Nostalgia

I had never felt so nostalgic as I felt on my recent visit to India. I met and spoke to my old teachers and also visited my alma mater, Department of English, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur (India). I wish to reminisce here particularly two of my teachers, Prof. R K Kaul and Prof Jasbir Jain who have made a huge difference in my life. I wish to outpour my love and respect for them, which I can only describe as a “spiritual experience”.

Prof R K Kaul, MA (Oxford) Ph.D (London), Visiting Fellow, Yale University (1983), professor of English, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, and Emeritus Fellow, and much more, was the embodiment of what a teacher should be. Prof Kaul was patient with questions from his students. Prof Kaul made impeccable contribution to shape his students’ intellect. He always saw his students as individual thinking human beings, to be listened to and heard, not merely receptacles in classrooms. Prof Kaul was the Head, Department when I post graduated in 1983. A life time teacher and mentor, he delivered most of us out from vulnerable states, when we were struggling to reconcile ourselves with our scholarly persona. I remember when I published a monograph on George Orwell’s 1984 in the year 1984, I approached Prof Kaul to write its Preface. He accepted with a little reluctance and after reading, he not only complimented my work but was ordained by him as “a scholar in making,” words that I have still preserved.

Prof Jasbir Jain, elected life-member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; Fulbright Fellow; Awarded several literary awards, including South Asia Literary Association Award, Indian Association of Canadian Studies Award; nominated for a Global Fellow for 2003, Sahitya Akademi Fellow; Writer in Residence; UGC Fellow; Emeritus Fellow; K.K. Birla Fellow; author of several books and many more, taught us the very sublime of academia, to be transparent, show no hypocrisy. She imbibed strong values in us through her caring smile and her unparalleled manner of teaching. Her core values of humanism always resonated with her students, and it continues still today. I was privileged to meet her last week when I shared with her how I reinvented the scholar within me in conducting discourse analysis of Diasporic and Expatriate writings. She smiled and showed me a few titles of hers on Diaspora.

We all treasure the kind words of our teachers, they are the ones who have sown the seeds of serious academic pursuit in us, which have matured and deepened over all these years. Our intellectual inclinations, our values of academic honesty have been nurtured in us by our great teachers. It’s time for us to acknowledge and pay our respects.