Growing up at Vidyasagar University: an autoethnography

Abhijit Guha

Prologue
At the outset, I confess that my autoethnographic[1] account is neither ‘neutral’ nor ‘detached’ and I do not pretend to be unbiased because, I consider Vidyasagar University[2] as a dynamic entity, a moving train, within which one cannot just sit on the fence. Secondly, I do not believe that one particular individual’s account of an institution can be all encompassing. A history of an institution is written by many persons, many historians, and many narrators often with contradictory views at different and same periods of time. It is an ongoing and dialectical process.[3]

Looking back
Imagine a young man of twenty nine, educated at Kolkata during the tumultuous ‘70s suddenly drops in a small town in West Bengal as a teacher in a newly founded university. Imagine further that this young man had no previous experience of teaching, let alone living permanently in a rural area, and he lived there as a permanent resident, within a university campus, surrounded by villages and of course, wide open countryside. That was me and it was 1987. Viewed from the anthropological perspective, the situation was fit for conducting participation observation and fieldwork and I did that too, although accidentally [4].

I joined Vidyasagar University on 6 December 1985, and became a permanent resident of the campus since July 1987. I saw the university growing up brick-by-brick and I also grew up within the rural milieu, slowly, sometime without even knowing the changes that had occurred within me. It was, simultaneously, a painful as well as a joyous journey in all sense of the terms. I missed my friends, addas [5], cinemas, dramas, book-fairs, little magazines and my whole life in Kolkata. Culturally, I was uprooted. I could only share my pains with my wife for she too was displaced like me. But our memories of Kolkata were not dead; those were in fact relived as our sons grew up at Medinipur. They listened to our ways of living at Kolkata which we visited with them for three to four times in a year. I have seen my sons growing up successfully with the university which had also developed from an embryonic stage to its present state. My life at Vidyasagar University from the very beginning was wedged up in the locality where I would station myself permanently for the next 27 years. That finally yielded many fruitful events in my academic career and social life. I will narrate some of them in this memoir.

Marginal native
It is not possible for me to think of Vidyasagar University as a separate entity from the Medinipur town and the district. But then, it was again a painful experience for two reasons. The typical urban middle class Kolkatans, my friends, relatives and others had a vague idea about Medinipur. Many thought that the place where I lived was near to Digha. Still others even thought that I worked in Vidyasagar College. I have also heard a number of intellectuals referring to ‘Midnapore University’ as my place of work. One renowned sociologist once asked me whether the university where I teach was adequately ‘urbanized’ or not? All these were, disgusting for me. Equally nauseating was the view of some local elites who expressed concern over the recruitment of inexperienced young teachers, like us, who have become founders of post-graduate departments at a university which had just disassociated from the Great University of Calcutta!

Initially, I felt like a marginal person and many of my friends and well-wishers suggested that at the earliest opportunity, I should leave Vidyasagar University. A good number of my best friends and colleagues who were academically very sound too left Vidyasagar. These disenchanting events, instead of alluring me were shocking in the process of my socialization at Vidyasagar University. At this juncture, I could vividly recall my personal communications with my teacher Professor Surajit Sinha with whom I was associated for doing my Ph.D as an ICSSR doctoral fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata. Just after joining Vidyasagar University, I wrote to Surajitbabu describing my daily struggles of working and adapting to local conditions. Professor Sinha gave a very interesting reply, which I consider valuable even now. Let me quote from Professor Sinha’s letter:

I am very glad that you are already quite busy running the show single handed for developing what the university has labelled as a Bridge Course. Please be careful that the course should be manageable, precisely formulated and play a decisive “bridge” role and not a “buffer” role.

