Kapila Vatsyayan on a receptive Indira Gandhi and a commanding Maulana Sahab

I never thought I'd say this, but after reading Kapila Vatsyayan's new biography by Jyoti Sabharwal, Afloat on a Lotus Leaf, I have to say that the Congress, despite its obsession with the Nehru-Gandhis, knew a thing or two about crafting a cultural and education policy for the nation.

Debates were healthy and the search for an Indian identity was an ongoing process, open to debate and discussion, not the sole preserve of Dinanath Batra and friends.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was education minister until his death in 1958 and he was an ardent nationalist, a proponent of domain specialisation, and an utter stickler for propriety. In the following excerpts from the book, we see how transformative a good education minister can be.

Some lessons for the current dispensation?

For a complete review of the book, do read the latest issue of India Today.

Excerpts

The central advisory board of museums was also set up at the initiative of Maulana Sahab. In a room in the ministry of defence, where tribunals had held meetings and freedom fighters had given evidence, the first meeting of this advisory board came about in 1956, and Kapila heard Maulana Sahab deliver a speech in Urdu, as full of gravity as wit and humour. He held forth on what constituted the heritage, recounting the riches of Asia and the export of art objects to the British Museum.

The speech, its contents and the manner of its delivery left her stirred and inspired, as Maulana Sahab had given the call for another kind of freedom - he freedom to know and recognise your intellectual and artistic past and come to terms with it. He responded enthusiastically to the suggestion of appointing Rai Krishnadasa as the chairman of the board. And that image of Maulana Sahab with his cap, and Rai Sahab with his dhoti and kurta sitting there along with Dr Moti Chandra, is still etched in her memory.

Kapila was asked to prepare a note on the state of museums in India. She began with much aplomb, though sounded a bit improper: "Indian museums are great. They hold the treasures of this country and the cultural heritage, but they are really like junk houses. They need to have a new direction with both cataloguing and documentation."

She said all this, thinking she had seen much of this abroad. But later, Maulana Sahab pulled her up for using that term.

He called her over and said with a smile, "Kapila, this is a very good note, but tell me what is a junk house?" She didn't know how to react. Seeing her discomfort, he said, "America se pad kar aayi hain na. But when you write your notes, don't write American English here."

An impression prevails in some quarters that Maulana Sahab did not go into the details of the notes, and much else. But Kapila knows better, having written the minutes in her rather illegible handwriting, and then typing those notes. A hard taskmaster, wanting immediate action, even checking up on the promptness of writing the minutes of this meeting, he asked Kapila over the phone, "Have those minutes been written?"

She said, "I'm working on them and they are being typed, sir."

"I suggest you finish them quickly and send them to me."

And what was this urgency? He was meticulous and punctilious when he wanted to be.

After about half an hour came another phone call, "Have you finished those minutes? I think I would like to see them now."

It was late in the evening and Kapila was still battling with the typewriter. Almost sounding grumpy, she said, "Sir, I haven't yet finished typing."

Came the command, "I don't know whether you have or not, I'm sending Ashfaq. Send those minutes."

On another occasion, Kapila was sitting in the second row of an officers' meeting, when Maulana Sahab picked up a file and asked a joint secretary, "Is this your signature?"

"Yes sir," he answered.

Then he asked, "There's a signature above. Whose signature is that?" "Deputy secretary," he answered.

Then he asked, "And the one above that?"

By now, the joint secretary was puzzled and almost breaking out in sweat, as he answered, "Under secretary."

Unrelenting, Maulana Sahab continued, "The one above that?" "Section officer," he answered.

"There seems to be no noting from the section officer to joint secretary but everybody has signed," commented Maulana Sahab. The joint secretary fumbled and said, "This means we all endorse the note."

Maulana Sahab gave a wry smile and said, "But I see a signature on the left side which is only an initial."

There was defeaning silence in the room. Then he turned towards the joint secretary and said, "To janab, us assistant aur section officer ko aap ki kursi par bitha dete hain. Dimag to unhi ka hai na? Aap log to sab siyahi karne wale hain."

The lesson learnt was that the instructions were to be given not through an office order, but that the officers were to write their own notes, and take full responsibility. And in these six decades, things don't seem to have changed much. When she narrated this episode to a senior bureaucrat, he said, "We don't write notes for the fear of subordinates' displeasure. But now, we also fear the RTI (Right to Information)."

Another memorable lesson in this series was being asked to seek some advice from the director general of ASI on some issue. In her ignorant and arrogant manner, Kapila said, "I will ask DG Chakraborty to come over."

Maulana Sahab looked at her sternly and said, "Aap Hindustan ki tehzeeb ke raja ke paas jayengi, unko nahin bulayengi. Thanda paani pijiye aur left-right kijiye."

His approach to the relationship between the central ministry and the subordinate offices was a great learning for Kapila. She chided herself for not investigating the history of the establishment of ASI; the rules and regulations of the government, and the niggling questions of the administrative ministry, the attached and the subordinate offices. These matters had not disturbed her inexperienced mind, because the persons who occupied the chair were much respected and looked up to. And just because she was in the central ministry, those who were in-charge of museums, archaeology or libraries, were not to be treated as subordinates. They were never made to walk the corridors of the ministry, notwithstanding the North Block superciliousness and the systemic paradoxes.

An Indian identity

She professes to have this pet, ad nauseam theme of Indian identity to which she would remain committed till the last. Having seen the richness of India in various states, she went and stood among the people, for an open house with Indira Gandhi at her residence on Safdarjung Road.

She spotted Kapila and said, "What are you doing here? Couldn't you have taken an appointment?"

