Rajesh Kochhar

The Tribune, Chandigarh (Op-ed page) 1 October 2007

60 years of Panjab University
In pursuit of excellence

by Rajesh Kochhar

PANJAB UNIVERSITY Chandigarh completes sixty years of its eventful existence on October 1, 2007. The occasion provides a convenient opportunity for taking stock of the past, understanding the present and planning for the future.
It is no coincidence that the University’s diamond jubilee closely follows that of India’s independence. Indeed, one of the very first acts of independent India was the establishment of a University as a successor to and in continuation of the University of the Punjab at Lahore (established 14 October 1882) which fell into Pakistan’s lap, even as most students and teachers crossed to India. By a coincidence, the diamond jubilee of Panjab University coincides to the month with the 125th anniversary of its Lahore precursor.

It was naively expected that the Lahore University would conduct the examinations for both parts of the Punjab even after partition, but that was not to be. East Panjab University, as it was then called, had to be “hustled into an unceremonious birth” through the promulgation of an ordinance, without even a Vice-Chancellor, leave aside any infrastructure. (Panjab was advisedly spelt with an initial “a” to distinguish the new University from the old. The appellation East was dropped by both the state and the University in 1956.)

The University began with a part-time Vice-Chancellor, Justice Teja Singh (February 9, 1948 – March 31 1949), whose successor Mr G.C. Chatterjee served for merely four months (April 1 – July 31 1949). The appointment now went to Dewan Anand Kumar (1894-1981) who remained at the helm of affairs for eight long and crucial years (August 1, 1949 – June 30, 1957) through four terms of two years each.

Kumar joined at Lahore in 1920 as a Reader in zoology and was appointed Dean of University Instruction in 1946, a post he continued to hold in the new University. He was also, since 1924, a member of Dyal Singh College Trust Society as well as Dyal Singh Public Library Trust, Lahore. It was left to him to administer both these after partition.
Extremely wealthy in his Lahore days through his inheritance of a 6000 acre landed estate, aristocratic, benevolent, imbued with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, well-connected, related to the Nehrus through ties of marriage (Brij Kumar Nehru was his sister’s son),and committed to high academic and ethical standards, the Cambridge – educated Kumar (affectionately and reverentially known as the Dewan Sahib in his time) is the true builder of the University as we know it today.
“Over some difference of opinion with the Chief Minister [Pratap Singh Kairon], Kumar retired from the Vice-Chancellorship in 1957.” While the administrative offices moved to Chandigarh in 1956, teaching department assembling in Chandigarh 1958 onwards. The honour of leading the University from its elegant new home thus befell Dr Amar Chand Joshi whose tenure extended from 1 July 1957 to 30 July 1965.

After a brief sojourn in a cramped Simla, the University offices shifted to hill-top military barracks spread over an area of about eight kilometers in Solan. Kumar functioned from here till 1953 when he shifted to Delhi because of a heart problem.

To meet educational aspirations of the large number of Punjabi refugees now in Delhi, East Panjab University was permitted to intrude into Delhi University’s jurisdiction and start an evening Camp College, with tents serving as a hostel. It is here that the journalism department was restarted in 1948, which borrowed the services of eminent journalists as faculty. (It shifted to Chandigarh in June 1962.) The Camp College itself was acquired by the Dyal Singh College Trust in 1959.

As early as October 1947, physics and chemistry classes were started under the auspices of Delhi University on an initiative by students like Prof. Yash Pal, while chemical engineering was accommodated in Delhi Polytechnic.
For the rest, the University had to depend on the reluctant charity of colleges and schools within its own territory. For full 11 years the University Punjabi department within Khalsa College Amritsar prepared students for the lower-level Gyani and Vidvan examinations only while the M.A. classes remained under the control of the College, as before.
Commerce classes were shifted from Bakrota in Dalhousie after two years to an evacuee property in Jullundur when it was realised that because of the high cost of living in Dalhousie, “only the rich people could afford to send their children there”. Concern for the under-privileged which was so typical of those days seems to have been forsaken by its erstwhile beneficiaries.

In October 1948 Kapurthala, then in Pepsu, offered to host all science departments, but the East Punjab Chief Minister Gopi Chand Bhargava was adamant that the University would not go out of the state. Finally, early 1949, the Government College Hoshiarpur was placed at the disposal of the University. Under the name University College, it became the dominant, but not the sole, seat of the University.

