The Poetics of Studentship: A Tribute to Professor JPS Uberoi (1934-2024)

My gratitude to Professor J. P. S. Uberoi for showing studentship of truth, as a path for intellectual self-reliance and ‘poorna swaraj’ or holistic self-rule wherein the individual and collective wellbeing are reciprocal. The truth of such studentship unfolds, he demonstrated through his life and works, as one learns to re-search questions with responsibility and without fear.

Thinking retrospectively, my initiation into this studentship happened in 1977 when I joined the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, as a student to pursue an MA degree. His class on classical thinkers (Marx, Weber and Durkheim) suggested the importance of knowing the integrity of theory and practice, and about the vivisection that forcibly separates these.

It was a mid-September evening in 1978, I was sitting outside the Delhi School of Economics coffee house, unhappy and forlorn, not knowing what to do, having not done well in my first-year Masters exams. I got a taste of vivisection. Unexpectedly, a hand tapped on my shoulders. I turned around to see Prof Uberoi. He asked me if I would like to come for a walk. I agreed. He took me home, which was close by on Probyn Road, gave me a glass of water and made me sit down. After some time, our walk began. For over an hour, Prof Uberoi took me on a round trip of the Delhi University campus. All along he suggested, with a wide range of examples, that ‘there is nothing to lose if some papers are repeated. In the long run, every setback is an opportunity to discover one’s path’. At the end of the walk, he hugged me goodbye. I was grateful he gave me so much time. I wondered, was there a need for this long walk? Couldn’t these words have been said over a cup of tea? In retrospect, I think a conversation over a cup of tea would not have had the deep impact that the walk had! I wrote exams for 12 papers—four from the first year and eight of the second year—MA previous and final, respectively, as was the nomenclature then. This was not difficult. Enough to qualify for an MPhil, I improved my grades, and in this process built stamina as well as the capacity for perseverance.

Walking regularly was an integral part of Prof Uberoi’s daily life. On several occasions, I heard him say, ‘Every day is new day, a new beginning, a resurgence and revitalization’. I observed that every morning, he made several conversations while walking to the classroom in the Department of Sociology, from the gates of the Delhi School of Economics. He would often go to the coffee house and talk with students, colleagues, and visitors after class. Over several visits to his home, I observed that siesta was his sacred time for recuperation and regeneration. Thereafter, the professor would take his dog for a long evening walk. After this was his study time. In the evening, he would often sit in the Ratan Tata Library. During this sacred time, occasionally students or visitors would be welcome. I imagined that there was a sacred time in the morning as well, before he left for the Department of Sociology. After retirement, some of the conversations shifted to the Mall Road DDA house near the university. Some continued outside the Ratan Tata Library. Professor Patricia Uberoi, his wife, would bring him to the library every morning and take him back home for lunch. After some years, these conversations took place at his residence in Sah Vikas Apartments, Patparganj, on his birthday, 5 September every year. The last one was on his birthday in 2023.

Regularity served him as a midwife for intellectual fortitude and self-reliance, within the resources of time, space and finances made available by the university system in India. With regularity he created durable structure: At home, he was a non-conventional conscientious householder; in the university, a bold sociologist-social anthropologist, and in the public domain a humble critical citizen.

Official class time was only the beginning of conversations. Prof Uberoi was engaged in several conversations across differences between gender, class status, and power with people from different professions, vocations and walks of life. Every conversation continued, sometimes the next day, sometimes a week later, sometimes a month later and sometimes years after, in a different place: a garden, a coffee shop, during long walks and so on. There was phenomenal mindfulness as well as wakefulness in keeping up these conversations.

