In today’s education system, D.D. Kosambi would not have found a job: Ram Ramaswamy

The life and work of D.D. Kosambi offers a rare example of scholarship that crossed the boundaries of mathematics, history, Sanskrit, numismatics, science, and politics. In this episode of SpeakEasy with Amit Baruah, Professor Ram Ramaswamy, former vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, discusses his new biography, D.D. Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds. He also explores the making of one of modern India’s most unconventional intellectuals.Ramaswamy traces Kosambi’s early education in the US, his mathematical career, his role as one of the earliest members of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and his eventual turn towards Indian history, Sanskrit poetry, and other fields. The conversation also looks at Kosambi’s political ideas, his views on Marxism and his opposition to nuclear weapons, his interest in solar energy, his relationship with Homi Bhabha and his engagement with the international peace movement.Ramaswamy also takes a turn in the interview to talk about academic freedom, the dangers of excessive centralisation, the limits of India’s current education model, and why a scholar like Kosambi might struggle to find a place in today’s highly compartmentalised academic system.Edited excerpts: What took you to the personality of D.D. Kosambi? See, the reason I did the biography finally was because I had a fellowship from the New India Foundation. But I was inspired to write a proposal to the foundation because I realised at some point that there was no accessible biography of Kosambi. And I do feel that this is a lacuna in our public life: while we celebrate a variety of enterprises, politicians, businessmen, cricket stars, movie stars, and so on, the public intellectual has very few biographies, and they are soon forgotten. I felt that this was not quite deserved for a person who had been so influential in so many disciplines as India was becoming independent.

Ram Ramaswamy discusses D.D. Kosambi’s Marxism, science, and scholarship, and why India’s centralised education system leaves little room for thinkers like Kosambi. | Photo Credit: Dipesh Arora You’ve given us various dimensions of the transition Kosambi made. One thing that struck me is that he had his initial education in the US, where his father, Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, himself a scholar of considerable repute, lived. Do you think that if Kosambi had been in India and studied in the Indian educational system, he could have done the kind of work that he did? I don’t think so. I think that many things went into creating a personality like this, and one of the most important components of this personality was his supreme self-confidence. That came in part from his own brilliance, which was acknowledged. But there are many who are the smartest in the family who don’t go to do this. But he was very self-confident because he was in America as he did the latter part of high school. I think also at Harvard, he had the freedom to choose his own curriculum. So, he went where his interests took him. And that kind of spirit was very difficult to have. You couldn’t do that in the Indian educational system, whether it was in high school or whether it was in university. As a matter of fact, the decision to take him to America was because he was ahead of his class, and his father realised that if he was left behind in India, he wouldn’t graduate from school until he was almost 17 years old, and that would have cost him a lot of time. So, lots of things came into it, but I believe that his self-confidence and his ability to follow where his interests took him came from the American education. Also Read | I have found Indian culture and society to be a marvellously plural society: Romila Thapar You point out that he was the second employee of TIFR after Homi Bhabha, and describe how their relationship evolved. You also mention an incident when J.R.D. Tata denied him leave to attend an international peace conference, accusing him of using it for political purposes. So, do you think Kosambi’s work at TIFR, where he was brought in for his mathematical skills, gave him a platform to engage with other issues as well? I suspect that there is some truth in that. Because let’s remember that TIFR started on June 1, 1945, that is, before Independence. But it was pretty clear that A) independence was going to happen, and B) because of the connection between Bhabha and Nehru, this institute was going to be well protected, well-funded, and prominent. So, Kosambi knew that this was a platform from which he could go places, compared at least to Ferguson College, where he was perpetually battling his colleagues or complaining about poor students and so on. This was a platform that was really up there in the international space, and in the initial years, he used it well. Subsequently, though, he could have continued had he just been doing some good mathematics. Was it because his interests changed? It may be an unfair question, but the initial promise in mathematics was clearly evident. Somewhere along the way, though, his interest shifted to ancient Indian history and