Calcutta and the Meeting of East and West: The Dilemma of Cultural Allegiance

Abstract

LF ONE has worked for several months in the higher educational institutions of Calcutta and has seen the inside of more than one Bengal university, he comes away most deeply impressed, here in this intellectual capital of India, not by the Communist proclivities of faculty and students but by another and more significant phenomenon: the fascinating interplay of Eastern and Western culture and the struggles of both faculty members and students to come to terms with the two or to set one above the other. When I was doing research in Indian philosophy at Calcutta University and my husband was teaching comparative literature at Jadavpur University, in the first such department to be established in any Commonwealth university, we had many opportunities to savor the inwardness of this cultural confrontation of Orient with Occident. On my first visit to the impressive, eighteenth-century-style central buildings of Calcutta's very crowded university, its courtyards bordered by seventy-five-foot palm trees, I was sent from the registrar (the second most important administrative officer of an Indian university) to the acting vice-chancellor, and finally to the secretary of the College of Arts and Commerce before any record could be found of my Fulbright assignment! (The administrative machinery was Western, but the casualness with which it operated was perhaps more Eastern than Western.) Upstairs and downstairs we went, along corridors steamy with monsoon heat and plastered with student signs, lettered with blue pencil on old newspapers, reading No More Stores and Night Classes for M.A. For the sake of revenue, the University had rented more and more of its badly needed space to shopkeepers, and was resisting student requests for an opportunity to pursue graduate work in evening classes. Finally, a file was unearthed which showed that I was to work with Professor Satischandra Chatterjee, head of the Philosophy Department, and author, with Dhirendramohan Datta, of the most readable and comprehensible history of Indian thought, modestly entitled Aen Introduction to Indian Philosophy (5th ed., University of Calcutta, I9S4).