Kapila said, "No madam, the purpose for which I am here, I couldn't have taken an appointment."

She asked her, "Kya hua? Ab tumhaare dimag mein kya fatoor aa raha hai?"

Indira Gandhi was aware of Kapila' s reputation from the times of Maulana Sahab and her own father, that her mind was invariably racing with innovative ideas. She had also watched her transform Teen Murti House into a museum.

Kapila said, "This silk sari, the bangle and Kolhapuri chappal I'm wearing, and your Kashmiri shawl, kisne banaya hai yeh sab?" Indira Gandhi said, "What are you trying to say?"

Kapila said, "Our educational system is denying the very basis of our identity, which is given by the poor people to us. You bring out slogans and ordinances; please issue one more such ordinance that we've to pay their debt - ki inka karz chukana hai - because all these craftsmen who make us look so elegant are Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. So, coin this slogan and not "Garibi hatao". We have about 50 lakh one-teacher schools. These should become two-teacher schools and the second teacher should be a craftsperson."

Indira Gandhi reacted saying, "Oh, that's brilliant. Tum kaam karo iske upar."

Kapila said, "Kaam kar ke dikhayein aapko. We should do it block by block in each village, and bring these weavers, carpenters, potters, cobblers and blacksmiths to these schools, and ask them to inculcate those skills in students. What we call the vocational cap. If my son has to learn from a cobbler and a cobbler's son has to learn ABC and ka, kha, ga, then after ten years there would be equalisation. You won't need any reservations."

She always found Indira Gandhi to be receptive. When it was suggested in the ministry that Khuda Baksh Library and the Rampur Raza Library should be turned into national institutions, it was the agility of the prime minister's office that elicited immediate response to matters pertaining to heritage and cultural sensitivity. Kapila also links it to the fact that Indira Gandhi had been to Santiniketan. But such decisions were as much determined by the Planning Commission, as also the ministry of finance, and many suggestions remained a pipe dream.

Obviously, this issue underpins the international debates both implicitly and explicitly. The arts and the crafts, especially of the developing world, ie India, Asia; Africa, and Latin America, are the creative gifts of those who are economically underprivileged but culturally loaded, having lived with nature and used the resources with a firm conviction that they belong to an interconnected ecological system. On the other hand, there has been a phenomenal rise in "development", based only on the principle of economic growth and affluence.

Kapila feels this tension and polarity is fundamental at the level of value. The opinions vary from those who propose a path of growth through what she would call "unsustainable consumption" and pure economic growth based on the values of materialism, and those who are committed to a model of "sustainable human development", which contains greed and satisfies needs, and promotes most of all the value of nurturing the Earth and human as equal partners. This issue, she thinks, becomes even more imperative in fluid India of the ordinary, economically poor but culturally rich.

That's why Kapila venerates Kamaladevi's "integrated approach", which blended the socioeconomic and artistic dimensions, fostering a non-governmental movement of self-reliance, as also the products that brought home the extraordinary value and beauty of the staggering variety of the crafts tradition. Renascence was her essential tool, as she touched the materials and their makers alike. So, Kapila underlines that the boom in the entire sector of handicraft and handlooms owes a deep debt to this one person, whose creative response to political freedom was to re-energise the "creativity" of the ordinary to make it extraordinary.

India abroad

Kapila's detractors might have been thinking that she had been penalised by being shifted from the high-profile external cultural relations bureau to back of beyond of languages and hoary Sanskrit studies. But she was making the best of this transition by also trying to redress the gnawing gap between the institutes of higher education, especially in humanities within the University Grants Commission (UGC) and those lying outside its pale. She wanted to bring about parity in respect of pay scales, recognition, equivalence, etc, and also espoused that those enrolling for a PhD in the UGC system should fulfil a primary requirement of having command over at least two languages. She took up this serious issue with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi both through the ministry of education and separately at a personal level.

Making her submission, this is what she told her, "Why don't we make it compulsory at the PhD and MPhil level in any discipline to master at least two languages? One amongst them should be a classical Indian language, be it Sanskrit or Pali, or Arabic or Persian. The other should be a foreign language, and some of them do learn French and German, but we should include Russian and Chinese too. Unless one is in command of a language, you cannot go into the primary material on the subject being dealt with, and that is why we continue to largely access from the English sources. After all, the world over, scholars are required to have mastery over a language as prerequisite before submitting their thesis".

Indira Gandhi accepted the suggestion and it went through all the committees of the UGC. And they wrote back to her saying that even Oxford and Cambridge had given up the compulsory requirement of Greek and Latin.

She too was disappointed and conveyed this response to Kapila with comment, "Your own academics don't agree with your suggestion."

And all those academic friends later told Kapila, "We knew exactly where this was coming from. So, we had to give a suitable reply".

Kapila said, "We are not having a debating society here. I am talking of another generation of Indians, who should not only be learning English, though it gives access to knowledge. If we want these youngsters to come out with a new sensibility, give them the possibility of learning Sanskrit as a library language. That is where Sanskrit has to be established and not by making it compulsory in all school education, and therefore, getting it in the neck from everybody. But along with that is the whole question of the preservation of the manuscripts."

She's still persisting and writing to the UGC three decades later to pay special attention to the study of ancient scripts and languages, as also indigenous languages, besides instituting research professorships for Southeast Asian studies. She states candidly that what we do know about India is barely ten per cent of what William Jones had collected in the Asiatic Society. To that ten per cent, there is 90 per cent material in different disciplines, not only in Sanskrit, but also in Pali, Prakrit and other Indian languages and scripts. Sanskrit is the mother of languages.

So, how could it be ignored?