We are beggars: JNU Vice-Chancellor pitches for campus temple

Varanasi: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Vice-Chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit has said the cash-strapped university should follow Banaras Hindu University’s (BHU) Vishwanath temple model and set up a Lord Venkateswara temple on its campus to generate funds, calling JNU a “beggar” in the process.

Pandit was speaking at a three-day international conference at BHU that began on August 10, where she was the keynote speaker.

“After the Vishwanath Temple, I suggested to JNU that since we are beggars, we should bring a temple of Lord Venkateswara here. I hail from Andhra Pradesh. A lot of money would come our way,” she said, invoking BHU founder Madan Mohan Malaviya’s approach to building sustainable sources of income for academic institutions.

Swipe at JNU historians

The Vice-Chancellor also took a swipe at historians at her own university, saying facts were sacred while interpretations could vary, but that JNU’s historians had turned that around by treating interpretation as sacred and facts as variable.

She argued that a university could not function or flourish under the monopoly of a single ideology. Pandit also said the Indian Right had not invested comparably in institution-building, and that much of its intellectual output remained reactive and event-driven rather than cumulative and theory-building. 

Scholarship, peer review, archives, translation, research centres and doctoral training were what allowed ideas to endure within institutions, she said.

Draupadi was first feminist: Pandit

Wading into the debate on feminism, Pandit said Indian ideas about women need not be viewed through a Western intellectual lens.

“I would not like anybody who says that feminism began with Simone de Beauvoir. Draupadi is the first feminist. Look at all the questions she asked her husband. Nobody will ask them even today,” she said.

She cited traditions of goddess worship, including Chamundeshwari and Madurai Meenakshi, and the prevalence of female gram devatas and forest deities to support her argument.

Pandit also said Indian thinkers should be taught alongside Plato, Confucius and Kant at universities such as Oxford, Harvard and Heidelberg, suggesting that Panini be studied with Chomsky, Kautilya with Machiavelli, Aryabhata with Newton and Abhinavagupta with Aristotle.

The conference, organised by BHU’s Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya chair, was on the theme of Indian knowledge traditions and the thought of Deendayal Upadhyaya.

Latest in a series of rows

The remarks come at a time when Pandit, JNU’s first woman Vice-Chancellor, appointed in 2022, has been at the centre of repeated controversies on campus.

Earlier this year, the JNU Students’ Union and the JNU Teachers’ Association sought her removal over remarks in a podcast in which she described caste discrimination in terms that student and teacher bodies called “casteist.”The campus saw sustained protests, police action against students marching to the Union Education Ministry, a student referendum on her removal and a public inquiry by the two bodies, which she did not attend.