in the late 1980s. Education, he remarked, is both public service and political process. Diversity of the English curriculum, the other insistent passion in which Barua stayed invested all his life, would certainly help the middleclass ‘English’/ metropolitan graduates of India who took their privileges for granted. They, he believed, ought to rethink their positions as unmarked, so they will see that the more powerful among them are apt to use a degenerate rhetoric of justice and propriety to exploit the less privileged, even oppress the powerless. Offered variety and diversity, however, at least a few among them will, in time, be seen to respond enthusiastically to new, reformist ideas. New paradigms redeemed from the old, rusty domains of traditional literary history are slow to appeal at first but students, he felt, are basically open to renascent terms and reasonable texts. Always a believer in drawing upon ancillary resources to counter the heavily loaded, imperialistically biased core courses, Barua made it a mission to build a small library of teaching texts for himself. (He wouldn’t prescribe them, he assured me once!) He seemed almost poised to give a new definition of ‘Further Reading’ by assembling excerpts and fragments collected in rare anthologies of discursive prose and socio-historical documents otherwise unavailable to Indian students.
One such collection Barua was determined to take away from Hyderabad was A Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England, 1381‒ 1914 (Penguin, 1984). It took both of us nearly a week to persuade the then library staff (those resentful employees of a degenerate library management in our country) at the CIE & FL to lend me its only copy. I was a teacher there but my privileges did not extend to books on loan from the REFERENCE shelves. Christopher Hampton’s Radical Reader, we were told, was distinctly marked for use “only in the library.” Sensing strong resistance to our repeated appeal for a few hours’ loan for photocopying, Barua was even willing to make do with his copying out in longhand shorter excerpts. His love for the carrel was such that he was never far from it.
That was when I began noticing something quite unusual about Barua’s thinking. His commitment to the revision of the English curriculum where he was teaching was as steady as it was in line with his unabashed interest in the radical politics of working-class lives. Any teacher who is invested in processes (of education, of institutions of literary learning, of the social life of a language, etc.) will be a lot different from one who is merely service-oriented. That is to say, one’s “teaching experience” so called is not merely metered hours and cumulated years, but something numbers will not tell us: sheer evidence of where one lived, and what one lived for, as a teacher. Barua’s insistence on having a copy of A Radical Reader was now very transparent. Hampton’s meaty excerpts in it from many Victorian/ Edwardian sources had appealed to him so deeply during his Sheffield days as a doctoral student working on Edward Carpenter.[1] They must have still seemed irresistible to him as lead-texts for a new course he seemed keen on developing at the time. He and I were anthology buffs. We relished looking through well-thumbed anthologies of critical prose, collating as we called it, like most browsers noticing the ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ (in the Oxford themed-anthologies of those years), or perhaps how uneven the selections (and notes) still are. But are any anthologies even? Barua used to laugh at such quirky remarks and then, seriously, comment that the anthologies we make tell us a great deal about the pedagogical practices that shape our profession. I couldn’t agree more then, but do they, I wonder. Today I would rather add: only those anthologies less beholden to the market pressures of academic publishers. Barua’s thinking about our pedagogical thrust in shaping young minds (now seems to me) resonated with what Stuart Hall once proposed in “Minimal Selves” (1987). “Identity is formed,” as Hall reminds us, “at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture” (115). Barua used to feel that we do very little in our colleges to make affordable collections for our own “minimal selves,” and helpfully deploy suitable materials for the classroom. In such collections we ought to gather provocative and inspiring essays that conduct intelligent minds through the thickets of basic humanist conundrums. Sadly, our routine College English anthologies are largely mercenary and profit-driven.[2] Like cheap gifts exchanged at middle class marriage-parties, poems and stories complete with their editorial apparatus pass from one anthology to another, none of the editors/ publishers having paid the legitimate copyright fee. India may be the only English-teaching country in the world where we have so many plagiarized texts feeding ‘new’ anthologies in wide shameless circulation. If, in an unlikely instance, a good well-edited and copyrighted text does remain in a proposed collection, an insensitive editor or an overzealous board of studies is apt to throw that potentially creative baby with some ideologically unclean bathwater. All good texts hurt, especially those that still stand exacting critical scrutiny. But the politically motivated cry that only some texts hurt more than others, or that they (are likely to) hurt others more than us. All Indian castes and tribes owe their history and legitimacy to certain social mores founded on touching and the touchable. That explains our still touchy issues that leave commonsense untouched in making usable anthologies for our youth. Balancing social consciousness, local/ regional cultural biases, and linguistic competence is a hard task even for the most qualified teachers of English who know their wards.
