An essay by one of India's best known scholars, A. K. Ramanujan is at the centre of the latest flashpoint in the historic battle between the Left and the Right.
The pro-Left academic community came out on the streets on Monday to protest the scrapping of Ramanujan's essay - Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples and Three thoughts on Translation - by the academic council of the Delhi University on October 9. While the right-wingers claim the essay is blasphemous, the academics say the move violates the freedom of speech. They described the attack on Ramanujan's essay on the various versions of Ramayan as acts of wanton philistinism.
Over 250 protesters, including both students and teachers, from the Delhi University gathered near the Vivekananda statue at the arts faculty and took out a protest march on the campus. The protesters were demanding that the college authorities must preserve students' fundamental rights and should not give in to pressure from political groups claiming 'hurt sentiments'.
"Can we allow technical inquiry to be replaced with assertion of faith?" asked the agitators. The participants included history teachers and students who said the decision by the academic council was "thoroughly discouraging to the spirit of freedom". The council had earlier, after going through an expert committee review, recommended that the essay be removed from the syllabus. The decision was contrary to the report of the expert committee, which ruled by majority that the controversial essay should be retained in the syllabus.
"Our academic council could have done better than banishing one of the finest commentary pieces on ancient epics," Mukul Mangalik, senior lecturer at Ramjas College, said.
"Several versions of the Ramayan have been written in India and in other south and east Asian countries as well. But this is a fact and it will not change, no matter how hurt someone is. You may be hurt but you cannot take away someone else's right to read or reprint it," Mangalik said.
THE demonstrators described the pressure on the varsity to remove the essay from the syllabus as "anti-democratic, anti-academic and illogical." The protest, said the marchers, was not about the particular essay but about the methods employed to remove it. "Even if the essay was not as good qualitatively , we would have still objected to the furtive manner in which it was removed," Mangalik said.
Historians, among the protesters, said the episode exposes the attack on the country's most prized asset, its diversity.
"For a country as diverse as India, such objections are bound to arise time and again. But it is the duty of our institutions to withstand such torrents. Democracy is the cornerstone of not only education but our nation as a whole," said Mushirul Hasan, a historian, and former vice-chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia.
Historian Aditya Mukherjee said: "Instead of cherishing and celebrating our diversity, we are succumbing to pressure that is bent on destroying it."
"We should be proud of our culture which has produced hundreds of versions of Ramayan, but instead we're entertaining philistinism which is bent on simplifying our literary and philosophical inquiries. Can the German history, for example, be taught without mentioning the holocaust?" Mukherjee argued. He said the manner in which the academic council had passed the resolution was disgraceful and not becoming of a senior academic council.
"The academic council remained open in the night when most of the people barring 25 had gone home and then they surreptitiously passed the nonagenda. This is totally undemocratic," Mukherjee said.
The protesters later submitted a memorandum to vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh. The memorandum made three points in favour of the essay. First, removal of the essay was contrary to the recommendation by the expert panel, second, the academic council disregarded the opinion of the department of history and third that the council ignored a letter from the Oxford University Press to D.N. Batra, the petitioner who had claimed that the essay was blasphemous, which made it obvious that communal forces have pressured the press not to sell the book.
In 2008, activists of the BJPbacked ABVP barged into the office of the then-head of department of History, Dr SZH Jafri and demanded that the essay be withdrawn. The ABVP members vandalised Jafri's office, claiming that some portions of the essay - such as a south Indian version of the epic that describes Sita as Ravana's daughter - were blasphemous.
Prompted by a Supreme Court decision on the matter, the academic council later referred the essay to an expert committee and brought it up for a decision whether to keep it in the syllabus, last week. Despite three of the four experts on the committee recommending that the university continue teaching the essay to history students, the council voted to drop it from the syllabus. Out of 120 members on the council, only nine voted against the decision.
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