Students and academics are up in arms against the “shifting” of a prestigious history library at Jawaharlal Nehru University to two different buildings.
The Centre for Historical Studies (CHS) library has been gradually built since the late 1980s with University Grants Commission rewards for excellence. It houses private collections of eminent historians such as Bernard Cohn, Satish Chandra and D.N. Gupta, as well as several primary sources such as Central Legislative Assembly (CLA) debates, the Simon Commission report and the Transfer of Power papers.
Vice-chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit said that the reallotment of the building for the Special Centre for Tamil Studies was not unprecedented. Last year, the Tamil Nadu government granted Rs 5 crore for the centre — the bank interest on which would be used to pay the faculty.
JNU Students Union councillor Anagha Pradeep explained to The Telegraph: “There are some 18,000 books, theses, journals and other works housed in the two-storey CHS library. A few days back, the signage was changed to that for the Tamil centre. Today, the books of the CHS library are being moved to the Exim Bank library, which has a seating capacity of hardly 40 to 50 students and caters to three other economics-related centres. This has happened completely without the knowledge of students, and without consultation.”
VC Pandit told this paper: “This is a unanimous decision of the executive council to allot space to expanding centres of Indian languages because of my attempt to bring in diversity and difference into JNU. The language centres are supported by the state governments.... It is just a temporary adjustment of space from Centres that have more space than others.”
Similar language centres funded by the states of Assam, Odisha and Maharashtra are also in the works.
She added: “The books are being shifted to Exim and additional space in the School of Social Sciences, block 3 (at some distance) …. We got a Higher Education Financing Agency loan last month and the process of getting new infrastructure takes time.... Many centres and schools have earlier had their space reallotted. Why the protest now? It has been the practice of JNU since its inception.”
Aditya Mukherjee, a retired JNU professor of contemporary history, told this paper: “This is irregular, wrong and should be stopped. In the late 80s, the UGC recognised the CHS’s work and gave us a Department of Special Assistance grant. We could have used the funds for new posts that would have led to promotions for our faculty, but we said that we don’t want posts. Use the money to make a library specifically for historical research — not a duplication of other libraries.”
The library doesn’t just have books, but also primary sources and inscriptions, and archives from France and Tamil Nadu brought by the CHS faculty. Mukherjee got hold of the CLA debate papers from 1930 to 1947 and it was transferred from a library in RK Puram. The University of Chicago chose the CHS library to transfer the personal collection ofCohn, anthropologist and scholar of British colonialism, after his death in 2003, said Mukherjee, who pointed out that it would cease to be a specialised subject library if its inventory was distributed across buildings.
“Early in this millennium, UGC recognised the CHS as a Centre for Advanced Studies, and with the grant, again, we chose to build another floor of the library instead of creating new posts. We welcome the Tamil centre on our 1,000-acre campus. But we see the scuttling of our library that we have earned through grants for our work, research output, papers and projects as a deliberate attempt by the central government which has constantly attacked the centres for history, politics, and arts and aesthetics by multiple methods since it came to power,” said Mukherjee.
He pointed out that in January, the VC had said at an event of the RSS-linked NGO My Home India: “We cannot write history on falsified foundations, which we have been doing for the last 75 years and my university has been very good at it.”
Both the Left-controlled JNUSU and its main opposition, the RSS-backed Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, are united in opposing the shifting of the library. A statement from the latter compared the varsity’s move to Bakhtiyar Khilji’s sacking of Nalanda University in the 13th century. Syed Rizvi, the secretary of the Indian History Congress called the move “another step towards furthering myths in place of history.”
CHS professor R. Mahalakshmi said that most teachers were also in the dark about this as it has taken place before the university reopens for the academic year on August 12. “There was no official communication… We have drafted our response to the VC, and eminent former professors of the Centre, such as Romila Thapar and Harbans Mukhia will also be writing to the VC.”
Last updated on 05 Aug 2023