The dual control did cause some problems but the arrangement generally worked well. Prof. Ram Prakash Bambah, who later became the Vice-Chancellor, joined at Hoshiarpur as a Reader in mathematics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was an economics student and then a research scholar at Hoshiarpur. (Later he served in Chandigarh also.)

In 1956, on the eve of merger of PEPSU with East Punjab, it was belatedly suggested that the University be housed in the former’s capital Patiala to “maintain the prestige of that town”. The University however rejected the suggestion, one of the recorded argument being that “Patiala still had a feudal atmosphere while Chandigarh was free from any such thing”.

Chronologically, a product of the mid 20th century, Panjab University is culturally anchored in the 19th century, because the Lahore University’s extant rules and regulations were simply re – validated in 1947. Unlike Bengal where the British were dealing with a social class they themselves had created and enriched, in Punjab they had to come to terms with pre-existing social elites which were duly represented in the University’s governing body, the Senate.
Increasingly worried about the growing Indian nationalism, the colonial government wanted to exercise control over the universities. For the native leadership, Senate was a forum for articulating nationalist aspirations. With passage of time after independence, the Senates seem to have generally lost much of their original focus.

The University was amply compensated for its early travails by the provision of a beautiful campus in the new city of Chandigarh. The University does not carry any scars from its early days, which is a good thing. But memories of the heroism of those days can serve as an inspiration.

Rajesh Kochhar

Reprinted from Kochhar, Rajesh et al (eds) (2013) The Making of Modern Punjab: Education, Science  and Social Change c. 1850-c. 2000, pp. 15-19 ( Chandigarh: Panjab University). 

Punjab was the second last territorial addition to British India. The ground realities here were different and the primary British concern was geopolitics rather than commerce. Education under colonial auspices followed a different route in Punjab than elsewhere. In Bengal, the British had the convenience of dealing with a new social class which had become wealthy through European connection and was favourably inclined towards English language. In contrast, in Punjab the British had to come to terms with the old aristocracy which had no major interest in English. In fact, the enthusiasm which Calcutta and its hinterland as well as the city of Bombay showed for English was not visible anywhere else in the country. In Bengal, the East India Company had been very keen to impart Western education and thought to the Indians through the medium of English. In Punjab however the officials who wanted the oriental languages to be recognized and respected gained ascendancy and successfully enlisted the support of the nobility and the gentry.

In the early years the colonial administration had kept the missionaries and the Christianity enthusiasts in its own ranks on a tight leash lest their evangelical zeal produce a backlash. However, by the mid 19th century such fears had passed. Missionary activity was strictly prohibited in the British India territories till the 1823 Charter gave permission to the British missionaries. The next Charter in 1833 extended the concession to non-British missions. Taking advantage of this, American Presbyterians opened a Mission in Ludhiana, on the outskirts of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, in 1834. The Lodiana Mission as it was called opened a church in 1837 as well as a school.

Significantly the first ever English school in Lahore was a missionary school. As if in anticipation of the Punjab events, the American Presbyterian Rev. Charles William Forman (1821-1894) who had arrived in India in 1847 moved to Lahore in 1849. Many British military officers felt that since they had conquered Punjab, their own missionaries should work here. Accordingly the Anglican Church Missionary Society arrived in Punjab  in 1852 and since the Americans were already ensconced in Lahore chose to make Umritsur [Amritsar] their centre. Both the sets of missionaries worked together harmoniously, receiving handsome help and assistance from high Government functionaries at official and personal levels.

In December 1849 Forman opened an  English school  in Lahore with three students who were taught under a tree. In 1853, the school  settled in a palace known as Rang Mahal which lent its name to the School. Both Lahore and Amritsar displayed remarkable anxiety for learning English. Many Punjabi ‘noblemen and gentlemen’ made private arrangements for teaching English to their sons, and ‘many natives of Bengal who possess a smattering of English find employment as teachers’. The government opened a school in Amritsar in 1849-50 ( because Lahore already had the Mission School), with  English, Hindi, Persian, Arabic and Gurmukhi departments. Within a year, the school came to have a daily attendance of about 150.  About one fourth of the students enrolled for English. ‘The Seikh students of Goormukhee’ were about one fifth of the total. Among the Sikhs, ‘the prevailing caste’ was Jat; among the Hindus Khatris and Brahmins. There was similarly a flourishing English school in Rawalpindi, ‘supported with the sanction of the citizens by a surplus town duty proceeds’. Both the Amritsar and the Rawalpindi schools were handed over to the missionaries.