Few years later, during the late ‘90s when I got thoroughly entrenched in the local milieu of Medinipur, I met Surajitbabu at the Indian Museum hall in Kolkata. By that time, my Ph.D registration at CU under the supervision of Professor Sinha had expired. He asked: ‘What are you doing now at Medinipur?’ I immediately replied: ‘Sir, I am now writing in a little known Bengali daily published from Medinipur town.’ Sinha looked at me and in his characteristic style (I always regarded him as a ‘stylist anthropologist’) and said: ‘This is the right kind of thing you are doing. You should do it more.’ I was surprised with this kind of accolade from one of the great anthropologists in India, who enjoyed Fulbright scholarship twice, taught at Northern Illinois and Chicago Universities, Directors of the Anthropological Survey of India and Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, and the Vice-Chancellor of Viswa Bharati. He used no personal letterhead, let alone printed his achievements on it. Surajitbabu’s occasional comments, encouragements and particularly his Bengali writing on the potentials of Viswa Bharati was my great source of encouragement and helped me to overcome the marginalization I was facing in the initial years of my journey at Vidyasagar University. He never advised me to use Vidyasagar University as a stepping stone to move towards better places in the metropolis. I got similar kind of inspiration from two personalities, much later. These two persons were Vina Mazumder (one of the pioneers of women’s studies in India) and Anil Kumar Gayen (the forgotten founder of Vidyasagar University), although I had never seen Professor Anil Gayen.

Adopted son of the soil
I could still see in my mind how Vidyasagar University with the teachers began her voyage in a troubling ocean of financial uncertainty and political bossism in a rented house at a place named Subhasnagar in the town. Only nine teachers joined at the very beginning and there were three officers and a handful of non-teaching staff. Our task was to scrutinize the application forms of the students for our respective departments. I could recall that one day an enthusiastic and bossy officer gave us an attendance register for signing and some of us signed in it. Professors Rabindranath Jana and Tarun Kumar Banerjee protested and requested us not to sign in it since, as they explained, ‘University teachers do not have to sign in daily attendance registers.’ All of us agreed and this incident was the first spark to unite ourselves under an association. Vidyasagar University Teachers’ Association was born and by the time we have moved into the present campus and classes also began. The first President of VUTA was Professor Durga Prasad Pande and the General Secretary was Professor Manoranjan Maity and I was the Assistant-cum-seminar Secretary. But during that time there was little division of labour and the teachers of all the departments constituted a single family and we were all housed in the two floors of the science block.

There were of course divisive forces created by the external political functionaries and some of them were members of the district unit of WBCUTA. One of them insisted upon us to form the Primary Unit of WBCUTA at Vidyasagar University. I rebuffed that gentleman in the public by saying that we would first form our university teachers association, and then we would think of WBCUTA. In any case, those of us who were not politically indoctrinated on either side of the then dividing line, created our own intellectual niches in the rented houses of some of our colleagues. Brilliant addas were held in those enclaves and not unsurprisingly, ideas around organising seminars and publication of interdisciplinary journals and even floating of the proposal of a multidisciplinary M.Phil. Course, were born in these evening gatherings of teachers which often took place at small restaurants named Ashirbad and Mistighar on the Medinipur Station Road and also in Kamala Hotel at Battala Chowk. Some of the outputs of those addas took concrete shapes, (like the only one issue of the Social Science journal of VU edited by Professor Tarun Kumar Banerjee) some have miserably failed (e.g. the M.Phil. proposal prepared by me) or aborted after a good beginning (seminars by VU faculties a students under VUTA’s banner) but, I still cherish the memories of those productive encounters of addas when I now pass through these places of the town. I am not aware whether multidisciplinary addas still take place among the younger teachers of the university within and outside the campus, in the town, and whether the younger teachers still fight with one another as we did, sometime acrimoniously, to champion one’s point of view.

Forgive me for the digression, and I again go back to the seminars organized by VUTA during the early years. The first series of seminars organized by VUTA was delivered by the senior teachers of the university. Professor Tarun Banerjee spoke from his excellent Ph.D. thesis(now published as a book) on the Naxalite movement, Professor Sachinandan Sau talked on the economics of Haldia Port(his Ph.D thesis), and I presented a paper jointly with my students on the emerging trends of research in Anthropology. Our then Registrar, Dr. Jyotirmoy Pal Chaudhury (he did his Ph.D at Birmingham University on West African history) gave a very informative lecture on the ‘struggle for rice and rights in Liberia’. Professor Tapan Jyoti Banerjee gave an interesting lecture on the literary works in English by Indian authors. Participation of the students and teachers of all the six founder departments of the university used to be splendid in those seminars. One very interesting seminar on the national budget was organized by VUTA in the month of March, 1987 and it was led jointly by the Commerce and the Economics departments. Professors Kartick Paul and Arindam Gupta presented excellent papers. We had no sense of inferiority complex for not being able to invite reputed scholars from Kolkata in those seminars. VUTA, at that time, virtually had no fund to invite outside scholars. VUTA seminars, were however very much enjoyable for us. A little later, I presented a very debatable paper in one VUTA seminar held on 7th July 1993. It was on the environmental pollution in erstwhile USSR. The seminar hall was packed up and critical questions were raised by my brilliant colleagues of the Economics and English departments and, you may be happy to know that those questions inspired me to study the problem further and enabled me to publish two articles, one in Bengali in Jignsa(June, 1995) and the other in a peer-reviewed professional journal(Journal of Human Ecology, 1996). This was my last seminar presentation organized by VUTA (I presented four seminars at the VUTA platform) and probably the last one presented by any teacher of Vidyasagar University. Afterwards, seminars in VUTA became an affair of external resource persons. I think the present VUTA leadership may again think of reintroducing seminar presentations by our youngest batch of teachers, research scholars and students for the greater academic benefit of the university.