Barua once asked me whether bad anthologies or the bad English teachers teaching them accounted for the poor standards of college teaching. Both, I told him, despite (or because of) our ELT/ESL institutes and their annual summer schools. And yet, we are not sure while skimming our English milk what constitutes its creamy layer, and what name we give it: language, or literature.
I think it was at Barua’s instance that I looked more carefully at Frank Kermode’s Classic. He told me that Kermode’s definition of the classic is hard to better: a text that never quite exhausts its plurality of meanings, a “requirement and a distinguishing feature of the survivor” that kept it alive (Kermode 111). When he told me this, given my slowness generally in getting to the nuances of another’s point of view, I did not quite see who or what survives the other. The fitness of survival, in both Darwinian senses, applies to a classic. And that probably was what he explained to me following Kermode’s formulation that a classic is patient, even forgiving like a good teacher, patient of interpretation, of other interpretive challenges. Therefore it stands the scrutiny of any age or reason.[3] Another less-known detail about Barua’s wide reading and retention of informational nuggets was evident to me in casual conversations and asides. Speaking to someone who was working on the “drunkard narratives” in American Literature, he called up Franklin Evans, Walt Whitman’s first novel, a best-seller at that time. It dealt with a boy who is ensnared by intemperance. Wasn’t he pushing his interlocutor, I wondered, to take a little more creative risk than she had bargained for?
As co-examiners once for a Ph. D. dissertation, Barua and I wrote reports. I was privileged to look at his report besides one other examiner’s because I was invited to sit on the candidate’s viva voce committee. As dissertations go, the work we had evaluated was not bad. I remember it as a rather bold and smart piece of research but certainly not good enough to wholly applaud the scholar’s effort. While none of us felt the need to use “original,” “intelligent,” “erudite,” “well argued,” “well researched” etc. in our reports, I caught Barua summing up his, using the phrase “good work.” So I read his sentence once again, only to learn that he just wished the work was good, or good enough, if only the candidate had read a few basic studies of the subject and had shown some awareness of this source or that. Nuancing her critical opinion was the problem with the candidate, as it still is with most doctoral students anywhere. Barua’s grasp of the circumtextualities of the topic in question (samples mostly of Victorian critical prose) was so up-to-date that, had this student cared to revise her work, she would certainly have benefited from Barua’s report rather than from ours. He for one knew where lines should be drawn. And of course, how to draw them without fuss.
In 2004, I visited Jadavpur University (JU) as a Visiting Professor on their DSA Programme. A handful of my hosts in English apart, I knew no one else on the campus. Two senior colleagues outside JU whom I was keen to go the proverbial extra mile to look up were Dilip Barua and Arup Rudra. Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri had then promised to arrange my meeting with Barua who was probably domiciled in the city after his retirement. Both of us however regretted that I was not to meet Arup Rudra who passed away a year or so before my visit. There indeed was a connection among the three of us: Barua first mentioned to me Rudra’s monograph on the Modernist Romantics in 1991, work which had probably originated in JU as a doctoral thesis. I agreed to review the monograph for Barua’s University of Burdwan Journal. A well-written and sensitive reading of English Romantic poets and T. S. Eliot, Rudra’s monograph showed a rare brilliance in matching ideas with apt citations, and occasionally inveigling readers into re-reading the poets in question. Rudra later wrote to thank me for my review [4], and (as I recall) since then we had exchanged a couple of letters, one of which wondered whether I would mind examining a doctoral dissertation he was then supervising for Calcutta University, again on T. S. Eliot and his French inheritance. A few years later, I was a little surprised that Rudra and I stopped writing to each other. His silence used to sadden me because he was unusual among the English teachers I knew; his critical thinking was one that rubbed up against my notions of the given and the known. Of course answers to questions we dare not ask reach us rather late.