One of the very first administrative decisions taken by the British in Punjab concerned language. In the Sikh kingdom period, Persian had been the language of the court and of public business.  Between 1851 and 1854, Persian was officially replaced not with Punjabi but with Urdu in Persian script.  With the 1857 decline of Delhi and Lucknow, Lahore emerged as the main centre of Urdu literary activities. In Punjab, missionary and government educational efforts came to complement each other. The government focused on vernacular education at village level and the missionaries on the English. For the missionaries, English education was not an end in itself but as a means towards effecting conversions. When some students were baptized, there was a severe backlash and students were withdrawn. Hindus were not too enamoured of Urdu which they identified with Muslims rather than the province. This is how the government’s initiative for secular English education emerged, and Hindus took steps to introduce English for their children in combination with Hindi and Sanskrit rather than Urdu. The identification of  language ( Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi) with religious communities ( Muslim, Sikh, Hindu) would produce far-reaching consequences in colonial Punjab and later in Indian Punjab.

Rajesh Kochhar

Reprinted from Kochhar, Rajesh et al (eds) (2013) The Making of Modern Punjab: Education, Science  and Social Change c. 1850-c. 2000, pp. 63-65( Chandigarh: Panjab University). 

The Punjab University Lahore became part of Pakistan at the time of Partition, while most students and teachers migrated to India. It had been naively expected that the Lahore University would conduct the examinations for both parts of the Punjab even after Partition, but that was not to be. To protect the interests of the  large number of school and college students suddenly left without an examining body, East Panjab University, as it was then called, was ‘hustled into an unceremonious birth’ through the promulgation of an ordinance on 20 October 1947, under a provisional Syndicate, without even  a Vice-Chancellor leave aside any infrastructure. (Panjab was advisedly spelt with an initial ‘a’ to distinguish the new University from the old. Both the State and the University dropped the appellation East on 26 January 1956.)

Two of the Vice Chancellors of the Panjab University, Dewan Anand Kumar and Ram Chand Paul, had been in service in the Punjab University Lahore.The first two Vice-Chancellors, both  former members of the Syndicate of the Lahore University, were part-time and short-term. Justice Teja Singh, a puisne judge of the Punjab  High Court, was formally appointed honorary Vice Chancellor  four months after the establishment of the University, that is on 9 February 1948. He however resigned on 31 March 1949 to devote full time to his new office of  Chief Justice of PEPSU ( Patiala  and East Punjab States Union) High Court, which he had accepted  in November 1948. He however continued to be an active member of the University Syndicate. His successor, Mr G.C. Chatterjee of the Indian Education Service, and Director of  Public Instruction, East Punjab,   held office only for four months ( 1 April – 31 July 1949) as he was elevated to the membership of the Union Public Service Commission.

The appointment now went to Dewan Anand Kumar ( 1894-1981)   who remained at the helm of affairs  for eight long and crucial  years (1 August  1949- 30 June 1957).  Educated in Cambridge, Anand Kumar was appointed a reader in zoology in 1920 , and head of the department in 1942  at Lahore. In 1946 he was made the Dean of University Instruction, a post he continued to hold in the new University.

Extremely wealthy in his Lahore days through his inheritance of a 6000 acre landed estate, aristocratic, well-connected, benevolent, imbued with a strong sense of noblesse oblige,  and related to the Nehrus through ties of  marriage (Brij Kumar Nehru was his sister’s son),   Kumar ( affectionately and reverentially known as the Dewan Sahib in his time) is the  true builder of the university as we know it today.

The   turbulence  of the   early Panjab University is brought home by  the fact  that it was funded not only by the state government and the central education ministry but also by the central ministry for rehabilitation. After remaining in a crowded Shimla for a short period, the administrative offices were shifted to Solan cantonment where they were housed in  hill-top barracks  spread over an area of about eight kilometers.

