For someone who had stayed away from many lectures during undergraduate and postgraduate years, I was surprised to find myself attending most of my classes in JNU. I don’t think this was simply because my new teachers were more scholarly or eloquent, or the topics of lectures more riveting. It may have been prompted more by the ways in which the air and ease of animated conversations in the JNU campus seeped into classes and set their tenor. The classroom was just one among the many live communities of conversation on campus. In a friend’s hostel room where I stayed until I got my accommodation, in tea shops, hostel messes, on the lawn, on the street or in buses on the way back from music concerts or film screenings in town, such communities—small and large—flourished.

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Classes in fact manifested their best energies when they approximated the unofficial. My time as a student in JNU was hugely enriching, even though I did not finish the course I  was enrolled in.

Decades later, when I returned to JNU as a teacher, much had changed in my former Centre, as well as in me. The School had moved to the New Campus long ago, and the Centre had bifurcated into Linguistics and English Studies. The English centre, which I joined, had become a more confident and full-fledged intellectual space, with a wonderful set of students. In comparison to Delhi University, where I taught for several years, the MA classes in JNU were clearly smaller in student size. In DU, there was a huge mismatch—sometimes as large as three to one—between the number of students admitted and the seating capacity of the lecture hall. Finding it impossible to enter, many students used to give up on lectures after the first few weeks. In JNU, it was possible to get to know most of your students. But this was not because of small numbers alone; the main difference lay in the readiness of students to participate in any discussion that would open up. Neither competence over the English language, nor—sometimes—command over the text or the issues being discussed, really stood in the way. Many students were ready to jump in and wager their ideas and see how and where they would go. It is possible to run Master’s courses entirely in a participatory workshop mode in JNU, as many teachers do, where discussions develop a rhythm, tempo, and destination all on their own, exceeding the limits of pre-meditation.

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This account should not mislead us to think that the JNU classroom is an ideal, utopian space. It cannot obviously be; how can it? The reality of the world and of life breaks in, in refracted and at times skewed ways. Universities are strange places; their existence is predicated on a putative lease of protection, a tentative deferral of the ‘payback’ time, the erosion of which has been all too palpable in recent years. Higher education has been a hard-won opportunity and privilege for many. At the same time, the peculiar position occupied by the university in relation to other spheres of life can easily lead to a sense of self-enclosedness in the university community. This is perhaps more evident in JNU than in many other public universities in India. The ease and friendliness of the residential campus are sometimes intermeshed with a reluctance or an incapacity to move out of one’s comfort zone. This is a complex matter: I remember being grateful as a student that JNU was a sort of bubble, protected from the abrasive texture of interactions in the city. However, the protective warmth of a community with its rituals and conversations can imperceptibly lead to a loss in mobility and openness.

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The enclosed nature of the campus is not the only reason for this; I have wondered sometimes if there is perhaps not an exaggerated sense of comfort, bordering on self-satisfaction, which lowers our ability to appreciate and engage other spaces closely, and to recognize and respond to what the university and the classroom, as they evolved over the years, have rendered invisible.

The most noteworthy change in central university campuses over the past two decades has been in their demography. Increased diversity in caste and religious backgrounds is clearly visible in JNU over this period, even against the background of the social justice measures the University has had in admissions for a longer time. The classroom in which I teach now is considerably different as compared to my student years, yet it is possible to miss what is at stake in this. Around twenty-five years ago,  Aniket Jaaware, who taught in Pune, drew attention to the silence and the invisibility of the subaltern student in the English classroom. The readiness for discussion I encountered in JNU is not equally available to all. A space like JNU, with its self-perception of inclusiveness, may make it easier to miss such silences. It remains a challenge for our classroom communities to evolve ways of being together that draw in and engage all without placing anyone under obligation. But the classroom does not exist in isolation; it is a part of several spaces of togetherness among students, and among teachers and students. Silence may not be a purely territorial effect, and engaging it means changing the dynamic of those spaces as well.

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As teachers we often tend to see our work as involving the inculcation of knowledge and skills and, consciously or unconsciously, the grooming of a ‘certain kind of academic subject’. Ethical dimensions of the classroom in our present may demand a modification or even an interruption of this project and a willingness to see the province of the university as located in a larger landscape of difficult human togetherness.

It is not perhaps solely a matter of drawing the silent student into the protocols of academic exchange, but of modifying these protocols to recover the meaningful connection between the academic, the intellectual and the ethical. The question posed by the classroom now concerns that ‘certain kind’ that has defined the normative horizon of our pedagogy.

What new figures of academic subjectivity might define the potentialities opened by our present? We may not—and perhaps should not—engage this in terms of concessions and adjustments to an external world; it is a matter of whether we can imagine and reconceive practices in higher education, recognizing the new possibilities manifested in silences or in ‘unreasonable’ demands in our campus and the classroom.

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Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s premier educational institutions, has fostered high academic values and norms, pioneered forms of inclusion which have made for a unique student body, and created spaces for critical thinking, while also deepening respect for democratic traditions. This has made it among the most desirable of public universities for the exceptional standards of higher education it upholds. In its fiftieth year, JNU continues to stand tall despite coming under siege for precisely the kinds of academic achievements, democratic traditions, and inclusive policies for which it was well known.

JNU was established in 1969 under the leadership of G. Parthasarathi and Moonis Raza. It soon became an innovative intervention in the field of higher education in encouraging interdisciplinarity, in pioneering exemplary pedagogical methods that have inspired programmes of higher education elsewhere, and in remaining steadfastly committed to ideals of equality and social justice. The faculty and alumni of JNU today include highly respected academics and researchers, some of whom have been recipients of the Nobel, the Bhatnagar, and the Infosys awards.

The contributors to this book—who include some of the university’s most prominent alumni as well as those who have been an integral part of the institution—chart the history of JNU from its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s, through the times when it expanded and grew, developed unique centres and schools, and responded creatively to the demands and needs of the complex student body. The essays in the volume recall the university’s ethos and outline those unique and worthwhile features of the institution which have given the university its identity. The essays are commemorative of JNU’s achievements but also serve as an important archive for preserving its institutional memory. The book is divided into twelve sections—‘Spaces and Places’, ‘Imagining the University’, ‘Of Schools and Centres’, ‘Sites of Learning’, ‘Living and Loving’, ‘Politics, Posters, Performances’, ‘Giving Meaning to Social Diversity’, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, ‘The Way Things Were’, ‘Promises to Fulfil’, ‘Memories from Afar’, and ‘The Spirit of JNU’.  Each section consists of diverse contributions from former students and teachers, and from administrators and staff. A rich picture is thus built up through personalized narratives and reflections, on the institution’s singularity as well as what it shares with other public universities to make it the premier public university in India today.

Beautifully designed with over a hundred photographs, JNU Stories: The First 50 Years is the first wide-ranging and critical look at a remarkable experiment in public higher education.

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