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Every ruling class has a school, and for half a century the ruling class of independent India, before independence existed, was being formed in the colonnades of one university on the banks of the Sangam. The University of Allahabad, founded in 1887 as the fourth university of British India, earned in its noon the title Oxford of the East, and earned it twice over, once for its scholarship and once for its output, a register of alumni and faculty that reads like the republic’s staffing plan, prime ministers, presidents, chief ministers by the dozen, the judges of every bench, the poets of Hindi’s high noon, and civil servants in a proportion that gave the services their oldest joke, that the ICS and later the IAS were an Allahabad old boys’ association with a competitive entrance formality.
The institution grew from the Muir Central College, raised from 1872 at the urging of the Lieutenant Governor William Muir, its great quadrangle by William Emerson, architect later of Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial, giving the city its Indo Saracenic landmark, domes and arcades in cream and sandstone that made the campus itself an argument about East and West combined. The university proper, examining at first and teaching from the century’s turn, gathered departments whose names carried weight across the empire, its English school, its history and its sciences, Meghnad Saha holding its physics chair while formulating the ionisation equation that carries his name, and its law faculty feeding the High Court across the road, the bar and the campus forming one continuous ecosystem of argument.
The politics arrived with the geography. Allahabad between the 1880s and the 1940s was simultaneously the university town, the seat of the High Court, the home of the Congress’s founding generation of the province, and the address of Anand Bhavan, the Nehru household this series profiles in the next batch, and the university stood at the confluence of all four currents as surely as the city stood at the rivers’. The Congress held early sessions in the city, the students supplied every agitation its foot soldiers, from the Home Rule leagues through Non Cooperation, when the young broke with degrees as an act of politics, to Quit India, when the campus emptied into the processions and the jails, and the university’s unions and hostels became the apprenticeship of public life, the debating chair at the students’ union rated, in the province’s lore, a surer path to a ministry than most party posts. The roll makes the point without adornment, Govind Ballabh Pant, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Chandra Shekhar, VP Singh, Gulzarilal Nanda, Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Arjun Singh, Madan Mohan Malaviya himself before Banaras, presidents and vice presidents, Shankar Dayal Sharma among them, and a bench of chief justices, the university functioning for two generations as the heartland’s escalator between the district and Delhi.
Its literary chapter glows on its own. The Hindi renaissance this series meets in the culture batches ran substantially through Allahabad, Nirala and Mahadevi Varma in its orbit, Sumitranandan Pant, Firaq Gorakhpuri teaching English in its classrooms while writing Urdu’s most celebrated modern ghazals, Harivansh Rai Bachchan of its English department whose Madhushala intoxicated the language, and the city’s publishing houses and journals, fed by the campus, made Allahabad for decades the Hindi world’s literary capital, the coffee house on its edge the parliament of poets.
The decline, when it came, was the province’s own in miniature. The later twentieth century brought the era of campus politics hardening into caste and muscle, the session collapses and mass copying scandals of the state’s examination culture, funding starvation, and the flight of the ambitious to Delhi and beyond, the Oxford of the East becoming, in the standard lament, a preparation suburb for the civil services examination, its hostels famous less for debates than for the longevity of their aspirant residents. Central university status, restored in 2005, brought funds and fresh recrimination in familiar proportion, and the campus of Emerson’s quadrangle now houses, like so much of the state this series maps, a great inheritance and an argument about whether it can be recovered.
For the UP Files, the university’s century teaches the batch’s closing lesson in institutional irony. The Raj built it to manufacture loyal graduates and it manufactured the republic’s cabinet instead, the machine of the previous article once again training its own replacement. When this series reaches the freedom struggle’s leaders in the next batch, the reader should picture where a remarkable number of them first learned to hold a room, under the domes at Allahabad, within sound of the rivers.
