In memoriam

Vinod Raina (1950-2013)

THE news about Vinod Raina’s death on 12 September came as a rude shock. Not many, including those who gathered that evening at the Lodhi Road crematorium, were aware of his four year long struggle with cancer, possibly because he and his wife and co-participant in the movement to democratize education and science, Anita Rampal, hated the fuss that invariably accompanies news of such developments. But then Vinod, despite his high profile involvement in multiple causes, both at home and abroad, never quite appeared comfortable with the spotlight turned on him. The tendency to personalize movements and struggles, focusing more on spokespersons and leaders to the detriment of foot soldiers and processes, invariably results in ego-based conflicts, including in progressive movements, a fact with which he was abundantly familiar.

Like many of his generation, Raina was deeply moulded by the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period when he joined the Physics department of Delhi University. This was also the phase when the then Vice-Chancellor, K.N. Raj, initiated a process of reform in both content and pedagogy. Raina was an enthusiastic participant in the exercises of reworking the course content in his department, as also pushing for changes in the methods of instruction. Little surprise that when Anil Sadgopal, of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme fame, appealed for volunteers to help develop the methodology of teaching science to school children through a ‘learning by doing’ process, Vinod signed on, leading to a lifelong involvement with science teaching and children. And when Kishore Bharati, Anil’s organization, moved away to pursue other interests, Vinod Raina and his associates set up Eklavya in Bhopal to both expand and deepen the programme, together resulting in one of the most innovative and daring interventions in government schools.

This development also brought Vinod in closer touch with the official machinery in Madhya Pradesh – political leaders like Arjun Singh and Digvijay Singh, and unusual bureaucrats like Sudeep Banerjee and R. Gopalkrishnan – whose help was critical if the initiative was not to meet a premature end. Working with and through the establishment demands skills not always evident in those wedded to ‘revolutionary’ transformation. It demands patience, an ability to persuade and negotiate, as also carry along those with whom one may have other conflicts. It is worth remembering that this phase of the mid-1980s also witnessed the Bhopal gas disaster and the deepening of the struggle against the dams on the Narmada. Vinod Raina’s involvement with these movements expectedly led to strains in his association with the establishment, eventually (though this was not the only reason) resulting in a shutting down of the Eklavya programme in schools.

From there to involvement with the National Literacy Mission, the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS), or the movement for the right to education represents a long journey, a story that merits a fuller assessment. Along with his colleagues in the BGVS and the All India People’s Science Movement (AIPSM), Vinod was a key participant in the debates and struggles which eventually culminated in the Right to Education Act some years back. Beyond education, he also participated in the different struggles against the growing virus of communalism, for the right to information, employment and food, for tribal rights, and compensation and rehabilitation of victims of displacement, some of which, like education, have now been enshrined as constitutional rights.

A demanding life of public engagement invariably takes a toll, on family life and friendships. A life time of pushing agendas and causes, usually against great odds, tends to leave those convinced of the worthwhileness of what they are espousing somewhat impatient with others who do not quite share their enthusiasm or strategy. Far too often this results in the development of a sectarian and conspiratorial outlook, as also bitter divides amongst those struggling for similar goals. And when the process involves continuous engagement and negotiation with the establishment, charges of being ‘sold out’ and ‘co-opted’ are common, particularly among the revolutionary purists. It is to Vinod’s credit that he somehow, successfully, managed to weather these charges.

While much is likely to be written about his role in helping actualize the right to education, more specifically in helping draft sections of the act and then formulating the rules of business, less is known about his involvement with groups and networks struggling against an unjust global order outside the country. His association with groups like the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA), South-South, or the World Social Forum won him friends across the globe, helping provide a larger comparative frame for understanding the processes of change. Of particular note is his deep association with Chinese activist – intellectuals, both in the PRC and Hongkong, in research and teaching programmes, all of which went a long way in nuancing his understanding of socialist transformation. It also helped temper the attitude of Indian exceptionalism, as also arrogance, that so marks Indian interlocutors in regional and global settings.

But all this is about Vinod Raina, the public figure. For his friends what matters equally are memories of personal encounters – the love for music and food, the interest in poetry and fiction and, above all, the effort at nurturing and preserving friendships. As also his eternal optimism and the resolve to ‘never say die’. It is this that I shall miss.

Harsh Sethi

Consulting Editor, Seminar

 

A thoughtful pioneer

Obaid Siddiqi (1932-2013), Fellow of the Royal Society, Member US National Academy of Sciences, ex-President of the Indian Academy of Sciences, National Research Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), passed away on 26 July 2013. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2006.