My tenure in the post of Assistant Secretary did not last for its full-term, and that was because of my headlong opposition to the informal decision which used to come from outside the university, from the then political bosses. It was decided by the outside boss who communicated to us via some insider representatives of the external political commanders that the first set of VUTA office-bearers will continue for the second term and there will be no change for the sake of ‘unanimity’. This word became a cliché, which continued throughout the history of VUTA elections. I, however objected and the then President and the General Secretary were against me. Finally, I resigned just to disobey the diktat of the outside political bosses.

Election for the posts of VUTA office bearers first took place on 3rd April 1991, in which Professors Kartick Paul, Falguni Chakrabarty and I filed our nominations as opposition members for executive membership. We opposed the dominant majority of the then VUTA not on political party lines but on ideological grounds. We did not believe in the hegemonic myth of unanimity which was superimposed on VUTA by external forces. Kartick and I came out victorious and Falguni never repented for his defeat. He too was against the hegemony. This was the first election amongst all the associations and unions of Vidyasagar University and therefore should be regarded as a remarkable event in the history of VUTA.

The next batch of VUTA leadership was headed by Professor Pranab Ganguly(President), Dr.Tarapada Ghosh(General Secretary) and Ambarish Mukherjee(Assistant Secretary).This batch was also notable in the history of VUTA because of its brief but significant stay in the office. They could arrange a delegation of VUTA office bearers to put up a deputation to Professor Nurul Hassan, the then Governor of West Bengal to demand governmental initiative towards the release of capital grants from the UGC which was unavailable to Vidyasagar University since its inception. I do not know how far it worked, but that enthused the general teachers in a great way.

In any case, the size of the university had to increase and the close bond amongst the teachers gradually loosened, inside speakers in VUTA seminars were no more visible, number of general body meetings of VUTA declined sharply. The VUTA constitution was reformulated and secretariat and executive bodies of VUTA assumed more importance. On the other hand, my interactions with the social, cultural and educational centres of the Medinipur town increased. I became a columnist in a local daily, wrote in local little magazines, became members of Midnapore club, Midnapore swimming club, lectured in a science club and became a close associate of Midnapore film club and started to write on foreign films dealing with anthropological themes and developed contacts with the Midnapore Unit of the state-level Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR).Active intellectuals of the town, notably, Siddhartha Santra, Biplab Majee and Tapas Maity and my students played a catalytic

role to introduce me to the wider world of the town and the district, and I realised that Vidyasagar University and its week-end teachers were almost unknown to the intellectual hub of the town. For me, it was again a very painful experience since I wished to belong to the university as well as to the town but found them opposed and sometime antagonistic to each other. I was hovering between the town and gown. This antagonism was also expressed in political idioms. Many in the town identified me as one of the beneficiaries of the political bosses who were controlling the university while within the university, I was already classified as one who was against the then ruling political regime! At another level, my permanent residence at Medinipur town with my family and my Kolkata origin coupled with my increasing connections with the cultural life of the town made me an unclassified category in the cognitive map of the people in the town. I had no kin in the town, I have not studied in the schools and the colleges of Medinipur, but I have students having origin in Medinipur. I was not a son of the soil but was trying to become one. In this connection, let me narrate one incident which made a permanent mark on my mind.

