Mumbai: “I will really miss this tree.” Mugdha Karnik is gazing out of one of the two large windows of her office in the Mumbai University (MU) Kalina campus, both of which frame greenery-filtered views of nearby buildings. She points to tamarind pods hanging from the branches, new leaves sparkling among the old in the evening sun.
Around her, printouts, gameboards, dice and tokens, and chatter waft around the room. Students, mostly twentysomethings, with a few older ones among them — including one with a thatch of silver hair — are preparing for a festival of ancient Indian games that will start the next day, one of several events they have been working on as a sort of extended farewell for Ms. Karnik; at the end of June, she will retire after over 26 years as director of the University’s Centre for Extra Mural Studies (CEMS). She confesses to sadness, not just at leaving all she has built, but because MU has still made no move to hire or promote a replacement, and it looks to her like they won’t.
Outside the walls
The concept of extra-mural studies had been brought to India by M.R. Jayakar, who had been seen similar programmes in the UK, and implemented them as Poona University’s first vice-chancellor. Maharashtra’s University Act, 1974, provided for extra mural studies, and it was implemented across all the State’s universities by 1976, mostly as a rural education initiative. Successful in the beginning, because it took lectures and learned people to the villages, it began losing ground to the reach of print publications, and then television.
The then University of Bombay had a department like other universities did, but it was only in 1989 that the administration decided it needed a director and put out an advertisement; interviews happened in 1991. Ms. Karnik was 30 then, with a Masters in sociology and experience in journalism, adult education in the city’s slums as well as with the Warli community, corporate communication, and human resources. A senior academics who liked her writing asked her to apply. Bored with her job, she did, and she was selected.
She remembers an academic warning her that it was a bhaakad department, infertile; she saw that as an opportunity. Since there was no precedent, and it was non-formal education, she says, she has been able to experiment to her heart’s content. But there was one early setback. The University Act of 1994 had no place for extra mural studies. She thinks it was because the State was now doing more with adult and continuing education. She was told that since there would be no department, she could shift to a public relations role. “I got wild. I said, “I have done good work, completely changed the rural programme. If you want to shut it, okay, I will leave, I can get another job.” The then-VC, annoyed, stopped signing her papers. This, she says, is the usual reaction from senior administrators with bruised egos. “Almost all the V-Cs have done that,” she chuckles, as she recalls her many conflicts since then, but asks not to be quoted.
Fortunately another senior academic, who valued the work and wanted it to continue, advocated for a continuation, and the VC issued a directive that gave the department a stable lease of life. Around then, another well-wisher gave Ms. Karnik valuable advice: get new income sources. She knew what she should do. In the rural programmes, she had started classes in subjects like astronomy and dramatics, and activities like nature trails which had already been getting queries from urban students. She had the syllabi ready; to those she added a sustainable development certificate course, and one in nursery and gardening and started a set of weekend courses. Happily, astronomy was quickly overbooked, and the other classes filled up too.
Since then, the department has created a place of its own in the city’s academic landscape. In 2006–7, it became the Centre for Extra Mural Studies, and over the years it also added courses in subjects like geology and archaeology, most taught by guest lecturers (among them a few former students). Archaeology proved so popular that it is now a department under the CEMS; Archaeology MA students — the first batch in MU after 150 years — have just sat for their first-year exams. Lecturers come in from Deccan college, Sathe College; even Dr. Arvind Jamkhedkar, chair of the ICHR. “They support us,” Ms. Karnik says. “They get paid for three hours, teach for five.”
There has been no shortage of students for the eclectic set of courses on offer. “People come,” she says, smiling affectionately. “They know we give certificates, not degrees, but they want to learn. Lots of crazy people.” She mentions a numismatics enthusiast who took his first course at age 92 and even worked at an archaeological excavation in peak summer; and a business owner and a loader who became great pals, bonding over their love of history. “They give up their weekends to come here.” A middle-aged student working on the exhibition pipes up: “No! We live for the weekends!”
Indifference within
When Ms. Karnik returns to the present, the mischief that often crinkles her eyes and the corners of her mouth fades.
Come July, CEMS will have no director. She has written four letters, two to the previous V-C, one to the interim appointee, and one to the new V-C, Suhad Pednekar, but MU has not even put out an advertisement inviting applications. At the usual speeds of government-run academia, she says, a hire would take six months, at best two months if fires were lit under seats. But she has been told the State government wants to cut costs and her post, though a sanctioned position, will not be filled. The centre won’t be the only one without a dedicated full-time head: there are, she says, around a dozen such vacant posts in MU, and the powers-that-be show no signs of filling them.
She could apply for an extension, as other retired heads have, but she won’t. Such positions pay a fraction of their former salaries, making it attractive for the administrators. “But no new blood will come in,” she says. “I understand my limitations now. I did good because I was 30 years old then; I had lots of good ideas and could put in my heart, do everything. Now my interests have changed a bit… writing, translation, political opposition to this regime [laughs]. Somebody new should come; you cannot go on giving extensions to the same old people.”
That new blood could be the current coordinator of CEMS, Kurush Dalal, also the head of the archaeology department. But Dr. Dalal faces an uncertain future himself. He was appointed by the UGC as an Eleventh Plan post. “[Universities] gives an undertaking to the UGC when we ask for posts,” Ms. Karnik explains. “Either we or the State government has to pay the professor after their UGC tenure.” Instead, she says, these teachers are asked to leave, unless their heads of departments lobby for them. “And we do,” she notes. “36 professors came through the UGC Eleventh Plan, and 22 of them are still there, so 22 HoDs have fought for their people.” But the extensions are for six-month stints, explicitly ‘on purely temporary basis.’ Worse, unlike regular teaching staff who get Sixth Pay Commission salaries, Dr. Dalal and others in his predicament get paid Fifth Pay Commission rates. “I have told them, fight, go to the courts; I will support you, testify. But they say, ‘If we are likely to be made permanent, this spoils our chances.’ That’s very convenient for MU and the government.”
Unsurprisingly, Dr. Dalal is weary. “He said he would leave,” Ms. Karnik says. This will endanger both the archaeology department and the CEMS. “I said, stay for six months, I will fight for you. He has agreed to wait. If he does, I can give the charge to him.” On whether CEMS and the archaeology department will surivive, she says she is “hopeful, but not confident.”
She thinks MU might bring in an administrator, not a teacher or a non-teaching academic like herself. But without someone deeply invested in the ethos, she fears the CEMS will wither, die. She finds it disappointing that a government willing to spend ₹3,500 crore on a statue of Shivaji wants to cut funds for education. What stings more is the indifference from MU’s administrators: “They are not bothered. They could fight for us with the government, but don’t want to.”
Her own future, come July, is a focus on Instucen (India Study Centre) a trust she, her husband and several other academics founded — and funded — to pay for activities she felt weren’t happening at the university. “The dream is a Western Ghats Centre: a botanical garden showing the flora; explaining the geology, archaeology. Too big a dream, perhaps.” But her smile is back, and she does not look at all unsure.