poetry, including translating a great deal of it. Was that a particular fascination for him? I have been asked that earlier, and I think that there is something to be said for a PhD. Not so much because it’s not as if you learn a lot, but what you do learn is how to learn and how to keep yourself intellectually alive all the time. I think that at a certain point, the lack of that kind of training for him in mathematics began to tell. By about 1950 or so, already his papers in maths have a slightly dated flavour. And mathematics was changing after World War II. The International Mathematical Union, in which he played a role, was coming back. So, I think that there was a decay or a decrease in the kind of productivity that he had, both in quality as well as in quantity. I mean, there were some years when he was writing five papers in mathematics, and then for some years in the ‘50s, there were no papers at all. So his engagement with the subject suffered, and he filled up that space with his speculations on other areas. So then history went up, and Sanskrit poetry went up, and so on and so forth. D.D. Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds, the biography by Ram Ramaswamy, traces the life and work of the pioneering mathematician, historian and public intellectual. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement You mention that Kosambi was an early votary of solar energy and had thought about using photoelectric cells, so this was not merely an idea. Was the contrast between nuclear power and solar energy something that developed in Kosambi’s thinking? You also suggest that this may have been influenced by the differences in personality between Bhabha and Kosambi towards the later period of their association. True. You see, it’s not just Kosambi, but a lot of the solar energy movement in the 1950s was Nehruvian. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) was involved; Nehru was involved. Many people were, but it was at the level of the passive use of solar energy, namely, how to concentrate the sunlight so that it heats up some pot. Even as recently as my childhood, I remember the solar cooker, and in adulthood, I remember the solar cooker. So, those were not very intelligent. Whereas Kosambi had been at Harvard, but he had good friends who were at MIT, and he wrote to them. I haven’t covered that so much in the book, but he had extensive correspondence with them on what the latest stuff was on solar power, where he was thinking in terms of going not so much for passive use but for other ways of getting solar power out. Whether he thought of photovoltaic cells is highly doubtful because that was a much later invention. But the fact was that he was pointing out something which is obvious. And the fact that it opposed Bhabha’s scheme for nuclear energy was something that was also a bonus. Because this is how Kosambi did approach people whom he disagreed with on one aspect. He would attack them on something else. What was Kosambi’s view of nuclear power? You mention that he was opposed to it. Was he particularly sharp in his opposition to nuclear power, given that he was obviously opposed to nuclear weapons? There are two aspects to his opposition. One was the fact that he was against nuclear weapons. The times that he lived through—a point that is worth remembering is that he lived through two world wars and a Cold War. And also saw India’s first conflict with China, meaning that his life spans this range. He was anti-nuclear weaponry, of course, and he has said that he supported those who work for peace through peaceful means. For him, that was very important. The Pugwash Movement, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, etc. These were all the times that he lived in. But it wasn’t just that. He was also aware of the dangers of nuclear radiation. He had enough exposure. He had done the Kosambi distance in genetics. So, he was aware of how radiation influenced genetics. This was after DNA was found and its structure and so on. So although he doesn’t write quite so explicitly about DNA, he does talk about the fact that these are long-lasting changes, and then he was opposed to nuclear war for that reason as well. What’s your sense of his politics? He withdrew, or at least reduced his involvement, in the international peace movement in 1956, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary. How political was he in his approach? He was sharply ideological, but what about his politics? See, he was very suspicious of the official Marxists. While he was definitely a Marxist in his thinking, he didn’t like the party politics. He was scathingly critical of people like Shripad Amrit Dange. He was supportive of Jawaharlal Nehru, but his politics was a very personal politics. It wasn’t party politics. When he went to China, for example, he had a long conversation with Zhou Enlai. When he went to Helsinki, he propagated the Panchsheel Doctrine, meaning that his speech there was really saying that everybody should follow the Panchsheel. So, he was not a congressman, nor was he of any type of persuasion, but he was certainly Left. And I would say that he was ideologically leftist, but probably not belonging to any particular political party.

Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi was an Indian Buddhist scholar and Pāli language expert. He was also the father of the mathematician and prominent Marxist historian Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons You talk about the interplay between Kosambi and his father. Was he heavily influenced by his father? Oh, completely. The first five years of his life, he lived with his mother in Goa. And then for five or six years, he was together with his father and mother as a family in Pune. But from the age of 11 onwards, his mother receded from directly influencing him, although he was very attached to her. But the day-to-day involvement with his mother completely decreased. First of all, he went to America when he was 11. He returned when he was 17. From 11 to 17, it was two years without the father, but four years with the father. Then they went back to America, and then there was a two-year period where he and his father were living together and were very close. One of the things that I quote in the book is the diary; it was just for six months, but every day there is something with Bapu—that’s what he used to call him. He says, every evening we discussed The Dhammapada. So, there was philosophy being discussed. Then, on one particular day, Bapu told him that the history of India is incomplete. Then, along with Bapu, he went somewhere, and he noted that down. So, there were many things that his father alerted him to: the incompleteness of Indian history, being critical of texts like the Gita, and asking where it comes from. At some point, he says that the Gita seems to have been written in the Gupta period as a sort of way of justifying fighting your brethren. And then he has, one day he has a theory about Krishna. Where does Krishna come from? Is it part of the similarity between Hercules or Heracles and the snake, and Krishna and Kaliya? Are these two legends the same, etc.? So he’s 19 years old, but he’s already thinking of the kinds of questions through the conversations with his father, and these would continue to stay with him all the way. He finally wrote an article on Krishna in 1965, a year before he died. Do you remember the burden of the argument in that article? Is it similar? It’s similar. You see, because there are many Krishnas. Krishna just means “dark”. So there is Ghora Angirasa in the Chandogya Upanishad. There is also the Krishna of the Mahabharata. He asks if all of these are the same. The Dhammapada, an ancient Buddhist text that D.D. Kosambi studied and discussed with his father, Dharmanand Kosambi, during his formative years. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement I want to ask you an unfair question that brings us to contemporary times. You taught physics at JNU for many years and were also Vice Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad. From your experience as an academic, educator, and administrator, would Kosambi have survived in today’s university system? It’s not an unfair question. Today’s educational system is so unforgivingly compartmentalised that somebody like Kosambi would not have, first of all, found a job. And if he had a job, he would not have been able to progress very well in the profession. Look at today’s system—they require your papers, your API score, your this, that, and the other. He may have played the game, but I don’t think he would have done very well. In fact, on one occasion when I was giving a talk on the book, somebody in the audience actually said that he didn’t have a PhD—how did he get it? How did TIFR appoint him in mathematics? I said, look, those were different times, and that era is gone now. But talking in terms of contemporary relevance, one of the things that the new policies talk about is multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, etc. And that is where a life like Kosambi can teach us something. Because here was a man who was trained in mathematics but eventually contributed fundamentally to Sanskrit poetry, to numismatics, to history, and so on and so forth. How did this happen? Nobody sets out saying that I’m going to study history or study mathematics and I’ll eventually do something else. I think that the freedom of curriculum, the kind of academic freedom that was available. Would you say it also was the openness of the Nehruvian era in some ways? Well, no, I was thinking more of the Harvard days, because when he was really developing, good libraries, reading a lot, and being able to take six courses in mathematics in one semester, and in another semester take Italian, German, English, history, military science, etc. He was told that, “Look, if you want a degree in mathematics, you concentrate this much; the rest of it you make up as you like”. So he did what he liked. These are the kinds of principles that one could at least learn from. I’m not saying follow it exactly, because Harvard in 1926 is different from Hyderabad in 2026. But I think that we’ve sort of legislated multidisciplinarity in a way which cannot—thou shalt do so many courses in this and this and this and this. That’s not multidisciplinary. It’s very prescriptive One would have thought that our education system would have done better—that what Harvard did for Kosambi, we could have done for tens of thousands of Kosambis. Where do you think the problem lies? Is it bureaucracy or an approach? Having seen the system closely, what would you identify as the key impediments? The over-centralisation is a problem because education, at the end of the day, is an intensely personal, regional, local problem. And it’s on the Concurrent List, it is true, but it’s not treated as a concurrent issue because the Central Government now wants to have one exam for the entire country: the CUET, the this, the that, and the other. It is a problem because you don’t recognise the difference between Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan. The needs are very different. In one State, you have to have a little more study of biodiversity and environmental issues. I’m not saying it’s not important, but the focus is over there. Aridity, so water preservation is a problem somewhere else. So let States bring back the control and the responsibility for education to the local level because it is an intensely local subject. At the end of the day, who’s going to solve India’s problems? Indians. And who’s going to solve the problems of a particular State or the region? Most Indians don’t move away from their States. Or they would prefer not to. In sheer percentages, most people stay in local areas. So let the education also address their local needs and requirements while allowing them opportunities for other things. Do you think that these protests by youngsters, which we’ve seen recently, are a result of their perception of the academic and examination system? Very much so. It’s completely led by them, and it is a response to an immediate situation because education is not necessarily providing employment. That’s the difficulty that many of them state in most imaginative ways that it’s not translating.

