nary. Until recently he has actually worked for 18 hours a week with his classes[1].
As regards fitness of a university teacher to undertake the teaching of a particular branch of a highly specialised subject, Prof. Sarkar agrees that the Calcutta staff ought to be judged by the standard indicated in the extract from the London University Commission’s Report made by Prof. Chakrabarti. But when one of its members—the Head of a Department—takes up a stone scratched with the date 19-7-72, turns it upside down, reads the writing as an example of a neo-lithic proto-Brahmi script, and rushes to print this piece of “research” in three serious periodicals, he raises philosophic doubts among those who are not his subordinates.
The Calcutta University’s performances in All-India tests held in India are as follows:
| 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | 1925 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I.C.S. | 3 | 4 | 1 | nil |
| Finance Examination | nil | nil |
It has been said in justification of Calcutta’s comparatively poor success at these tests, that the University is not a workshop for turning out I.C.S.’s, etc.; but so is not Madras. Why then does Madras do better than Calcutta?
The I.P.S. is now being conducted as a purely provincial test as regards the selection of candidates, though they are all examined together. It affords no correct ground of comparison.
Re recruitment of Calcutta graduates in other provinces.—Do not be too sure. By this time the average quality of the graduates turned out by Mukherji’s creations (as distinct from men trained by an older breed) has been slowly found out in other provinces. There are definite instructions with regard to them in Bombay and the U.P., but these cannot for obvious reasons be made public.
The ruin of Bengal’s youth is effected by a vicious system of examinations, conducted, mostly by the post-graduate teachers, with their sham first-classes (see Professor Jadunath Sarkar’s article published in the October Modern Review). Professor Chakrabarti finds fault with Professor Sarkar for speaking of some post-graduates teachers as sneaks and sycophants. In support of Prof. Sarkar’s use of the words, see the true story of the discovery of the silver roll inscription, p. 490. M. R., October, 1925, and the dedications of some works by Calcutta University Professors.
As Prof. Sarkar wants retrenchment and economical expenditure of the people’s money, his critic has referred to the salary drawn by him in a vein of sarcasm. Though Prof. Sarkar entered Government service after passing the Premchand Roychand Scholarship Examination and with four years’ teaching experience in first grade colleges, his salary in a Government College was only six hundred after twenty years of public service from the very first of which he had to teach M. A. students. If it is now “over a thousand” after 28 years of public service, it is still much, less than the Rs. 1400 which a Calcutta University professor has been drawing as his total emolument. Nor has Prof, Sarkar been supplied with a furnished Ballyganj flat by the Calcutta University at a quarter of its proper rent.
The Calcutta University has already been allowed to bleed the students and guardians of the entire provinces of Bengal (minus Dacca) and Assam, to the tune of several lakhs of rupees annually, under the heads of enhanced examination fees from the Matric. upwards, price of University publications, selections etc. (compulsory text-books), and various charges which may be best described as abwabs. No residential non-affiliating university has resources of so vast a magnitude.
Any tall talk of what the University in England are doing must be futile mockery, when we contrast the average national income per head in England and India. Prof. Chakrabarti refers sarcastically to the fact that though Prof. Sarkar has criticised the education given in the Calcutta University, he takes his research students from that very university, who, by the by, are only three in number in five years. The reasons are quite simple. Professor Jadunath Sarkar does not enjoy the right of raising revenue in various ways from the students and guardians of two provinces, nor has the “free and independent” Calcutta University been so accommodating as to force any of his works like Mukherji’s conic sections, down the throats of thousands of Matriculation or Intermediate students annually for a number of decades in succession. He cannot, therefore, offer any scholarship to his research students (one or two), but must take those who are prepared to live in his house under the conditions of plain living, earnest work, and no earning during the period of training. Youths agreeing to these conditions can come only from a province where there is a glut of unemployed M.A.’s—which is the pre-eminent distinction of Calcutta. And it must be added that the cheap degrees of Calcutta have not deprived some Bengali students at any rate of their intellectual powers.
Professor Chakrabarti calls the use of the word “megalomania” in connection with the Calcutta University “academic Billings-gate of an unsurpassed quality.” The external indications of this megalomania are too many to recount here. Let us give an example or two. For years the Presidency College has possessed a well-equipped physiological laboratory with a quite competent staff. Yet the university unnecessarily opened classes in physiology with a very ill-equipped laboratory and teachers who could not stand comparison with the Presidency college staff. Classes for Zoology were opened without adequate laboratory arrangements and competent teachers and examiners. One of the paper-setters was so incompetent that he had to plagiarise questions from another University examination papers. Another asked which could have been properly put only to medical students of Zoology.
- ↑ Calcutta University Minutes for 1910, Pt. IV, p. 1509, clearly states, what Mr. Chakravarti has suppressed, that in 1909, Prof. Sarkar worked 18 hours a week.