When Barua and I met on the JU campus finally, we seemed to have stepped into a penumbral zone. We looked around. We first noticed unspoken all the posters and placards that dot the scene. “By hammer and hand all things do stand,” as carpenters say. Barua looked pretty run down. The shopping basket he carried was ripped on the side. Somehow, he was not quite himself. Midsummer weather. A crowded and busy street adjacent to a line of irregular kiosks and the JU post office. We were just a few yards away from one of the JU main gates opening on to an awfully traffic-busy, dusty road. What with all the rattle around, loud protestors and hawkers from near and the far, and frequent disruption of our conversation on a sidewalk, we still kept talking. Both of us were distracted by the thickening and thinning crowds that jostled by, nearly everyone smoking; he more than I observing people who did not know they were being observed, probably looking for a profile he would somehow recognize. I cannot now recall whose hearing was the poorer, but occasionally I recall his yelling to me a word or phrase for clarity or emphasis. Poor quality of vegetables, dearer prices. We exchanged notes on our respective Visiting Professor assignments at JU and elsewhere, common friends he remembered to ask after at Hyderabad, the decline of the ASRC, the poorly-tended stacks and the buildings there, our recent adventures in desultory reading and writing. So much else of our conversation then on is now a blur but Barua was still careful to remind me that good food was practically unavailable around the place. The canteens, he remembered, were under repair. He suggested a few decent joints on the main road, and was keen that we sit down to share a meal some day before my brief visit ended. That, alas, was not to be.
Marilyn Strathern, the author of the acclaimed Relations: An Anthropological Account once remarked that the nicest thing about culture is that everyone has it. She assumed its quintessential difference rather than its sameness in all tribes and communes across the world. I sometimes think we might extend that to talk about our Cultural Studies business in English departments. We all have it, but we mean it differently depending on how our disciplinary training allows us to afford it, and then teach it the way we like. Barua and I occasionally used to talk about the materials teachers use for teaching English: the culture, the language, the literature of a people with whom the Indians continue to have ideologically troubled relationship. (Probably our terms of reference in the 1990’s were not so much the Birmingham School, Stuart Hall and others but their progenitors, Richard Hoggart, Denys Thompson, and Raymond Williams.) I still recall one short conversation we had once had about our “complex fate” as English teachers in India. For all our very strong, unwavering subnational, regional and linguistic commitments as Indians, English is strangely the subject, the discipline, the specialty we call ours, and perhaps tangentially the ‘Department’ to which all of us seem immured for life. The essentially conflicted nature of our profession owes not a little to the subcultures that we engage with in our classrooms. They are fed by numerous linguistic resources and folkloric traditions of India. All this perhaps arose subliminally in us as we both flipped through a volume called Subject to Change edited by Susie Tharu we spotted among the ‘new arrivals’ display at the CIE & FL Library in the 1990s. We did, as I recall, also talk then about a few unfortunate tendencies among teachers who profess English: the unnatural, largely mistaken, notion that language teaching versus literature teaching is still pedagogically tenable; philological scholarship versus aesthetic commitments is still admissible. Barua then mentioned to me some cases where the selection panels for university teachers were split in the middle regarding what to them was more crucial― a candidate’s good scholarly background with proven capacity for publishing research papers, or their absolutely creditable, honest-to-goodness pedagogic skills at once flexible and appropriate for undergraduates and postgraduate classes. As our discussion progressed, we were rather discreet in not inviting others into our discussion because we were then located well within the precincts of CIE & FL (now EFL University) that believes that “need-based courses” can (and will) turn out good teachers.[5]