The University of Hyderabad, where Ram Ramaswamy served as Vice-Chancellor, is among India’s leading public universities. | Photo Credit: Siddhant Thakur What was your experience as an administrator when you were at the University of Hyderabad as Vice Chancellor? Could you tell us a little bit about it? Well, that is the subject of another few hours of talk. The main thing that I feel after so many years of being in the system is that we have to start rethinking our educational models. Our universities, by and large, are not very different from what existed pre-Independence, in terms of format and what they offer. Whereas today’s needs and today’s requirements are very, very different. We don’t need these huge campuses where there’s one set of rules inside the campus, and India lives outside the campus. We need our universities to be embedded in the communities that they are serving. One of my colleagues at JNU used to say that universities are the new colonies, that you build a wall around a university and that’s it. What happens inside and outside are disjoint. I think that we need to bring a different flavour to education today. Because everything has changed about our lives except the university model. Exams twice a year, or whether it’s a semester system or a three-year or four-year programme or what have you, really, it’s very cosmetic changes that have happened, not fundamental ones. Whereas in every other part of our lives, fundamental changes have happened. When I went to college, as when you went to college, your teacher was the only source of information. And now, usually, the teacher is the poorest source of information because you’ve got the internet; you’ve got so many programmes and access to everything. So, we’ve got to really redo the model of education, and that is not being addressed by any of these policies. When you say redo it, could you give an example of what is possible? Certainly. The model that comes to my mind is that the present mode of constructing a university and addressing students’ education is, for want of a better word, paternalistic. The university shall provide accommodation for all its faculty members. The university shall provide accommodation for all the students. As a result, what happens is that the number of students that a university can teach is completely determined by the amount of real estate you have. Now, teaching and owning hostels and faculty housing are actually separate things. So, is there a way of exploring the following? You have a university which can educate many more people if you change these requirements. If you build a university in a very remote place, how are students going to get there? So don’t build your universities in very remote places, and instead figure out some way in which students can live in the towns where the universities are built. One can elaborate on it, but you see, if you have the Central University of Orissa in Koraput, for example, who’s going to go there to study? After 15 years, the number of faculty members has just about crossed into the two digits, and this—any student that you admit, you’ve got to first build the hostel room for them to have a place to stay, which means that finally you are limited. Would you say that then students should be allowed to live outside the university? Look at Delhi University, where you studied and others. There are different models that are coming up. There are universities that I know of in Dehradun where there are no hostels, or very few rooms in the hostel, and the entire villages outside this university got guest houses and places for students to stay. Also Read | If you turn a blind eye to Gaza violations today, tomorrow it may be you: Justice S. Muralidhar You quote US Chief Justice Earl Warren as saying, “Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study, and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding. Otherwise, our civilisation will stagnate and die.” These are serious words. Looking at today’s India, where we are collecting cow urine and paying people for it while others, perhaps in China, are developing the latest AI models, what does this say about research and academic freedom? I want to ask you particularly about JNU, where you spent more than three decades and which has produced some of modern India’s most “successful people”, including ministers in the present government. What is your sense of academic freedom in the present government? See, it’s a little difficult to be completely objective about it, because I retired in 2018. But Chief Justice Warren’s statement is something that people should really pay some attention to, and it is not entirely unrelated to Kosambi because this was in the case of Sweezy vs the State of New Hampshire, and Sweezy and Kosambi were very close in a variety of ways. This is part of the correspondence and exchange with Sweezy that was there. I bring it out only because Kosambi sort of typified this multiplicity of interests, which Justice Warren says is crucial to the growth of civilisation. I think that this is something which is very important for us to remember. Because this was a landmark case, and it set out the stage for academic freedom, that you should be able to explore, you should be able to argue and discuss all these issues at that period in your life. As you are maturing, as you are growing and learning about subjects, it is important to have that kind of exposure. I think that all of us would do well to remember that dissent is a normal part of growing up. Even Bhabha dissenting from Kosambi or vice versa, is normal? It’s normal, but you don’t disrespect people for that. Even with his dissent with Bhabha, his contract was not renewed only after he turned 55. Despite his lack of productivity in mathematics and everything else he did, they allowed him to continue until that age. There’s a lesson here: you have to allow these things to run their course. Amit Baruah is an independent journalist.This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.