Sunil Sethi: The long and short of journeys

Mumbai is now a city held hostage to what its teachers may teach or its students read

The dropping of Rohinton Mistry’s novel Such A Long Journey from the undergraduate syllabus of Mumbai University is actually the story of two new, rather short journeys: the first being the opening salvo of third-generation scion of the Shiv Sena dynasty Aditya Thackeray’s political anointing; and the second, the equally inauspicious start of Rajan Welukar’s takeover as vice-chancellor of a distinguished university that once had a hallowed department of English literature.

Aditya Thackeray, an arts undergraduate himself at one of the university’s prestigious colleges, says that references to Maharashtrians in Mistry’s book were bad “enough to cause goose bumps”. He is obviously a slow, erratic reader because the book has been part of the curriculum for a decade till he discovered it. His political brethren — including the ruling NCP-Congress alliance in Maharashtra — clearly haven’t opened a book in years, given the way they are flashing highlighted photocopies of the novel everywhere. Chief Minister Ashok Chavan, Home Minister R R Patil and others have strongly endorsed the Shiv Sena stand that the book should be chucked.

Rajan Welukar’s recent appointment as vice-chancellor is in itself dodgy. A statistician by training, his name was nowhere on the first shortlist for the post submitted by the expert committee to the Maharashtra governor; it only materialised on a second shortlist, which was promptly challenged in court by Rajasthan University’s vice-chancellor (and a former pro-vice-chancellor of Mumbai University) on grounds of Welukar’s inadequate qualifications. It is widely suggested that Welukar got the job because he is considered close to NCP boss and Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar.

This also raises the inescapable hypocrisy of the Congress party with its projected liberal, secular image and its loathing of the Shiv Sena. Top Congress leaders have not come out to condemn the book’s dismissal. The prime minister, whose reputation as professor and public intellectual was built on books and academic excellence, has apparently nothing to say on political parties dictating university curricula; HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, whose ministry, by way of the University Grants Commission, disburses taxpayers’ money to subsidise higher education at universities such as Mumbai University, is quiet; other leaders are silent because taking a position means losing ground to the Shiv Sena.

Politicians of all hues are increasingly brazen and bellicose in deciding what the Indian public should read or not, from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to James Laine’s biography of Shivaji. Henceforth, they will also decide the literary merit of what students should read. It has happened to school textbooks, learning of history, biography and art. Fiction, the one category that belongs to the realm of a writer’s imagination, had gone relatively unscathed. But no longer. To score points, the Shiv Sena recommends adding The Red Saree, a thinly-disguised fictional biography of Sonia Gandhi, to the syllabus.

The decline of Mumbai University is yet another nail in the reputation of the once free-spirited, cosmopolitan and multicultural metropolis — it’s now a city held hostage to what its teachers may teach or its students read. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that state Home Minister R R Patil is the same morality chieftain whose vociferous campaign in 2005 led to the closure of dance bars, driving 75,000 bar dancers into underground sex work, and raised manifold complaints of extortion and harassment against the city’s police force. This dark, dangerous story is told in Sonia Faliero’s remarkable new book Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars.

One glance at Patil’s blog should help fill in the picture: “I am fondly called Aaba by friends and well-wishers... When it comes to speaking about me, I become very conscious. As I talk about my experiences through my blog, the feeling of diffidence engulfs me... Under (Sharadchandraji Pawar’s) guidance I am trying to inculcate fearlessness and faith in people of Maharashtra through my police force... I love to talk to simple, downtrodden people, talk about their sorrows and happiness... etc.”

If politicians had their way, this is probably the kind of glutinous prose that university students should be reading in their course of study.