Page:The Modern Review (July-December 1925).pdf/365

342 absolute majority in these Boards will select only such books as are:

(a) Possible for them to teach, including obsolete books or books by writers like Dr. Abinash Chandra Das or Dr. Gauranga Nath Banerji,

(b) Books favoured by the head of the department or the party in power, such as Sir R. G. Bhandarkar’s “Early History of the Deccan”, G. N. Banerjee’s “India as Known to the Ancient World”, Keene’s “Fall of the Moghul Empire”, which are hopelessly out of date and grossly erroneous.

2. The appointment of lecturers and the fixation of their salaries, which makes the applicant for a post;—

(a) compelled to support the system in vogue in spite of its defects and

(b) to accede to decisions of the head of the department in all matters, whether right or wrong. The applicant for or the incumbent of a post, knowing that his appointment will last for a number of years only and that his reappointment lies in the hands of this Board, must remain a silent spectator of the sham research work, fraudulent Post-Graduate teaching and the selection of unworthy text books by the members of this Board or he will be sacked at the end of his first term as an inconvenient dissenter who disturbs the harmony of the family compact.

3. The standards and conduct of examinations and the appointment of examiners. These powers assigned to the Board of Higher Studies are more dangerous than any of the two preceding. If the group of teachers in a particular subject have the sole power of fixing the standard of Post-Graduate examinations and the appointment of examiners, then in the interest of their own skins they will fix the standard as low as possible. It is well-known that out of twenty-five lecturers at present employed by the Calcutta University in teaching Ancient Indian History to the Post-Graduate students, the Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture and a few of his assistants, have any real right to teach Post-Graduate students.

Thus the lecturer in Fine Arts and Iconography—Archaeology—Group B does not possess any idea of the history of ancient schools of sculptures and the lecturer in Numismatics (Archaeology, Group A, Paper IV) fails to read an uncommon and rare ancient Indian coin. People of this type therefore prefer to fix the standards of examinations in such a way that students are able to answer the question from their lecture-notes only. In the second place they and their colleagues select such examiners as are favourable to them and are unable to deviate from the standard fixed by the teachers. In outward show and camouflaging the late Sir Ashutosh Mookerji was a past-master, and an outsider judging from the calendars and the printed regulations will not be able to judge the amount of sham existing in the teaching and examinations in the Post-Graduate Department in Arts of the Calcutta University.

An illustration of this was furnished by Prof. Jadunath Sarkar and the facts were admitted in the public press by even the University apologists. He had been appointed an external examiner in M. A. Islamic history—his special study, and, in order to test the modernity of the knowledge of the Post-Graduate classes had asked the candidates to examine the popular traditions that the Arabs had burnt the famous Alexandrian library and that Roderic, the last Gothic king of Spain, had outraged the daughter of Count Julian of Ceuta, who had invited the Saracen invaders in order to avenge his family honour. Now, though these myths had been disproved by scholars many decades ago, the Calcutta Post-Graduate teachers were still vegetating in the age of Gibbon’s Orientology. Not one student gave the correct answer! When Prof. Sarkar, in his report as examiner, pointed ont that the answers showed that the latest works on the subject had not been brought to the notice of the students in the Post-Graduate classes, these very teachers, who as internal examiners preponderated in the Board of Examiners, resented this legitimate inference as to their work, and decided to exclude Professor Sarkar from acting as examiner in future. Some softer external examiner has replaced him. Now as Prof. Sarkar is invited by nearly all the Universities of India to assist at their highest examination in his own subject, Calcutta’s boycott of this scholar could not have hurt him in the least, whatever light it may throw on Sir Ashutosh’s tactics.

The Regulations lay down that there will be two sets of examiners, internal examiners and external examiners. The internal examiners are appointed by the Board of Higher Studies in that subject according to para 12 (g) of part I, chapter XI of the Regulations, but the external examiners are selected by the “Executive Committee on the recommendation of the Board of Higher Studies concerned”. Therefore