Everyone was equal but different. I witnessed how each person had a different response to him. Without exception, everyone was spellbound as he nonchalantly freewheeled across disciplines, cultures and geographical boundaries citing examples to make his point. In fact, this was his way of ensuring the seamless circulation of the word, of dissolving the halo of the expert and of opening up diverse avenues for dialogue and discussion. All of this was a respectful appreciation of all human beings as thinking beings, an acknowledgement that everyone learns in a fellowship to know their self, grasp the world they inhabited and nurture their respective relation to it. Some people were mesmerised, some confused not getting what the professor was saying, some were irritated, some annoyed, some angry, some thought of him to be eccentric, some appreciated him as a scholar, some thought his works were incomprehensible, and others awestruck, kept their distance from him.

From 1977 to 2023, it is 47 years, almost half a century, of my conversation with Prof Uberoi. Many others might have had more years of being in communication with him. This long duration has in fact created the ground for the fellowship to evolve into a sangat (a gathering of people similarly engaged in conversations). As the news spread that Prof Uberoi had breathed his last, people gathered. This was an acknowledgement of his presence in their respective lives, over and above individual time and space, for a fellowship, their sangat to absorb, internalise and carry forward the breadth of his ideas in the rhythms of daily breath.

As a modest contribution to the sangat, I share glimpses of some conversations.

The studentship became more wholesome when I became his doctoral student in 1983. Over approximately six months, he drew my attention to what work for a doctoral research entails. It is where you learn the basics of intellectual self-reliance: to ask questions, make a reading list, plan research, and draw inferences, write, rewrite and write again. I remember discussing three very important themes: humility, the boldness of imagination, and fortitude. Together, these inculcate fearlessness. Each presupposed the other (non-dualism of theory and practice), independently humility gets associated with ignorance, boldness with arrogance, and fortitude with foolishness (dualism of theory and practice).

Humility was related, I recollect, to the temporality of research. He said, ‘Your doctoral thesis will be complete when it has matured in the same way as a papaya fruit or any other fruit ripens and falls off the tree (it does not have to be plucked before its time)’. Elaborating on the papaya metaphor, the professor said straightforwardly, ‘Your thesis may take 5 years, or 10 years or 25 years…it may not complete! Are you prepared?’. I soon realised that this required humility. After some days, I went back to him and said, ‘Yes I am willing to learn as I move along this path’. Deep down there was a trust in him and an eagerness to know how this would pan out. Today, looking back over approximately 30 years of research, teaching, and writing, this metaphor of humility says, ‘there is no need to be disheartened when the rhythms of ideas do not fit into the institutional time frames; that there is need to cultivate stamina, patience and commitment to abide by the temporality of asking as well as to pursuing questions’. This non-dualism engages the whole being of a person.

Boldness of imagination, I recollect, was related to walking on two legs. After returning from the first six months of fieldwork, I shared with Prof Uberoi a question: ‘Is there a way of knowing the world view of forest dwellers other than from the standpoint of mainstreaming them into some version of positivist modernity? Is there another discourse or frame of reference that will draw out their own expression of their knowledge in relation to their way of life?’ Prof Uberoi said:

We will discuss this later, for now think that research as such is a way of learning to walk on both legs–theory and fieldwork (non-dualism) and, to get a wholesome sense of the field of research, two cycles of social life across all seasons could be observed. In other words, each season needs to be studied at least twice and the critique of positivist modernity is a one-thousand year project.

The boldness of this imagination was to be built and nurtured with the practice of reading, writing and discussion. Indeed, the fruit of a papaya tree was merely a moment in the time scale of several generations. Why several generations could be discussed at another time and in another place? Suffice it to say here that this is a marathon walk; it cannot be a 100-metre dash, and for this reason, it requires the sangat of people who are willing to partake in an exchange of ideas, life experiences and world views over long durations.