In one seminar organized by the Midnapore Red Cross Society, I was introduced by Dr. Shyamapada Paul (a good friend of mine and the secretary of the Red Cross Society, Midnapore Chapter) in the following manner: ‘I now introduce Sri Abhijit Guha to you .He will now talk on the problems of higher education with special reference to Vidyasagar University and though Sri Guha is not the son of the soil but I regard him as our adopted son!’ It was probably in the late ‘90s. I was finally classified under some category in the cognitive map of the sons of the soil!

VUTA’s failure to uphold teachers’ interest: Four appalling cases

Any association must review its failures and I think VUTA should not be an exception. The celebration of Silver Jubilee is a good occasion not only to rejoice our successes, (I have already mentioned some of them and will recount a few others) but also record the shortcomings in a self-critical manner.

Case I
One of the earliest and grave incidents in the history of VUTA was its failure to register protest against the extension of study leave in favour of two brilliant teachers of Vidyasagar University. One of these teachers was Dr.Gobinda Gopal Choudhury, of the Library and Information Science department and the other was Dr.Sibabrata Das, who belonged to the

department of Commerce and Firm Management. Gobinda was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship to work for his Ph.D at Sheffield University, UK in 1989, but his service was terminated by the executive council of Vidyasagar University on the ground that study leave should not “ordinarily” be extended beyond two years, although his case should have been considered as a special one for the benefit of the university and Gobinda had signed a contract that he would serve the university for at least five years after the completion of his Ph.D. The matter was placed in a VUTA General Body meeting and an opinion poll by hand-raising was organized on the floor. The majority of the teachers voted against Gobinda’s extension of leave. Only a few teachers raised their hands in his favour. Notable among them were courageous Professors Bithi Sarkar and Tirthankar Daspurakaystha, who then had just joined the university. The episode was reported in The Statesman under the caption ‘Lecturer; Victim of professional jealousy’ (The Statesman, 2 July 1992, p.12).

Case II
Close to the dismissal of Gobinda, the behaviour of the executive council in case of Sibabrtata (he ranked among the first ten students in Madhyamik and Higher Secondary Examinations) was more interesting. Sibu (as we called him) received a Government of India Scholarship for doing his Ph.D on community development, at the John Hopkins University, USA and he too was not granted extension of study leave beyond two years since Gobinda was not given any special treatment! VUTA remained silent. The matter was, however reported again in The Statesman under the title ‘Study Leave: Lecturer not granted extension’ (The Statesman, 16 September 1992, p.11).

Case III
The next disgraceful case occurred also during the ‘90s when a renowned scholar and founder Head of the Anthropology department Professor Pranab Ganguly (formerly, he was a Professor at Manipur University) was not granted reemployment for the second term by the executive council on the basis of some allegations against him. Professor Ganguly was not even allowed to defend himself. He was a Ph.D and D.Sc. of the Calcutta University and a winner of national and international medals (including Sir Griffith Memorial Medal of CU) for his remarkable publications, an excellent teacher, and was the second President of VUTA. Not a single resolution was moved by the VUTA to protest against Professor Ganguly’s removal from Vidyasagar University, although the then President and the General Secretary of VUTA were members of the executive council. In a later period, reemployment was not given to other teachers (e.g. Dr .Asoke Basu and Professor Purnendu Sekhar Das of the Commerce and Economics departments respectively) of VU and VUTA played almost no role in all the cases. Probably, to avoid these kind of humiliations, Professor Tapan Jyoti Banerjee of the English Department did not apply for reemployment. I still miss the wonderful audio-dramas directed by Professor Banerjee in the pre-puja cultural programme organized by VUTA every year.

Case IV
The fourth scandalous case in the history of Vidyasagar University took place when Professor Falguni Chakrabarty, one of the founder teachers of the department of Anthropology, was beaten up by a group of students and outsiders within the campus on 28 September 1992. The present President of VUTA, Professor Ambarish Mukherjee was also harassed on the same day and he was not allowed to take his classes by a group of students since he accompanied Professor Falguni Chakrabarty who came from Kolkata on that very day to join the university with a Calcutta High Court order which instructed the university authorities to allow Professor Chakrabarty to join after he was suspended on false charges w.e.f. 28 August 1992. This frightening incident did not find any place in the resolution book of VUTA. Professor Tapan Jyoti Banerjee alone came forward to protest against the students, who heckled Professor Ambarish Mukherjee. Incidentally, the pre-puja cultural programme was organized that year too and Ambarish could not join it. I could recall that after the cultural programme Kartick came to my flat and replayed popular Bengali songs in his guitar, which he played in the VUTA’s cultural programme to give a healing touch to Ambarish in that evening. It was one of the most memorable evenings in my life at Vidyasagar University.

