A note from Prof. Kancha Ilaiah, thinker, writer and activist for India’s marginalised people. He gets retired from his teaching job in Osmania University after 38 of study, research and teaching. He says he does not remember his birth day because of the background he came from . He is the author of “Why I am not a Hindu,” “Buffalo Nationism” and “Post Hindu India."
| by Kancha Ilaiah
( October 4, 2012, New Delhi, Sri
Lanka Guardian)I am among the millions who live
a life without a birthday. October 5, 1952 is what my school recorded as my
birthday; beyond this, I am as yet unclear of it all. As I retire this month
from Osmania University, where I studied, researched and taught over a period
of 38 years, it may be of some value to now tell the story of Osmania and of
mine.
Osmania is an old village-like
university established by Osman Ali Khan in 1918. He did that at a time when
millions of Telanganites didn’t know who their ruler was and what a university
would be. The first and deepest impression of the imposing Arts College
building that was built with marble brought here from abroad is still fresh in
my memory. I first saw it, and also the imposing portrait of Osman Ali Khan in
the library building, as I came to take the entrance test for MA. It was in
1974.
Like many others, I was also a
victim of the 1969 Telangana agitation and the mass copying that accompanied
it. But for the newly introduced entrance, where no copying was allowed, I
would not have got a seat in this university. When I first saw the Arts
college, the building looked amazing. But when I saw the portrait of the man
who built that, I was further surprised. He looked as dark as I was, carrying
the innocence of the region on his face. He was said to be a scholar in his own
right.
 |
| Professor Kancha Ilaiah |
Till the Emergency was imposed on
June 26, 1975, the Naxalbari ‘Spring Thunder’ was ringing in our years. Many in
our circles took the ‘study’ part of the slogan as moralistic, and the
‘struggle’ part as being a more serious pursuit. One of the revolutionary songs
my friends used to sing at every meeting was Nee Gori Kadatham Kodako Nizam
Sarkaroda (O Bloody Nizam, we will kill you, and build a tomb). The right wing
students used to circulate funny stories about his evil deeds. What I realised
later was that he was a man of vision and held dreams of modern education.
We were under the illusion that
the Naxalite movement would liberate the villages, encircle the cities and
finally the New Democratic State will be established. Mao would, then, become
our chairman also.
Quite funnily, the emergency,
which we hated all long, became our classroom conductor. Some radicals went
underground, a few were killed in encounters, but some of us turned to serious
study. I was one of the beneficiaries of the timid side of Marxism which used
to insist that study at least when you cannot struggle. The atmosphere was
mediocre, with slogans and songs all around. If there was any writer, he/she
would write some poems about the power of the gun and the flow of blood.
English was meant for the classroom and Telugu for revolution. I was fortunate
enough to get out of that dogma slowly as I became a teacher in that very
marble building.
Over the years, I formulated a
slogan of my own life, “Read, Write and Fight”. The first two parts of the slogan
were alien to our lifestyle, family and caste history. On the home front, we
never knew what reading and writing were. Fighting was part of our house,
street and village. But my new slogan needed to be executed first at a personal
level, going beyond what is required of the professional reading and writing. I
tried, therefore, to expand my personal reading and writing with a methodology
of my own: combining the “academic” and the “popular.” The environment of
Osmania was not known for that. Along with that, I could turn the classroom a
creative zone.
Somewhere I had read that Dr
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan once visited the Arts College building and remarked,
“This marble building so far did not produce an academic marble.” I was also
told that he had no appreciation for the Nizam. For him, an ‘academic marble’
would be one that engraves his philosophical image of India.
I chose to be a black stone among
white marbles that wrote the Indian philosophical history upside down. I became
a buffalo scholar loving English and living in it day and night. Fortunately,
the powers that ruled the university never interfered with my independent
pursuit of knowledge, except once when they gave a letter, asking me to observe
some limits while writing.
I loved the university’s rural
environment. I could easily shift the methodology of discourse from ‘writing a
book from other books,’ or writing about militant movements — Telangana Armed
Struggle, Naxalbari etc — to writing the philosophy of a people’s day-to-day
life. There was this moribund academic view that masses do not have a
philosophy of their own. In a way, I proved they have. The borrowed wisdom
(from the West) was that either a metaphysical realm or a materialist realm
could engage with the philosophy of social science. I came to the conclusion
that even the Indian illiterate lower caste masses produce knowledge around
‘Spiritual Materialism’ within their productive field.
While leaving the university, I
must say I did my job. I am neither happy nor unhappy. Any university can
produce a serious thought only when the ideas that got generated by one
generation of scholars are improved, modified and advanced by the next
generation. I hope the process will continue.