‘Obaid’, as he was called by all and sundry, passed away rather abruptly as a result of a freak accident, and bewildered grief is not likely to do justice to his rich and complex legacy. But it is clear to those of us who knew him that we mourn a creative gentleman scientist, self-effacing institution builder, as well as the personification of the seamless interface between thoughtful science and a secular, tolerant, inclusive, socialist society.

Born in 1932 in Basti, Uttar Pradesh,he was one of seven remarkable children who would all share the characteristic of connecting a self-effacing work ethic with a commitment to social transformation that Obaid was so emblematic of. Even while at Aligarh Muslim University in the late forties and early fifties, Obaid spent time in jail for his social activism, and while his fascination with science soon lured him away from both activism and photography, he never lost his constant, keen sense of social justice and equity.

Although he began by teaching botany in his alma mater, AMU, it was evident that his real calling lay in investigations of how biological systems work; his true passion was genetics. He tried to start experiments in this area in the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi, but the weather gods ensured that storms would turn him from studying inheritance in crops to studying genetics in more easily manageable microbial life forms, which he did with Guido Pontecorvo in Glasgow for his Ph.D. In studies with Pontecorvo, and then as a post-doctoral fellow with Alan Garen, first at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and then at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA, Obaid made major contributions to the detailed understanding of how genes are inherited, changed and controlled. He was in the thick of a scientific revolution in biology; the structure of DNA had just been determined, and the molecular nature of the gene and its mechanism of inheritance were being revealed. While he came from traditional microbial genetics, his contributions were critical to a major, newly emerging field, molecular biology.

As one of the rising stars of this new academic discipline, it would have been no surprise if Obaid had elected to stay on in the milieu where he was well-recognized. But, in a choice that was to become familiar to his colleagues again and again, he responded to Homi Bhabha’s invitation to come and join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, a new institute that was already making a mark in nuclear physics, astrophysics and mathematics. He knew well what the pace of work in India was likely to be; after all, he had spent five years in India over 1953-1958 trying to get his research going to no avail. But the abiding connection he felt between his work and his commitment to Indian society, together led him to undertake, at the young age of thirty, not simply a research programme of his own, but the responsibility for creating a unit of independent faculty members in molecular biology. Scientific leadership came early to Obaid, he took to it as effortlessly as a duck to water. His association with Homi Bhabha was also very influential and he never forgot the implicit lessons about the energy, insights and creative abilities of young leaders.

The creation of the molecular biology unit in TIFR bore all the hallmarks of Obaid’s personal style as well as philosophy – slow, careful, organic institutional growth; an emphasis on committed, persistent scholarship rather than on quick-gun stardom; a non-hierarchical collegium; a sense of science as a global partnership for the like-minded. Obaid embodied a combination of personal trust and academic skepticism as unique and endearing as his unique style of combining emphatic, no-holds-barred argument with careful, courteous consideration. He brought together a remarkable group of people who worked on a range of areas at TIFR. In the early days there were Prabitra Maitra, who worked on yeast genetics and P. Babu, a physicist turned biologist who was trying to develop a completely new model genetic system by studying the development in a worm, C. elegans. Obaid’s easy confidence in himself, which came from a combination of background, achievements, and an impersonal focus on the question at stake, led to the Molecular Biology Unit becoming a visiting point for many of the world’s great scholars in a diversity of life science-related disciplines. The excitement and self-confidence that this inspired in his younger colleagues and students was perhaps unique in the cautious, suspicious, post-colonial world of Indian academia. Sidney Brenner, Francis Crick, Alan Garen, Guido Pontecorvo, Graeme Mitchison, Maurice Fox and Evelyn Fox-Keller, to name but a few, were frequent visitors. In the words of K. Vijay Raghavan (currently Secretary of the DBT and alumnus of the molecular biology unit), ‘We thought that working with great minds of biology and being challenged to do better, was the way science was done everywhere... little did we realize then that it was a carefully crafted environment that owed its all to one individual’s vision.’

Almost anyone would have been content. After all, by his forties, Obaid had done it all. He had been at the forefront of a major scientific wave; he had successfully set up a whole new area of empirical science in the rarefied Indian citadel of high-minded theory; and he had the continuing regard of peers globally for the work that he was doing. But, with the same uncanny sense of combining risk and adventure that led him to come to TIFR, Obaid decided that he now wanted to pursue interesting ways of using the power of genetics to look at even more complex, or at the very least very different, biological phenomena. Initially with Seymour Benzer at Caltech, he began working on the fruitfly as a model for understanding the genetics of the functioning of the nervous system. How do genes put together the nervous system and its circuits to allow behaviour to emerge?