A recorded protest in the public domain against the prevailing reign of terror at Vidyasagar University was made by me much later, when Professor Anandadeb Mukhopadhayay, the Vice-Chancellor of Vidyasagar University was not allowed to enter his office by the students’ wing of the then dominant ruling party. He was heckled in full-view of the then WBCUTA leader Professor Anil Bhattacharya, who asked one teacher of VU: ‘where are the teachers of your university?’ The day was 21 March 2001 and no VUTA executive went for the rescue of the Vice-Chancellor. I consider this as the black day of VUTA Good sense, however arose amongst us and within a few days about 30 general members wrote to the President of VUTA to convene a general body meeting on this ghastly incident. A special general meeting of VUTA was convened on 6 April 2001 in which majority of the VUTA members protested against the vandalism of the students in the campus. I wrote a communication in The Statesman which was published as the top letter under the caption ‘Violence Begets Violence’

in the editorial page. Kindly allow me to quote from my letter of 16 April 2001, which I think has contemporary relevance for the Teachers’ Associations.

The situation at Vidyasagar University where the vice-chancellor himself was forced to leave the campus by the vandalism of a group of students….reminds me of the incident in 1992 when my colleague Falguni Chakrabarty was beaten up by a group of students for coming to join the university with a court order…..Our teachers’ associations and WBCUTA remained silent when Mr.Chakrabarty was beaten up before the district police…… I would only like to remind the WBCUTA leadership that far worse days may come when WBCUTA leaders may also be humiliated and beaten up by unruly students within the premises of the educational institutions.

I think I have said enough on the failures of VUTA as a Teachers’ Association. Now I will narrate some of our success stories.

Beyond Economics
It is natural and obvious that a teachers’ association would bargain for the pay and promotion related benefits of the teachers. All through its history, VUTA continued its effort for the economic benefits of the teachers. Introduction and enhancement of personal research grants for individual teachers, pressurizing university authorities for the sanctioning of new teaching posts and expediting the process of career advancement scheme for teachers, enhancement of the remuneration of part-time and contractual teachers, are testimony to this struggle. But apart from fighting for these and other economic demands, VUTA in its early years prepared the first PhD regulations of Vidyasagar University and it was VUTA’s single-handed contribution towards the amendment of the VU ordinances to incorporate Section 36A by which the powers and functions of the Departmental Committee were inserted and that paved the way towards the decentralised and democratic functioning of the post graduate departments with effect from 30 March 1989. VUTA was also much ahead of time in preparing the leave rules for the teachers of Vidyasagar University and in the recent period advanced constructive suggestions towards the making of the new West Bengal University Laws (Amendment) Ordinance, 2011 and also towards the formulation of the modalities of newly introduced evaluation of teachers by the students.

The pre-puja cultural programme initiated by VUTA during the early ‘90s under the leadership of Professor Bithi Sarkar, the then Dean Faculty of Science has become a key point of attraction not only for the teachers but also to all the sections of the university community. This programme added a new dimension to the activities of VUTA.

It would be an incomplete narrative, if I do not mention the voice of protests raised by VUTA leadership against the authorities within the varsity and beyond. I would give two examples from the recent period.

VUTA leadership and the general members protested when the VU authorities excluded the HODs of Botany and Forestry as well as Physics and Technophysics from the selection committees for the recruitment lecturers in Microbiology and Electronics in the mother departments by violating the VU Act, 1981. The matter was reported in the The Statesman under the title ‘Vuta comes down on V-C’ (The Statesman, 24 September 2004, p.II).

In the second instance, the VUTA leadership did not back out to protest against the directive issued by the West Bengal State Council of Higher Education in 2007, to Vidyasagar University in which it was stated that the teachers should record the number of classes to be taken against the classes allotted to them. The then VUTA President Professor Anil Kumar Jana severely criticized the directive by saying that this resembled the ‘regime of Muhammad- Bin-Tughlak’ and explained that the root of this problem lay in induction of state higher education minister as chairman of the HE Council and all the vice-chancellors of universities in the state as its ex-officio members. This was also reported in the media (The Statesman, 20 April 2007, p.III).This early protest of VUTA against the high-handedness of the governmental advisory bodies in the internal affairs of the university has immense contemporary relevance when attempts to install surveillance cameras and CCTV were being made by the present VU authorities under the pretext of the directive of the WBSCHE.

