The Triple Stream

UNIVERSITY REFORMS

While the amendments to the Delhi University Act were debated on the floor of the Central Legislative Assembly and received due publicity, it is unfortunate that amendments of a far-reaching character proposed to be made in the Annamalai University Act are not destined to receive the benefit of such open discussion. The suspension of the Madras Legislatures, where originally the Annamalai University Bill was hammered into shape clause by clause, makes this impossible. The Annamalai and Andhra Universities have been looked upon as centres for fostering and promoting language and culture of the respective areas. They are rooted in public sentiment in a sense in which older Universities like those of Madras and Bombay are not. Their career and complexion are, therefore, matters of great public concern.

The amendments to the Annamalai University Act as published reveal a tendency to render the administration more ‘totalitarian.’ Totalitarianism be a need, and even a virtue, for Governments engaged in a War, but is a dangerous principle to be embodied in centres of academic learning difficult to understand why there should be an embargo on University teachers sitting on the Senate and the Syndicate, as if to remind them sharply of their status as mere employees. Freedom of growth (including ‘freedom from fear’) is the very breath of healthy academic life–and the of opportunities to the personnel of a University to take their proper share in the discussion of policies and proposals that affect their task most of all is detrimental to this freedom and to the rise of the University to its fullest heights.

There have been misgivings also regarding unjust communal discrimination in regard to admissions to courses of study. It is a melancholy circumstance that while the best mind and thought of India are chafing against discriminations against Indians in India and abroad, the communal distemper should find a home in University centres, which are the nurseries of the youth of the country and also leave an unhappy legacy for the future.

There may be plausible arguments in favour of communalism in deciding the proportions of persons in public services so as to maintain a balance of (nepotic?) power and to see that no community committed ‘atrocities’ against others. But to deprive young men who are intellectually qualified, of the chances of pursuing higher studies according to their bent of mind on the ground that they are brahmins or harijans is a negation of the basic principle of democracy, that there should be equality of opportunity. The youth of a country are its potential wealth and the full growth of their talents–whatever the accident of their birth–is, or should be, a matter of national concern. This land has always prided itself on its spirit of tolerance and should not imitate the spirit which has actuated the lynching of negroes in the United States or the baiting of Jews in Germany and elsewhere.

We trust that this great centre of learning which is a public institution, the creation of an individual philanthropist though it be, will continue to foster the growth of learning and culture in Tamil Nad in a broad and catholic spirit.

UNIVERSITY OF POONA.

The Committee presided over by the Rt. Hon. M. R. Jayakar, appointed last year to make recommendations on the constitution of Maharashtra University, have submitted their report. Among the older Universities, Bombay happens to be the only one that has not made way for other Universities in the Province where its jurisdiction extends, and though there has been some amount of public demand for Universities in the different linguistic regions that make up the Presidency, for Maharashtra, Karnatak and Gujerat, the Jayakar Committee has been the first officially appointed to consider and report on such course of development. The Committee have recommended that a University may be constituted with Poona as its centre to be called the Poona University, and not a Maharashtra one, because the Committee are anxious that the proposed University should not develop a parochial outlook. Poona though in a way the intellectual and political capital of Maharashtra, is also a cosmopolitan city and is the Headquarters of many All-India institutions. The Committee do not, wish therefore, to make the University a merely Maharashtra body.

This is a sound and broad view to take, but we trust this would not shelve or prejudge the demand for the creation of another University centre in Karnatak or in Gujerat for which there has been wide demand for some years now. It is only in India that we are wedded to Universities exercising jurisdiction over wide and unwieldy areas, affiliating colleges far and near, and continuing to be examining and diploma-distributing bodies. But the time has come when University centres should be brought into existence to foster the culture and stimulate the intellectual and economic life of every region of India. This is why though we are in the midst of war conditions, proposals have been made for Universities for Rajputana, Orissa and Sind.

A TAMIL SCHOLAR AND PUBLICIST HONOURED

For more than three weeks since the 25th of August there were celebrations taking place in every part of Tamil Nad to honour Sri. T. V. Kalyanasundara Mudaliar, on his completing sixty years. In this honour to one who has developed the new Tamil writing which combines erudition with simplicity of style, the writers of the new age in Tamil may well see assurance of approval to their own work at the hands of an intelligent literary public. It was the late Dr. Mahamahopadhyaya U. V. Swaminatha Iyer who brought into vogue a style in Tamil writing which was free from pedantry of any kind. Sri. Mudaliar not only replenishes himself from Tamil classics but draws much inspiration from modern writings of the west, and always gives of his best to solving many of our social evils. In other spheres of activity, such as the Labour movement, Sri. Mudaliar has rendered great services, which entitle him to the appreciation of a grateful public.