It is impossible to over-emphasize what an extraordinary shift of a field of study this was; to go from fungal and bacterial genetics and fundamental bio-chemical-biophysical questions about how DNA replicates, how it is altered, how mutations in it arise and are suppressed, to explore the idea that ‘behaviour’ like biochemical pathways could have a genetic basis. Obaid asked fundamental questions about learning and memory in the sensory system. How is taste, smell detected and the ability to retain a sense of smell encoded in the brain? It is a tribute to Obaid that despite having made such a radical mid-career shift, he came to be regarded as one of the most interesting minds in that field, and his studies became landmarks in our understanding of chemical communication in nature. In fact, in a field carrying the taint of eugenics in ideas of how genes could regulate behaviour, Obaid came to be a much-needed pillar of careful, evidence-based, inclusive rationality. And above all, Obaid set an example of how a truly international biological science enterprise could originate in India, providing an ideal for future expansions of the biological sciences in India.

Surely he could rest on his laurels by now? Perhaps for someone else, but for Obaid, the temptation to take yet another interesting risk (‘interesting’ was a major virtue in Obaid’s lexicon) simply could not be avoided. After all, he had established a microcosm of a global biology enterprise in a Third World country; how could he not try to make it a real institution? And so began yet another of Obaid’s adventures, this time down the rabbit hole of India’s far-famed byzantine bureaucracy. The creation of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore over a slow decade-long incubation period was a masterclass in combining Obaid’s brand of charming obstinacy and persistent optimism with quiet administrative gamesmanship. Once again, the outcome was something nobody else had ever quite visualized, including, to his own delight, Obaid himself. It is no surprise that NCBS has come to be something of a unique experiment globally as an institution that promotes fundamental enquiry at all scales of biological organization, from the physics of biomolecules to the ecosystems of South Asia.

A large part of this freedom to experiment with institutional structures and policies came from Obaid’s tendency to work by example rather than by emphatic proselytization. As a result, it came effortlessly to Obaid to step back, merge into the woodwork, and to let the colleagues and the institution that had grown into the freedoms he had designed to take wing on their own. With the cultural baggage that South Asians carry, this was no easy choice, and it is evidence of Obaid’s philosophical breadth that, unlike many a founder of scientific institutions, he found his way to walk away with unmatched grace. Yet, he stayed on to watch, with sometimes exasperated affection, how they did, and to go back to work, in quiet pleasure, with his beloved flies that smelt and tasted their world like nobody else.

Yet, Obaid had far broader interests and commitments beyond the bounds of conventional academia, that ranged from his love of shayari and sarod (few are aware that he trained under Annapurna Devi while in Mumbai), to his delight in the accomplishments of his multi-talented, academic, intellectual family, to his emphatic interventions in the social arena and in public discourse in defence of the peaceful, tolerant, secular socialist ideal that he never swerved from. Obaid also wrote carefully and caringly about friends he cherished. His obituaries about Francis Crick and Guido Pontecorvo are wonderful examples of setting up the person and his science in its context.

It is not a surprise that Obaid Siddiqi was also one of India’s most decorated scientists. We will miss him. For all this and more. For a long, long time.

Satyajit Mayor, cell biologist, National Centre for Biological Sciences and the

Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, Bangalore; and

Satyajit Rath, immunologist, National Institute of Immunology, Delhi

 

Ronald S. McGregor (1929-2013)

Ronald Stuart McGregor who died on 19 August 2013 in Cambridge (UK) at the age of 84, was a towering and pioneering figure in the Hindi world. Most people will know him as the author of the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, that invaluable and standard dictionary for all things Hindi that never leaves the Hindi learner’s or reader’s side, in dog-eared paperback copies or online. But his great modesty hid a multitude of talents and achievements, though his human qualities always shone through his clear, blue eyes.

Stuart, as he was generally known, though he used R. S. McGregor as an author, grew up in the south of New Zealand, where his parents had emigrated from Scotland after World War I, and studied English and French at the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. He then obtained a New Zealand government scholarship to continue his study of Old English and related languages at Merton College, Oxford, and left for Britain in 1952. When offered a research fellowship in English after his second BA, however, he chose instead to go and study Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. His linguistic interest in Hindi was probably sparked when as a teenager he was given a copy of a Hindi grammar book published in Fiji for the use of the migrant population from North India. At SOAS he met his wife Elaine, and they were married in Calcutta in 1960, when she was doing fieldwork for her own research on modern Indian history while he did research on Hindi literature in Allahabad. In 1964 he took a position in the Oriental Studies Faculty of the University of Cambridge, where he remained until his retirement in 1997 and where he set up a full Hindi degree, the only one in the UK. In 1980 he was elected a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

This was a time when Indian Studies in Europe still largely meant classical Indology, and Stuart McGregor was at the forefront of establishing modern Hindi language and literature as a legitimate subject of study and research. Evidence of the institutional reluctance to recognize Hindi is the fact that he was never made a professor, despite being the world authority on Hindi outside India. In 1979 the Government of India awarded him the Vishva Hindi Puraskar (World Hindi Prize), and in 2006 he was given the George Grierson Award by the Central Hindi Institute of Agra. In 1983 he was elected President of the Third International Hindi Congress held in New Delhi.