Epilogue
At the end of my narrative, I would recollect my brief experience of holding the post of the President of VUTA during July—August 2011. My experience was unique because during this brief period, with the support of my colleagues, I could install a computer with internet at the VUTA office and start communication through e-mails with the members for the first time in the history of VUTA. Within a few days, I realised that majority of the teachers of Vidyasagar University did not possess leave rules of teachers and the powers and functions of the departmental committee. I began to send scan copies of these two valuable documents to my colleagues through e-mail. I also took an initiative to enhance the salary of the contractual teachers, which was pending for a long time. More importantly, I used to open the VUTA office almost every day to meet the teachers and listen to their problems or simply to enjoy talking with them over cups of tea and coffee. The response was also increasing day by day. I
planned to move VUTA and its demands and visions in the cyber age with full transparency and thorough documentation. I failed, but I also learnt lessons. In fact, this attempt to write a narrative of how with my colleagues, I behaved round the association named VUTA at Vidyasagar University and Medinipur and this atoethnography is constructed to understand ourselves more deeply within a specific socio-cultural milieu. To rehearse famous American cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, The life of a teacher, after all, is a life of learning.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my university faculty colleagues Ambarish, Soumendu, Durga, Kaushik and Sachida for passionately inspiring me to write a historical account of VUTA for the Silver Jubilee Celebration souvenir published on 24 July 2013, edited by T.K.Banerjee. Vidyasagar University Teachers’ Association. Midnapore. This article is a slightly modified version of the historical account. I am particularly indebted to Tarunda, Kartick, Falguni and Ram for reminding me of some memorable events on the history of VUTA. I enjoyed the emotional flavour with which they reported those unforgettable events and, that I believe, has made this narrative participatory. I am also indebted to my wife Priti for her useful comments while I read the first draft of the manuscript. All the shortcomings (factual and interpretative) of this memoir however, lie with me.

Endnotes
1. Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. Autoethnography is a self-reflective form of writing used across various disciplines such as communication studies, anthropology, socialwork, sociology, history, psychology(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoethnogy accessed on 15/08/2020).

2. Vidyasagar University was established with a mission to provide an answer to the education needs of the region. It provides ethnic, sociocultural, geographical along with mainstream education. The university logo with the motto Education, Knowledge, Progress embodies the mission (accessed on 15/08/2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidyasagar_University).

3. Interested readers may see my post-edit article titled ‘Party and the Campus’ published in The Statesman on 3 March 2012 (p.6).

4. Much later, in 2011, I presented a paper in an International Conference at the University of Western Australia in a panel titled ‘Accidental Anthropologist’ on Vidyasagar University Campus. The larger and revised version of the paper has recently appeared in Anthropological Forum, an international journal published by Francis &Taylor (Routledge) in 2013.

5. The word adda has recently been included in wikipedia, the people’s dictionary in the global common cyberspace. The wiki says, ‘…although many Kolkatans boast of the city being the birthplace of adda culture, Satyajit Ray (in his film Agantuk) traces back the origin of the tradition to regular intellectual dialogues prevalent in Ancient Greece at the time of Socrates or Plato’. . [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adda_(South_Asian). Accessed through Google on 11.07.2013].

6. I firmly believe that the members of a teachers’ association of a university in this era of globalization should be efficient (among other qualities) in internet and computers, and the teacher leaders should be skilled enough to travel in the cyberspace. The slogan ‘Think globally and act locally’ has now become old. Today’s slogan should be ‘Think locally and act globally.’ These days, a university teacher can write a paper on the locality around her/his university and publish the same in an international journal and post it in wikipedia for the view of the global community. Recently, I have done it. The readers may see an example of this activity under the section ‘Academics’ in the title ‘Vidyasgar University’ in wikipedia. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidyasagar_University. Accessed through Google on 11.07.2013). The idea arose from my brief experience of working as the President of VUTA.

The author taught Anthropology at Vidyasagar University, Medinipur, West Bengal during December 1985-August 2016

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Jul 6, 2020

Abhijit Guha abhijitguhavuanthro@rediffmail.com

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