Fortitude, I recollect, was related to standing by the word. The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) doctoral scholarship required me to submit a six-monthly report. A list of 100 words was submitted. The officer dealing with my file summoned me saying, ‘What kind of a report is this?’. I replied, ‘Sir, I have to learn the Koitor’s language, without any translator or mediator or informant. This is absolutely necessary if I have to know anything about their social life’. Annoyed by this answer, he discontinued my scholarship. I reported this event to Prof Uberoi. He smiled and asked, ‘What does this teach you?’ ‘I have to continue without a scholarship’, I replied. He then said, ‘Why are you surprised? Shabd ki izzat karna aasaan nahi hai (to respect the word is not easy)’. What I understood of this was that, learning a language is a way to respect the word and the people who speak it; to abide by it with or without any support in the face of adversaries who are threatened by this. Such adversity comes because standing by the word threatens the status quo perpetuated by the fetish of words. Standing by the word without institutional support makes it possible to know the ‘life of the word’ in different contexts, through the diversity of usage, in contestations of its meaning in different discussions…and so on.

This I saw was an aspect of the path to intellectual self-reliance and poorna swaraj or wholesome self-government.

Humility over time, boldness of imagination, and fortitude in the face of adversity are necessary to walk this path ‘because there are chances of breaking a leg or both legs’ (either theory or fieldwork, or both) on the way. The question here according to Prof Uberoi was, ‘to endure difficulty, how much of one’s self is a person willing to give up: the comforts of armchair thinking, to pursue reading, writing and discussion?’ He would say, ‘As much as is required to stand by the word’. This is a way of respectfully engaging with (not patronising) the lives of all living and non-living beings. To draw attention to the gravity of this responsibility, he often talked about the international division of labour between theory and fieldwork. ‘The economically underdeveloped/developing countries were sites of fieldwork for the production of theory by the economically developed countries (dualism)’. He emphasised that all hegemonic regimes break both legs. These regimes associate humility with lack of knowledge, boldness with pretensions to knowledge, and fortitude with ineptitude (dualism of theory and practice in each).

Prof Uberoi singularly opposed this division of labour and showed a way to reverse this relation. He once told me, ‘It is easy to do field work with those who are poor and marginalised. These people are willing to share their sorrows and grievances. To do field work on the oppressor is difficult because it questions and challenges authority’. He argued that the ‘word’ of truth was in the monopoly of positivist modern European sciences. These sciences legitimised state authority to use violence against its own people. Several students were inspired by this to undertake fieldwork in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. He showed through his work that to research the oppressor was ‘writing an ethnography talking truth to power’.

As I am writing this tribute, I see a letter from Professor Arjun Appadurai, in which he acknowledges Prof Uberoi’s contribution:

Dear Anant, I am deeply saddened by the passing of Prof. Uberoi. I met and knew him in the 1980’s, and was one of his hosts at the University of Pennsylvania for a brief visit during that time. He was a thoroughgoing scholar, but equally a critic, who envisioned alternative possibilities in all forms of life. I still remember some of his spoken observations, such as a casual criticism of Foucault, saying that Foucault should have taken up physics or mathematics for his critique of Western humanism, rather than easier targets like linguistics or political theory. His many writings also opened my eyes to other Europe and to the meaning of Swaraj as a discovery of these alternatives everywhere. (Trail Mail ‘Homage to Prof JPS Uberoi’, 7 January 2024)

In an article in 1985, Professor Uberoi wrote:

…I…hope that the sciences and the arts can all work together to preserve the university as the right institution for just this kind of exchange of thought and formation of conscience in the spirit of self-rule or swaraj, which is the third function of the university after teaching and research. (Uberoi, 1985, p. 1782)

The poetics of studentship for self-rule bemoans adversity, but only for a moment. This is only a station, on the path of a 1,000-year project of non-dualist poorna swaraj or wholesome self-rule. This poetics unfolds with the acceptance that there is no escaping adversity, equally there is no evading getting through it. There is a falling and there is a rising. It takes time, perhaps more than a life. Sooner or later the spirit of self-rule or swaraj reinstates the principle, equal reverence for different lives, as an integral part of a worldview, a dignified way of life and a sense of responsibility to self, neighbours, as well as society.

Prof Uberoi, your passing away is not going away…this conversation with you will continue. You have often said that everything that is worthy of a discussion cannot be discussed in one breath in a lifetime. Goodbye, until the next….