Address by Syama Prasad Mookerjee
November 23rd, 1940
I deem it a great honour to be invited to deliver the Convocation Address of your University. It is true your University ranks as one of the younger seats of learning in this country. Yet one cannot overlook the peculiar circumstances leading to your foundation which brought within your jurisdiction many institutions that have for a long number of years steadily contributed their share to the cause of educational progress. If your University has known only thirteen summers, its habitation in this historic city of Agra, whose ancient and mediaeval associations are indeed unforgettable, gives you a dignity and a prominence which have a value all their own. The sacred river which glides past tile battlements of your city carries our memory back to heroic age of India, to the days of Mahabharata and even to that of the Rig-Veda itself. The ancient castle of the city figured in the qasidas of the Ghaznavid periods. The noble town which grew round it flourished under the fostering care of the greatest of the Great Moguls who founded the famous fort of cut red stone, the like of which those who had traveled over the world in the days of his son, could not point out. But it was left to his famous grandson to adorn the city with its brightest of ornaments-one of the seven wonders of the world - a crowning tribute in marble to India's womanhood. The land round the Taj was also the birthplace of Faizi and Abul Fazl. For years it was the residence of Tansen and the resting place of many an eminent person- age of the Mogul Period. A University founded in a city with such noble associations has a responsibility to the Motherland which needs no emphasis.
The last twenty years have witnessed the creation of several unitary teaching and residential Universities in different parts of India and admirable work is being done in many of them to advance the cause of higher education and research. The main feature of your University must, however, continue to be of the affiliating type, and while the colleges should be encouraged to carry on undergraduate teaching work in the various faculties, I would earnestly plead that you should organise in full co-operation with one another important schemes of original research consistent with the requirements of your province. They should embrace each of the great fields of human thought and achievement. It should be possible to develop the scheme in such a manner as to avoid duplication of work and permit a fair distribution of subjects in accordance with the conditions and circumstances of your institutions.
I am well aware that such a scheme will need for its materialisation very large resources in the way of apparatus, libraries, laboratories and museums, which are all indispensable to modern higher education as elaborate costly machines are to modern industry. As higher education in every part of the civilised world is financed generously, if not lavishly, by the State, you must appeal to Government for increased grants to enable you to discharge your main function. It is my firm conviction that, with the resources of the affiliated colleges properly organised and stimulated, your University can secure the assistance of the instructing staff and scholars who would be willing to devote themselves wholeheartedly to the sacred cause of advancement of the bounds of knowledge.
Universities in British India owed their foundation mainly to a desire on the part of the authorities to secure the loyal services of administrators and service-holders who could keep going the complex machinery of a bureaucratic Government in an orderly and efficient manner. There was also the idea of spreading in a conquered territory, through the agency of the Universities, a system of Western education which in those days of benevolent despotism was regarded by the rulers as a path of duty and the sure means of elevating India to what they thought to be a higher standard of life. Universities were not established as seats of learning nor was education attempted to be organised for the highest development of Indian culture and civilization. Nearly half a century after the establishment of the first University in India, the ideal of a teaching University where scholars might meet for the dissemination and advancement of knowledge was first formulated. But the general system of education was not even then closely linked up with those essential problems which called for early fulfilment, so that India might reach her destiny through education and regain her supremacy in the domain of culture and enlightenment as also in the social, economic and political spheres of activity.