To any reader who may still be wondering why I miss English teachers of Barua’s stature, let me offer this. I do not want English on our ethnically-diverse and linguistically affluent campuses to be a laughing stock, a subject to be pitied or pilloried. Given its checkered colonial history, English has nothing in fact to prove except that in India its purchase is not/ has never been in doubt. That is a fact despite, perhaps because of, its fulsome lovers among us disguising themselves as nativists. In any case, the dissimulators among us certainly have studied the aerodynamics of kite-flying. The English kite soars highest against a turbulent Indian wind, not without it. And if English now hopes to prove Browning silly by having its heavenward reach exceed its mandated grasp, and if it is trying (in vain) to do what bhasha departments (for long envying us) are, or have been, doing quite well among themselves, we ought to think again about the road mistaken. This is a fact we seem to be missing in our deliberations about the English curriculum, but our detractors, a legion, are laughing with good reason. Perhaps we have been ‘reading’ the wrong things in culture with thicker English lenses for Indian astigmatic eyes. The research we encourage in English evidence our ridiculously scanty knowledge of realities that make Indian cultures vibrant: the forests, hills, lands, and rivers; our indigenous folklore, myths and legends; and the tongues that bespeak tribal tastes and languages that are centuries older than the English we teach. And of course with (perhaps excusable) poorer competence and performance in English across India, we hardly care to ask whose culture we seem to be studying (and why so shabbily) when we seem to be ‘doing’ cultural studies. (The question to pose more urgently here is the pop culture that our youth seem to have acquired thanks to their English. Is that ours or theirs?) For the life of me I cannot imagine why English should recommend a research degree for a candidate’s work on Telugu film music, or on the revolts against the Armed Forces Special Power Act in select regions of our country, unless of course the thesis concerned establishes that English plays, if it indeed does, a significantly clear role in understanding the research problem, and that it would be impossible for any Indian to formulate such a thesis without English. If we cannot establish the inevitability of English in such researches, we shall, in time, reach a point where anything passes. By then, our very few funding agencies will regrettably realize that they have used up obscene amounts of money, and spent them in equally obscene ways, on projects that have absolutely nothing to do with English even by the most powerful remote sensing intellectual equipment. We shall then see no more angels who fear to tread our thinning English floors.[6]
Of course there are limits to English in India to which the Anglo-American academy never tires of directing our attention, but those limits imposed from there need not always be limitations. Sometimes those limits can be our strengths, scarcity engendering creativity in those who strengthen their English in order to seek viable workaround solutions for hard-of-access materials and means. The commonest form of human stupidity, as Nietzsche once remarked, is forgetting what one is trying to do. I sometimes think that we are very close to something like this when we ‘do’ English by other means.
Given such long art and short human life, we need help. Barua offered his, with no strings attached. He has lit a way for us. I am sure he would have agreed that humanist scholarship will certainly pass any peer review tests but cannot be judged solely on the basis of “productivity” and “citations.” He would, like most of us again, have wondered how a teacher’s insights could be told apart from a researcher’s, and how quantifiable they might be. Teachers like him are forever. “Is there any meaning in life,” Leo Tolstoy asks in Confessions, “that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” Teachers of the world hardly need to worry. The students who live after them will find that meaning. As we all would, in Barua’s life.
Notes
[1] Barua feels his way into his topic with such fine discriminating care that his Ph. D. dissertation submitted to the University of Sheffield in 1966 is worth close look by young researchers. His insights continue to feed western scholarship on Edward Carpenter. One recent evidence is Michael Hatt’s “Edward Carpenter and the Domestic Interior” that cites Barua’s work to argue that notwithstanding the Victorian socialist thinker/ writer’s aversion for material indulgence, he was hardly an uncompromising ascetic (Hatt, 410n). Besides such discernment of finer details of Carpenter’s intellectual makeup, Barua’s reading of India by the west unmistakably anticipates the gist of Edward Said’s Orientalism. His notice of the circumambient nuances of Carpenter’s spiritual affinities, Indian Vedantic thought, democratic socialist lore filtered a little through Walt Whitman etc. is richly textured and engagingly detailed. Among such examples, I would particularly recommend Barua’s pages beginning173 of his dissertation. Further, we shall find it fascinating to go over pages beginning189 of his chapter on Carpenter’s India which also includes a fine commentary on Carpenter’s sketch of Indian streets, 203 ff.
