Oxford's Indian history chair gets head after 3 yrs

Rashmee Roshan Lal / TNN / Mar 14, 2007, 00:28 IST

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The chair was finally filled eight weeks ago after being vacant for nearly three years, raising questions about why the former NDA government and its successor, the UPA government, appear neither to have expected nor demanded a return on Indian money.

Oxford's Indian history chair gets head after 3 yrs

OXFORD: Seven years after the Indian government's unprecedented £1.8 million gift to Oxford to create the University's first chair of Indian history and culture, the project is only just getting off the ground in a scandalous story of the NDA government's misjudged great expectations, mismanaged government grants and academic inertia at others' expense.
The chair was finally filled eight weeks ago after being vacant for nearly three years, raising questions about why the former NDA government and its successor, the UPA government, appear neither to have expected nor demanded a return on Indian money.
Though the new occupant of the chair, the earnest, erudite, utterly determined and charming professor of early modern Indian history Rosalind O'Hanlon has taken charge with an ambitious and "exciting" agenda for academic action, highly-placed Indian sources admit that even now, there is no guarantee of India recovering its generous investment any time soon with pioneering work on image-building through an Oxford view of history.
"The Indian bequest may seem generous to us but it is at least £3 million less than needed to properly fund such a chair," the sources told this paper.

When the then foreign minister Jaswant Singh announced the Indian endowment here in November 2000, he said the chair was the personal fulfilment of an old "dream".
But the generous Indian bequest got off to a creaky start by failing to appoint the first Oxford Indian history chair, S Subrahmanyam, for nearly two years after New Delhi handed the money over.
O'Hanlon and other senior Oxford academics in South Asian history, defend Subrahmanyam's record as chair, citing his work on "the early modern Indian period".

O'Hanlon, who insists she has "a scholarly agenda and not a right-wing cultural studies agenda" as suspected by some when the NDA broke new ground by instituting the chair.
She generously says she will continue in Subrahmanyam's footsteps "and neither of us have worked on Vedic glories".
But informed Indian sources suggest the first chair produced nothing of much consequence for the two years he notionally occupied the post, even as he spent much of his time at the UCLA in America.
Observers say it is shocking that there has been no significant demonstrable academic work from the chair in seven years, which could be relevant to the world's historical view of India and India's own understanding of its past.
They say this reinforces the impression of a shameful waste of Indian money at a time universities at home are struggling to find cash to survive.
The Indian history chair is only the third instance of any government, from anywhere in the world, funding a post at Oxford University.

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