Kumkum Roy, professor of Ancient History, recollects her days as an MA student at JNU, Delhi

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10-07-2025

By January 1977, I made what seemed to be a more or less permanent move to Delhi. My parents had shifted into a large, spacious house with a garden in Safdarjung Enclave, very different from our home in Kolkata. There were strong feelings in the air about the Emergency and hopes that the election would bring it to an end. I realised from conversations at home that the Emergency had changed Delhi and people's lives drastically – demolitions and displacement in the name of 'improvement', sterilisations to enforce 'family planning', censorship, and more. Somehow, all this seemed far more immediate and oppressive in Delhi than it had been in Kolkata.
Friends and relatives, rather different from those in Kolkata, were part of my parents' social world. These included bureaucrats who were keenly interested in what I should or should not have been doing. So, while there were neighbours and friends who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University ( JNU) and thought it would be the ideal place for me, there were those who felt I needed to join the bureaucracy, which they thought would be far more exciting than becoming an academic.
I duly took the entrance tests for the MA programmes at the Centre for Historical Studies (CHS) and the School of International Studies (SIS), the latter being considered ideal for would-be bureaucrats (I had reluctantly decided to keep my options open). I cleared both the tests and appeared for both the interviews. I do not remember what I did or said at the SIS interview, but the one at CHS seemed to me to have been an unmitigated disaster – I boldly declared that I wanted to study ancient history in order to decipher the Harappan script and that I wanted to study at JNU simply because it was close to where my family lived at the time. It was perhaps out of appreciation for my naivete that the faculty decided to give me a chance.
When I joined JNU, the academic sections of the university were located in what was affectionately referred to as the 'down campus' in contrast to the 'up campus', which seemed rather remote and was located in what was then barren, rocky terrain. The more appropriate titles – 'old campus' and 'new campus' – were used sparingly, if at all. Smaller classes were held in the offices of the teachers, and as CHS was on the fifth floor of the southernmost building in the old campus, one could gaze out on a vast expanse of the campus. The view was pristine, or seemed so to me, anyway.
However, opportunities to gaze out of the windows during class were fleeting and momentary. The history we were being introduced to was very different from what we had learnt in college. Even dynastic history appeared in a new, almost unrecognisable avatar, as we learnt to evaluate and assess both the Mauryas and Guptas in terms not simply of battles won and lost but also of complex socio-economic and cultural contexts. We learnt the rudiments of Sanskrit, epigraphy, and archaeology. We also got to explore religious histories, histories of the economy and society, political ideas and institutions. Equally challenging and demanding were the 'core courses', which provided insights into broad global developments through lectures and readings that were remarkable for their breadth and depth. Then there were the 'non-Indian' history courses, and we also had the option of taking courses in other centres. These had to be chosen in consultation with the faculty. So, while I chose to do a course on Bronze Age Mesopotamia, which was fascinating, I was advised, rather sternly and firmly, to do one on the Russian Revolution as well. I was petrified, but discovered, once I overcame my initial fear of the massive reading list, that the course had far more to offer than I had imagined. Also, doing a course on anthropological theories was particularly enriching, and, although I was and remain wary of abstruse theory, the course opened windows into new possibilities that perhaps informed my later interests. It seemed as if we were thrown into an immense ocean of books, talks, and more – we could sink, swim, or drift along.
I am not sure whether I consciously thought through my choice of specialisation – 'Ancient History' – at this stage. Perhaps it was the pursuit of origins. It may also have had to do with the passion of my teacher in college, which was infectious. But once I exercised the option, I had no regrets. It turned out to be an almost lifelong obsession.
Our Ancient History class was small and fairly close-knit but markedly different from what I had been used to in Presidency College. I was the only Bengali, and we were three women in a class of 12. The men were from very diverse backgrounds, as indeed were the women. But what for me was particularly exciting was that virtually the entire faculty, with the notable exception of the quiet, uncompromising scholar Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, consisted of women, and rather formidable women at that. All of them were doyennes in their fields – R Champakalakshmi for her pioneering work in early Tamil history, K Meenakshi for her remarkable studies on Tamil and Sanskrit grammar, Romila Thapar for challenging the earlier understanding of Mauryan history, Shereen Ratnagar for opening up a fresh perspective on the Harappan civilisation, and Suvira Jaiswal for her revisionist religious history. I am not sure whether they saw themselves as mentors and role models, but for many of us, it was wonderful to have a cluster of women around, women who were very different from one another in terms of their lifestyles and styles of teaching. Passionate about their research, most of them were unsparing towards their students. As a result, almost before I realised it, I began to think that I was meant to become a researcher, as that seemed to be all that mattered. The past beckoned.
I do not think any of these women would have explicitly identified themselves as feminists. And yet, their very presence made a difference to the environment both within the classroom and beyond it. In retrospect, it does seem that the decades following 1947 were marked by the creation of spaces through debate and discussion and the building of new institutions. Our teachers were part of a generation that both benefited from these spaces and shaped them creatively and constructively. A fruitful conjuncture.
Not surprisingly, the faculty had put in place a demanding tutorial and semester system. We were expected to produce a tutorial of about 2,000 words every fortnight, according to what seemed to be a punishing timetable, and then present our work for discussion in groups of threes and fours. Our tutorial scripts were often returned with copious markings and comments along the margins – no shortcuts! Invariably, we were nervous and stressed out, but soon enough, we began to look forward to these ordeals, learning to hold our own, acknowledging what we had missed out or not understood, and working our way through sharing our ideas with others. The formal discussions would often continue as informal chats over countless cups of tea, sipped either in the canteen or, more commonly, sitting on the floors of corridors around the library. Some of those conversations, fortunately, still continue, even as the venues have shifted over the years. The sense that we were discovering and sharing new ways of thinking was a heady experience, to say the least. And the tutorial system, which accounted for 50 per cent of the evaluation, also meant that the pressure of the end-of-semester examination was considerably reduced.