The College on the Ridge

To get a sense of this charming memoir, it is interesting to study the words of a Delhi historian and an old boy that bookend Daniel O8217;...

To get a sense of this charming memoir, it is interesting to study the words of a Delhi historian and an old boy that bookend Daniel O8217;Connor8217;s writing. Narayani Gupta situates this remembrance of a 8220;short decade8221; the Hobsbawn touch extends to every aspect of the book8217;s title of teaching English literature at St Stephen8217;s College in the city8217;s expansion from the leafy, undulating Civil Lines in the north to the shrill real estate development in the south. Stephen8217;s, in her reckoning, is a choice vantage point to gather the political and social changes of the sixties.

Gopal Gandhi, in his Afterword, expands on the internalisation of the Stephen8217;s experience. It began for him, like for so many before and after, with a scrambled-egg-on-toast and a tea at the cafe, under the stern, unforgetting care of waiters Dolly and Shelley. To be a Stephanian 8212; even to aspire to be one 8212; meant separating oneself from the rest of the world with College lingo and attitude. After the mandatory tour of chapel, library and reading room, he gauged the need for quick acclimatisation. 8220;All we pimple chins rapidly learnt a new speech and attire 8212; both with a very Stephanian air of studied carelessness, signifying a superiority of the mental over all other attributes. 8216;If I see a young man dressed rather well around here,8217; William Rajpal then principal once told me, 8216;I can be sure he is from the college across the road.8217;8221;

But this carefully constructed separateness was not to be construed as exclusionary elitism; it was in fact a way to reconnect back with one8217;s environment, with clarity and purpose. Writes Gandhi: 8220;If St Stephen8217;s meant something special to me, it was this, that it enabled and encouraged you to think for yourself, speak for yourself, and do both mindful of the other person being rather more important in the scheme of things than yourself. Not least because the 8216;others8217; were more numerous than 8216;your8217; kind. But let not the others8217; strength 8212; numerical or otherwise 8212; overawe you into silence or petrification.8221;

O8217;Connor, in recounting his teaching years in Delhi from 1963 and 1972, captures a slice of change in the life of the college 8212; and, by extension, in Indian academia and public life. St Stephen8217;s and its varied connections with the freedom movement are well-documented. O8217;Connor catches another phase of the college8217;s connection with the post-Nehruvian transformation. In the students he taught, he has ample life stories to track the burst of Indian writing in English in the late 1980s and early 1990s the grandly titled 8220;St Stephen8217;s School of Literature8221;, the post-colonial and subaltern threads in history writing, the attachment of the college8217;s best and brightest in the first flush of Naxalite rebellion.

All of this tends to give St Stephen8217;s an exaggerated sense of its eminence. It is to O8217;Connor8217;s credit that he cuts through those grandiose claims and humanises the college experience by peppering the book with tales of staff machinations and overall eccentricity 8212; and by stringing

St Stephen8217;s into a very Delhi landscape.