Rejected by Calcutta University , a star at Oxford


TOI

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KOLKATA: The first Indian woman to hold an Oxford Chair was refused a job by Calcutta University, not once but twice. Two decades after those successive disappointments, the wheel has turned a full circle. On Monday, Aditi Lahiri will advertise the virtues of the 900-year-old British varsity in a city that "prefers the US to the UK", perhaps helping open a similar path for those who couldn’t get past the iron gates of the iconic College Street address that has been as much a temple of learning as a political fortress.


The 59-year-old Lahiri has come a long way since the late-Eighties and early-Nineties when she was teaching at the University of California and the Max Planck Institute of Holland but was desperate to return to Kolkata. "Perhaps, I didn’t have the right political clout. Education here was much politicized those days," she says. "I wanted to contribute to education here. I couldn’t because I was denied access." Her applications failed to pass muster despite a recommendation from mentor Subhadra Sen, the son of acclaimed linguist Sukumar Sen.


"Being my parents’ only child, I wanted to be with them. After my father died in 1993, I stopped applying to Calcutta University. I took my mother with me to Germany, instead," says Lahiri, who created history on August 1, 2008 when Oxford University launched its linguistics, philology and phonetics faculty. It was an academic milestone for India, too — Lahiri had just become the first Indian woman to be an Oxford Chair.


"I don’t know if there were any Indian men who had been Chairs at Oxford. I had wondered fleetingly when Lord Patten (Oxford chancellor) said I was the first Indian woman to have made it there," she says. "I was immensely surprised when he said so because several famous Indians had been to Oxford. Indira Gandhi had studied at Somerville College, where I am a fellow. It was also a great pleasure starting a faculty at the time of recession."


The Bethune College mathematics graduate (1971) is married to Henning Reetz, professor of phonetics, University of Frankfurt. "During the turbulent Naxal period, I had missed two years when I was doing my M A from Calcutta University (Those days she had worked as a Doordarshan newscaster, her contemporaries being N Viswanathan, Leena Sen and others). The city has changed much since. For better or worse, I can’t say," says Lahiri, who has German citizenship and shuttles between Oxford, Frankfurt and Kolkata.

 

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