Like all pioneers, Stuart McGregor was faced with the groundwork task of producing the tools for the field, and it is a measure of the depth of his knowledge that all the practical materials he produced – grammar, dictionary, literary history – have become the standard reference works. Titles can be deceptive. Outline of Hindi Grammar, with Exercises (1972, rev. 1995), Urdu Study Materials (1992), or The Language of Indrajit of Orcha: A Study of Early Braj Bhasha Prose (1968) are still used as reference grammars and offer accessible and precise descriptions of the finer aspects of those languages. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (1993), a project that modestly began twenty years earlier as a revision of J.T. Platts’s Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884), took on a life of its own and became the most comprehensive, agile, and informative dictionary of Hindi available in any language. It was painstaking work before computer programmes were used for such projects, but he was aided by Elaine, who had herself become a lexicographer. What sets this dictionary apart is the range of its vocabulary (non-standard and dialectal terms are well covered, and so are Urdu/Persian/Arabic words), the clear etymology and transliteration, and the compact but exhaustive list of examples and expressions.

Stuart McGregor was also a pioneer of Hindi literary history, and the two volumes he contributed to the Harrassowitz orange series edited by Jan Gonda, while expensive and hard to get outside libraries, are pure gold. Concise yet incredibly comprehensive, they offer unfailingly precise, balanced, and suggestive judgements on individual authors and works. They are the necessary first port of call for any study in the field, and in my experience you go to them to find who wrote what only to discover many other authors and works that turn out to be relevant for your study, and all you need to do then is follow up the references! The first volume he produced, Hindi Literature of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1974), described and assessed the development of modern Hindi in ways that largely conformed to the Hindi narrative of events. It is the second volume, Hindi Literature From its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (1984) that for me opens up the Hindi literary tradition in so many different directions beyond the standard devotional and courtly (Bhakti and riti) narrative – from early Apabhramsha to Jain authors and texts, from oral traditions to local devotional groups, from translations to early and late romances, prose writing, etc.: in a 240-page volume they are all miraculously there! While it relies heavily on previous scholarship in Hindi, the breadth of scope and refreshing lack of communitarian bias are Stuart McGregor’s very own contribution. He revisited this historical narrative and reflected on questions of literary origins, spatial and social dimensions, and subsequent turns and innovations, for Sheldon Pollock’s Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (2003) – like the whole volume an absolute touchstone for the literary-historical study of South Asia today.

Equally remarkable was Stuart McGregor’s nose for little-known but intriguing authors, or for the lesser-studied works of famous authors that turn out to be significant and illuminating of much wider questions. Some examples are his articles on the early Hindi versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana by Vishnudas at the Tomar court in fifteenth-century Gwalior, his linguistic study of an early commentary in Braj Bhasha of Bhartrihari’s Sanskrit verse on ethics and good government by a local ruler, his abiding interest in the poetry of the more scholastic-minded Krishna bhakti poet Nanddas, his pioneering article on the treatise of Braj Bhasha poetics by Bhikharidas, and his ground-breaking work on early European dictionaries of Hindi; in the case of modern Hindi, his interest in the poet and novelist Nagarjun and in Bharatendu Harishchandra’s famous speech on the progress of Hindi but also in his multilingual allegorical play, Bharat Durdasha (1875). Many of these articles are scattered in the volumes of proceedings of the Bhakti conferences that brought together scholars and students of early Hindi literature and Bhakti religion in the 1980s and 1990s, conferences in which he regularly participated and which he himself organized in Cambridge in 1988.

All who knew him or met him could not fail but recognize the personal qualities that made Stuart McGregor a sterling human being, modest and unassuming as a scholar, invariably encouraging and helpful to junior scholars and students, correct and upright as a colleague and citizen, humane in all his dealings. The enduring affection and respect his closest colleagues and fellow Hindi scholars had for him are testament to his qualities and he will live long in their memories. I was privileged enough to be his successor at the University of Cambridge, and while our interests initially diverged, I have since found that whatever new direction, author, or theme I take up, Stuart had already been there and is my first and surest guide. His works are standing the test of time.

Francesca Orsini

Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature,

SOAS, University of London