[2] I would advisedly make one exception for Statements if only because I taught the prose pieces in this anthology with great relish as a TA at IIT-Bombay in the mid-1970s. Among the unusual excerpts that gave the students and me great opportunities for long and live discussions included F. N Souza’s “Nirvana of a Maggot,” Ashok Mitra’s “The Story of Indra Lohar,” and D. D. Kosambi’s “Science and Freedom.” I have never since seen or read such unusually provocative pieces in any Indian prose anthology.
[3] I am tempted to go off at a tangent here to consider the fortunes of The Waste Land at 100. Ever since its first appearance, Eliot’s poem has been inviting serious and non-serious cavils and critique. Right from the compositional details of its urtext (such as the poet’s convalescence at Lausanne; the number of typewriters and the British bond paper he was believed to use; the postage, persons, publisher contracts …) to the people and places that figured in its making and the first reactions, The Waste Land has intrigued its readers to no end. I have sometimes wondered whether it was only Eliot and Pound who collaborated in making The Waste Land a poem, or it was the steadily growing work of the successive structuralist and poststructuralist academic press that was complicitous in sustaining its curricular appeal through a whole century. Such compulsions are hard to beat. If there was an English classic that never existed but for its monument-mongers, The Waste Land deserves that isolated distinction. Shored against the explicatory and exculpatory ruins of a hundred years, the poem seems to re-echo its own Upanishadic thunder: “DA / Datta: what have we given?” Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, its teachers may ask misquoting Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock” a little, and where, the knowledge we seem to have lost in information?
[4] My review of Arup Rudra’s book Modernism’s Romantic Journey (Calcutta: Sarat Book House, 1991) appeared in the Journal of the Department of English (The U of Burdwan), Volumes VII & VIII (1), 1991-1992, edited by D. K. Barua.
[5] I forget whether Barua or I first sighed in relief that Tharu’s Subject to Change had nothing to do with “teaching aids” that obsessed ELT teachers then. It did indeed focus however on the unaided teachers and their students. It seemed customary to many of us that the “teaching aids” literature overemphasized expensive gadgets and flashy equipment to the near total exclusion of the teacher who must after all assume a pivotal presence in any classroom. If, on a rare occasion, the teacher received a straight look in such studies, it was in his/her ministerial role as an operator of the teaching-aids machinery.
[6] The hypocrisies of English pedagogy in India may require another article. Mostly, we pretend not to see the disparities and discrepancies that plague our systems that mange professional teaching and research. Compulsions, such as the need to retain models and templates, and outmoded pedagogical practices; the urge to publish in areas and topics in which we have practically no stakes or investment as Indian teachers, are among the least discussed issues that create a lot of confusion among our young teachers. The divided commitments to our bhashas and English again need no elaboration. Not being able to tell our profession from the imagined communities of propagandist nativism will only prolong our self-deception. The bhasha writers among our English teachers are a strange breed. I recall an old O. V. Vijayan cartoon in Malayalam where we see Krishna Kanhaiya bowing in supplication before a tall figure strikingly resembling someone like the then-owner /publisher of the Writers Workshop. The toddler lifting up a heavy tome, its jacket-scribbled The Bhagavad-Gita in Devanagari, wonders whether the publisher would show mercy and make him an Indo-Anglian. He avers that he is no mean writer, his book will be liked by many if they read it in English. (This cartoon appeared around the time P. Lal published The Condensed Mahabharata of Vyasa transcreated in English.)
Works Cited
Barua, Dilip Kumar. The Life and Work of Edward Carpenter in the Light of Intellectual, Religious,
Political and Literary Movements of the Later [sic] Half of the Nineteenth Century. 1966. The University of Sheffield. PhD dissertation. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/15180/1/693067.pdf Accessed 11 January 2022.
Hall, Stuart. “Minimal Selves.”
https://pages.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/Hall_Minimal_Selves.pdf. Accessed 14 February 2022.
Hatt, Michael. “Edward Carpenter and the Domestic Interior.” Oxford Art Journal, 36. 3 (2013): 395–
415.
Jussawalla, Adil, and Eunice De Souza, eds. Statements: Anthology of Indian Prose in English.
Orient Longman, 1977.
Kermode, Frank. Pieces of My Mind: Writings, 1958—2002. Penguin, 2003.