Historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, who died in his Oxford home last year, joined Presidency College as a student in 1943. In his memoirs, Bangalnama (The World in Our Times), he recalls that it was the worst and best of times.
The spectre of the Great Bengal Famine loomed large that year. But for a young Raychaudhuri, this was more than offset by the intellectual frisson, generated by rubbing shoulders with the brightest students and greatest professors of the age.
A student of history, his department was then headed by the legendary Sushobhan Sarkar, father of Sumit and Shipra Sarkar, two of our finest modern historians – and the intellectual forebearer to countless historians and economists. They crowded his standing-room lectures in the ‘main’ building, built in 1875, of the only college that mattered on College Street in central Kolkata.
Stories From a 200-Year-Old Institution
On 20 January, Presidency College will celebrate its 200th anniversary. It’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination: 1816 witnessed a meeting, in the home of the then-British Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where a group of progressive Brits and Hindu grandees decided to set up a college for the edification of young natives.
With the support of David Hare and Raja Rammohun Roy, the college opened its gates to 20 ‘scholars’ one year later. Initially called the Hindu College, the name was changed to Presidency in 1855. But let us not nitpick. It is no exaggeration to say that Presidency College, through the last two centuries, laid the intellectual foundations of Indian modernity – in science, liberal arts, economics, and politics.
Every generation of students of Presidency have their favourite anecdotes about their time there, but some stories have turned into legend. The most cited one is probably about Subhas Chandra Bose, then a student of philosophy.
Bose supposedly became incensed by some racist comments made by one professor EF Otten, in 1916. He bided his time, and depending on which version you trust, either assaulted Otten, or deliberately tripped him down the giant staircase in the main building. Bose was immediately expelled, but the incident brought him to the notice of Bengali nationalist leaders.
The League of Extraordinary Presidencians
CV Raman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930, performed many of his famous experiments in light spectrometry in Presidency’s Baker laboratory. The lab was established by one of the pioneers of Indian science, Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, who proved that plants have ‘life’, and that they responded to external stimuli.
Satyen Bose, who theorised the ‘God Particle’, named after him as the Boson, learnt his chops there, mentored by Meghnad Saha, another pioneer of Indian science.
After the polymath Sukhamoy Chakravarty died shockingly early in 1990, his classmate, Amartya Sen wrote a moving article about his friend in a Festschrift. Sen claimed that he was an indifferent pupil, attending lectures sporadically. All he had to do, he recalled, was to lounge in Presidency’s lawns and ask Sukhamoy about any subject. In the course of a few minutes, Chakravarty would fill him in on subjects ranging from capital theory to existential philosophy.
Presidencian Politicians and Parliamentarians
But Presidency was never all about bland academics. It, and the surrounding ecosystem of College Street, was a hotbed of cultural, political and taboo-breaking ferment. One of its early students was Keshub Chandra Sen, a pioneer of the Brahmo Samaj movement, which sought to rid conservative Hinduism of its superstitious shackles. He would later form the even more reformist Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. Naren Dutta studied in Presidency for a year, before transforming himslef into Swami Vivekananda.
Unsurprisingly, political tides, always powerful in Bengal, were strongest in Presidency College. No wonder then that an alumnus from Bihar, was first motivated by nationalist ideas there. He was Babu Rajendra Prasad, our first president. He wasn’t the only head of state to come out of Presidency: the list includes one president of Pakistan, and two of Bangladesh.
The list of politician-alumni is so long that it will fill a small book, but a few names deserve mention: Fazlul Haq, the longest serving prime minister of Bengal, and Bishnu Ram Medhi, prime minister of Assam, were both students. The intellectual thrust and parry of their youth turned many former students into some of India’s finest Parliamentarians: Hiren Mukherjee, Mohit Sen and Somnath Chatterjee come to mind.
Radicalism of the ’60s, ’70s and the Nurturing of Independent Thinking
By the mid-1960s, political tension in Presidency had become as stretched as a sitar string. Inevitably, it was the first to seize upon a small peasant insurgency in Naxalbari, a village in distant north Bengal, developing it into an urban uprising.
Within months of Naxalbari, 1967, the names of Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal were plastered on the college walls, along with blood-curdling slogans asking for the heads of class enemies.
Revolutions eat their children. Over the next 10 years, as the state struck back, it took a terrible toll on the best and brightest of Presidency College. The kids of 1967-77 are truly Presidency’s lost generation. In many cases, this loss was literal: students killed or ‘disappeared’ by the state, military or rival political groups.
By the late 1980s, when I was there, these embers were burning low. The spirit of revolution was hovering at every corner, but the Soviet Union had fallen and China had taken to capitalism.
So new causes had to be found. One day, walking in, I was puzzled to see giant posters that said, “Free Comrade Guzman Now!” My more enlightened comrades assured me that it was now a matter of prestige to secure the release of Abimael Guzman, leader of the Maoist Shining Path movement, in Peru.
This radicalism made us question all dogma. We never allowed unions of the mainstream parties – Congress or the mainstream Left – to strike roots in the college. And we learnt, I’d like to believe, to think independently.
The Decrepitude of Presidency
Yet, slowly the CPI(M) started filling vacant faculty positions with party hacks. Eminent professors like economist Mihir Rakshit and Sukanta Chaudhuri, head of the English Department, were asked to toe the ‘party line’. Both left in disgust soon afterwards.
The rot introduced by the CPI(M) has accelerated under the Trinamool Congress (TMC), despite tall talk by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. The nadir came in April 2013, when TMC goons, frustrated that their party had no presence in the college, broke open its massive iron gates and mercilessly beat faculty and students under the benign gaze of the police. They also vandalised the Baker laboratories.
I hope the next 200 years reverses this horrible trend.
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