Restoration of teaching was not an easy task. Since there was no institution in Punjab with facility for science practicals, physics, chemistry and chemical engineering  classes were started in Delhi. Since Delhi now had a large number of Punjabi refugees who wanted further education, Panjab University was permitted to intrude into Delhi University’s jurisdiction and start  a Camp College, which  could offer instruction only in the evenings because the  two  school buildings it was located in ran their own classes during day time. The College even set up a hostel in 150 small canvas tents pitched in the grounds. It is in the Camp College that the journalism department was restarted in 1948, which borrowed the services of eminent journalists as faculty.

For the rest, the University had to fall back on its own affiliated colleges. Zoology was shifted to Government College Hoshiarpur, while botany and pharmacy were hosted by Khalsa College Amritsar, which also accommodated Punjabi. The unusualness of the times can be gauged from the fact that for full 11 years the University Punjabi department within the Khalsa College prepared students for the lower-level Gyani and Vidvan examinations only while the M.A. classes  remained under the control of the College, as before. Hindi and Sanskrit were looked after by the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College Jullundur, while Law was accommodated in an evacuee property there, after a brief sojourn in Shimla.

The political and educational leadership at the time was very sensitive to the needs of the underprivileged. Commerce classes were started in  Dalhousie, but it was soon realized that the because of the high cost of living at  the hill station, only the rich people could afford to send their children there. Accordingly, 1951 end, the Commerce College was also shifted to Jullundur and  housed in an evacuee property. Early  in 1949   the  building of Government College Hoshiarpur was placed at the disposal of the University, under the name University College. The dual control did have some problems but the arrangement generally worked well. Two eminent later Vice-Chancellors of the University, Professors Ram Chand  Paul and Ram Prakash  Bambah  both were at  Hoshiarpur, though Prof. Paul  had begun his career at Lahore itself. As early as 1951, the Central Government led by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru decided to build a new capital for the Indian Punjab. Interestingly Patiala made a generous offer of land to accommodate Panjab University there, but very farsightedly, the Government  opted for a new campus in a new city.The various components of the University began assembling in Chandigarh 1958 onwards.

“Over some difference of opinion with the Chief Minister [Pratap Singh Kairon], Kumar retired from the Vice-chancellorship in 1957.”  The various components of the University began assembling in Chandigarh  1958 onwards. The honour of leading the University from its elegant new home thus befell Dr Amar Chand Joshi, at the time Director of Public Instruction Punjab, whose tenure  extended from  1 July 1957 to 30 June 1965. His successor was Mr Suraj Bhan, who was at the time of appointment the Vice-Chancellor of the newly founded Kurukshetra University.

The well-known chemist Ram Chand Paul (1919-2002) who held office for 10 and a half years,  from 1974 till 1984 end, has been the longest serving Vice-Chancellor in the history of Panjab University. Born in Shakargarh ( now in Pakistan) he had his early education  at Central Model School Lahore, and the Hindu and Khalsa  Colleges in Lahore Amritsar. Since his father and the eldest brother both were doctors, he dutifully enrolled for MBBS. But since his first love was chemistry he abandoned medicine  within a few weeks and joined Honours school in Chemistry at Punjab University. After passing his B. Sc. Honours School from Punjab University Lahore in 1939, he began research for the M. Sc. Degree under the guidance of Professor Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, with whom he published his first ever research paper.  He obtained his (first) Ph. D. from the University in 1947 with Dr. S. D. Muzaffar as his thesis supervisor. In the meantime in 1944 he published a paper in the prestigious Journal of American Chemical Society, jointly with Muzaffar.  This work in turn enabled him to obtain admission in Cambridge University in 1952 for his second Ph. D, which he earned in 1954 under the supervision of the internationally acclaimed inorganic chemist, Harry Julius Emeleus.

After serving the Punjab University and Panjab University as a Demonstrator, Lecturer and Reader, he went to Karnatak University Dharwar, as Professor only to return the next year to Panjab. Interestingly, the unsettled conditions in the University in the early days can be seen from his long list of publications which has a conspicuous gap for 1948 and 1949. Professor Paul was succeeded by his  colleague from the Hoshiarpur days, Professor Ram Prakash Bambah who held office from 1 January 1985 till June 1991.

( I thank Prof. Ram Chand Paul’s daughter, Dr Madhu Kaul and son, Dr Krishan Kant Paul, for their help and inputs.)

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