Abstract
Jit Pal Singh Uberoi’s ‘was a life lived fiercely’, as daughter, Safina, put it. I believe that he also lived it with a great sense of elan. I imagine that he’s probably going to come back and talk to us one day and tell us what we got wrong. But I will start by telling you my ‘jab we met’ story—or how I met him. I came to Delhi in 1981 with a group of classmates from Madras, and I made the terrible mistake of joining the Department of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. I was admitted to both departments—sociology and economics—and I joined economics. I tired of it soon as I found the classes unpalatable. I then found the Department of Sociology’s handbook. And much to my surprise, I found there was a gentleman who was teaching a course on the sociology of science. I had wanted to work on the philosophy of science back in Madras, but I had figured out that philosophy, the way it was taught in India, was terribly boring because it was largely hair-splitting Anglo-American analytical philosophy. And then I discovered Jit! Here was this gentleman teaching such a course!
I showed the handbook to my friend. We tried to find out who this gentleman was and discovered a strange-looking man. We staked him out. He walked around in shorts, a tucked-in white shirt and a thin red tie, along with canvas shoes and stockings. One Saturday morning when we walked into D-school, we found him sitting on the tree with his two daughters. We followed him around for a few days and found out where he lived. Eventually, we plucked up the courage to meet him at home. We knocked on his door, and he invited us in and made us sit. He had a bunch of papers that he was looking at. He let us stew for a while. We began to look around and saw a picture of Marilyn Monroe on one wall and a beatific sardar on the other, who we later figured out was Guru Nanak.
Just as we were taking in the beatific and the beautiful, we heard a soft voice saying ‘French, German or English’. We were completely startled! I said, ‘I beg your pardon’. And he said, ‘Do you gentlemen want to conduct this conversation in French, German or English?’. The dead seriousness with which he took French, German and English dawned on me only when I got to know him well. I realised that French, German and English were terribly important to him. The question was important because, for him, a language encoded an entire philosophy. Later, we found out that even though he did not know them, it was also an act of yearning because he repeatedly said that being multilingual was to be civilised, and anybody who was monolingual was less than civilised. It was the general human condition to be multilingual. It was a civilised way of being in the world. But, more importantly, the problem with we Indians, he often said, is that because we do not know French and German—he called them scientific languages—we are unable to read European theories in the original French and German. Things get lost in translation, and hence we would never be globally competitive with ‘White’ academics. The final and cardinal nail in the coffin was that because we did not know European languages other than English, we would never be able to study the Anglo-European world. All this took a long time to figure out.
The penny dropped, little by little, over the years. In time, what seemed to be an intimidating and seductive remark for a 22-year-old to fathom actually encoded an orientation. I took all this rather seriously and did try to study the Anglo-European world, first as his doctoral student and continue to do so. I must say, it has been enormously rewarding.
If I had to really sum up Jit’s life, I would say it was bohemian. When I say that it was bohemian, I mean that like all bohemians, he was a non-conformist. But his non-conformism was an exceedingly serious affair. For a bohemian—certainly for him and me—what it means is making no distinction between work and play. His work was his play, and I think this is how he continues to live on in all of us. I often tell my students that the state is paying me to have a ball. When I get up in the morning and think of going to class to teach, I smile. And when I got up in the mornings and thought of going to Jit’s class as a student, I always smiled because Jit’s classes were like a soap opera; every class was the next episode of the soap opera that we waited for. Each class was an absolute delight and a complete treat! Sometimes he would hold classes on Saturdays for no rhyme or reason. Somebody would send him a manuscript that had not yet been published, and we would read that manuscript from 10 in the morning to six in the evening, purely for fun. Often, for those entire eight hours, he spoke non-stop. You could not get a word in edgeways, and you did not need to because it was so phenomenally entertaining. It was entertaining because he was original and witty. He never tried to be funny, never tried to put you down, because he was an original wit and everything that he said was said with a poker face. But most of it was so hilarious that you wanted to laugh. That was the beauty of the man! I think this is something that we have imbibed, and this is something that we will all treasure—on how to lead a life of non-conformism, but a life of non-conformism that is completely and utterly serious.
I would like to end with another instance of his famous ‘seat story’, which again is an exemplary instance of his bohemianism. When he became the proctor, the students went on strike. Jit, rather than taking disciplinary action as the proctor, evidently went and sat with the striking students. He told them that they were not carrying out the strike properly, and he was going to teach them how to strike! The registrar, who was witness to this, was appalled. He went and told the vice-chancellor (VC) what Jit was up to. He apparently told the VC that ‘instead of putting the strike down the proctor is sitting there; I don’t know what he is doing but he is sitting with them’. The VC summoned Jit, and, when the registrar repeated his lament, Jit told the registrar, ‘You are a registrar; you are tied to your seat. You are a registrar only as long as you sit in the seat. I am a professor, and the seat goes with me wherever I go. And as a professor it is my job to teach students how to strike properly’.
I will end here. And I will end by saying that he was a really cool professor. The coolest professor that I have ever met in my life.