Sri. Mudaliar was a Tamil Pandit, when he heard the call for public work consequent on the awakening created in Tamil Nad in the wake of Mrs. Besant’s Home Rule Movement. He was a pioneer in installing Tamil in its rightful place as a medium for social and political propaganda, and in the mouth of this gifted exponent, the language acquired charm and power that convinced the sceptics that English was indispensable to give expression to the higher life and thought of Indians. It was only appropriate, therefore, that the Madras Corporation which honoured this good public servant presented its address in Tamil, and Sri Mudaliar replied in the same language, an event which is unique in the annals of Municipal Corporations.

THE PASSING OF A GREAT SANSKRIT SCHOLAR

Savants and scholars of Oriental Learning, allover the world, will be missing for long that erudite and distinguished Indian scholar, the late Mahamahopadhyaya, Vidyavacaspati, Darsanakalanidhi, Kulapati Prof. S. Kuppuswami Sastri, M.A., I.E.S. (Retd.) whose death occurred a short time ago. If, in recent times much useful work in Sanskrit research and Comparative Philology has been accomplished under the aegis of the University of Madras, it is not a little due to the unstinting labours of the late Mahamahopadhyaya.

A student through out his life, he had the initial advantage also of having early opportunities for organising institutions and shaping complete courses of study in Sanskrit. When barely twenty-six years of age, in 1906, he came under the magnetic influence of the late Mr. V. Krishnaswami Iyer, who easily determined for him is life’s work. As Principal of the Madras Sanskrit College, Mylapore, he acquired experience in managing infant institutions which stood him in good stead when transferred as the head the Maharajah’s College of Sanskrit, Trivadi. But the field of activities, that bore such fine fruits, opened to him only after he was chosen with rare foresight by Sir P. S. Sivaswami Iyer, then Indian Member of Council of the Governor of Madras, to fill the Chair of Sanskrit in the Presidency College and the Curatorship of the Library of Oriental Manuscripts. These two places he filled with great usefulness and distinction for more than two decades.

Many will be the tributes that will be paid to his memory, and the void will be felt in learned circles when any schemes for improving Sanskrit studies are deliberated upon in the academic bodies of Indian Universities which have so far received his wise counsel and help. But what will be missed most will be his wonderful speeches in Sanskrit of rich diction and resounding phraseology. For he was master of an excellent style in that tongue, which has earned, paradoxically enough, the name of a dead language.

Scholarship in the west is often measured by the number of books published by a person devoting himself to any branch of learning; but it has always been typical of the east to create traditions of teaching and merge oneself in that labour of love and live in spirit rather than in print. The Mahamahopadhyaya could have, no doubt, published many treatises and discourses if he had cared; but no such ambition ever fired his mind. He invariably derived satisfaction in the publications of his pupils. The only substantial monument of his vast learning to posterity will be the band of students who studied under him. It is certain that some of them, at any rate, will cherish all that he cherished and revitalise Sanskrit learning by their contributions.

The Madras Samskrta Academy, started in 1927, had the late Mahamahopadhyaya as its fostering President till his death. Orientalists of renown like Professors Sylvain Levi, Leuders, Winternitz and F. W. Thomas met him in person while in India and recognised his outstanding Position in the field. As a founder of the Journal of Oriental Research, Madras, he did much valuable work in bringing together scholars in India and elsewhere, and the Journal in its useful, though somewhat interrupted career, has made it clear to the world of scholars that there is talent in India for intensive study and worthy of wide recognition.

More than all these achievements, his blameless life and independence, his genuine love of books and innate modesty, will be remembered and long continue to inspire his many friends and pupils.

A VETERAN JOURNALIST AND NATION-BUILDER

It is with profound sorrow that we learn, as the final proofs of this issue are passing through the Press, of the death at Calcutta of Babu Ramananda Chattarjee, the veteran journalist, in his 79th year. India and Indian journalism have sustained a heavy and irreparable loss. Ramananda Babu took to the editorship of Prabasi in Bengali and the Modern Review in English as a mission in life thirty-six years ago. He gave up his Principalship of the Kayastha Pathasala, Allahabad, to devote himself fully to this ask. His contribution, through journalism, to the cause of Indian progress during these momentous years has been invaluable. The introduction of art and artists to public notice, the ushering of Tagore, large portions of whose writings were published in the Review, to the outside world, scholarly contributions on manifold aspects of Indian Culture, past and present, and the able discussion of contemporary Indian problems, social, economic and political, are among the achievements to the credit of this foremost of Indian Monthlies in English. Its pages have been a treasure of information to the Indian student and to outsiders interested in India. The copious editorial notes that Ramananda Babu himself wrote, brief, telling well-documented, outspoken and independent, often marked by mild sarcasm and dry humour will long be missed. We pay our respectful homage to the memory of a most successful and illustrious journalist and nation-builder, and offer our condolences to the members of the bereaved family.

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