Meerut is an old city with narrow lanes fringed by civil and military extensions from the time of the Raj. It is a city that is known to many by word of mouth and from newspaper reports, but – unlike Delhi or Lucknow – contemporary historians and sociologists tend to ignore it.

Meerut College is centrally located close to major government offices, the courts, and the police lines. The college dates from 1892. Its website states that it has been “awarded status of COLLEGE WITH POTENTIAL FOR EXCELLENCE by University Grants Commission, New Delhi,” and that “GETTING ADMISSION IN MEERUT COLLEGE IS A MATTER OF PROUD.”  

The standard of education in Meerut College has gone up and down. It has often been closed due to strikes. Cheating has been common. Indeed, “cheating is our birthright” has been a slogan used by students.

Meerut University campus, on the other hand, is situated to the southeast of the city. The campus was built after Meerut University was heaved off from Agra University in 1965. It accommodated the Vice-Chancellor’s office and residence as well as faculty quarters and student hostels. The university campus also housed the administration of the entire university, which consisted of around a hundred affiliated colleges, including Meerut College. The administrative work was in the hands of a large number of clerks, who commuted to the campus on a daily basis. They left around 5 PM, but the library was kept open in the evening.

The university was the first to introduce M.Phil. programmes. The postgraduate courses had “modernized syllabi,” and the number of students at each level was small compared to affiliated institutions like Meerut College. In my batch, there were only four students: Meenakshi from Meerut itself, Raghav from a nearby village, Satyanarayana from Andhra Pradesh, and myself.

Our professor was the rural sociologist Prof. Brij Raj Chauhan. Educated in Lucknow, he had done long-term fieldwork in a village called Ranawaton-ki-Sadri near Udaipur. In 1967, he published a volume titled, A Rajasthan Village, which established his name. Chauhan had also studied in California under the demographer Kingsley Davis though he remained more of a qualitative sociologist than a statistically oriented demographer.

As noted by Yogesh Atal in his portrait of Chauhan in the 2018 book Indian Village Revisited, Chauhan had been a good cricket player in his younger days, scoring a century in the Ranji Trophy tournament. When I came to Meerut, Chauhan was deliberately slow and measured. Classes would start with the students hesitantly taking their seats in his office, waiting for him to locate his paan, and then listening intently, when he started to speak in a barely audible voice. He weighed his words carefully, drawing on Marx, Weber and Durheim to make his own points.

Our syllabus was well thought out. Apart from Village Studies, we delved into the social and economic history of India, as well as modernization more generally. For example, we were introduced to the Meiji Restoration.

Our papers were sent outside for external evaluation. Chauhan knew leading sociologists, whom he asked to “mark” our papers. A few years later at the India Office and Library in London, I met the agrarian sociologist Prof. D.N. Dhanagare. I told him that I had studied in Meerut. He remembered that he had marked papers from Meerut that differed a bit from those of my class fellows. Those papers were mine, he inferred. Dhanagare rose to become a Vice-Chancellor in Maharashtra and also headed the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). He was an extremely conscientious scholar, who worked to the end of his life.

In addition to Chauhan, Surjan Singh Sharma also lectured us. He came from a village near Delhi. As a boy, he had been told to accompany a political leader from his village to Delhi to meet party bosses at election time. In order to sway the bosses to give his village leader a “ticket” to stand as a candidate, the young Sharma was instructed to weep for the village leader when in front of the party bosses. That was how Sharma acquired a feel for political sociology, he told us.

In his book Rural Elites in India published in 1979, Sharma vividly portrays the faction leaders and action sets that defined rural politics in those days. Every village had its own, and, an often-entertaining story. But generally, what it took to become a politically dominant caste capable of securing election victory for its chosen candidate was a numerical strength of about 40% of the total village population and a landownership of about 60% of the village land.

Typically, only the so-called ‘clean’ castes could aspire to dominance. In case there were several important ‘clean’ castes in a village, they would sometimes agree among themselves on who should run for office. Thus, in the village Gulistanpur, three landholding castes – Chauhan, Gaur Brahmin, and Gujjar – took turns. After a Chauhan leader had held the elected office of Pradhan, two slips were prepared, and a child was asked to choose one, thus deciding whether a Gaur Brahmin or a Gujar should be fielded as the chosen candidate for the next election.

The other castes in the villages were simply ignored.

Leaders were (s)elected because they could maintain peace and order within the village, and deal with outsiders, such as government officials and the police, in ways that were not very different from how they had done during the British Raj. Politics was “realist”. There was no one around to fool into believing that it was anything else. Therefore, people could be pretty honest about what was going on: Village politics was for prominent members of the clean-caste village elite.

This elite had become whole-sole in their villages after the Zamindari Abolition Act in the early 1950s had removed the powerful zamindars and taluqdars, who had collected the revenue during the British Raj. Now, it was the turn of the middle peasants. However, the logic of democracy moved on. During recent decades, a more or less “silent revolution” has enabled the so-called ‘unclean’ castes to use their numerical strength to challenge the political authority of the village elites.

Leaders from the lowest castes eventually managed to reach the highest offices of the state.

When I studied at Meerut University, there were very few, if any, Scheduled Caste or Muslim students on campus. Nevertheless, the university campus was a diverse universe. Apart from me, there were students from other states including Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Karnataka, and Jammu and Kashmir. The presence of students from villages and towns in the Meerut Commission was obvious.

As one could expect, the Jats, known for their forthright “meri baat sunno” style, set the tone, but other urban and rural castes were also represented. As a sociology student, I was made to visit villages, but some of the students also invited me to their villages to see for myself the virtues of peasant proprietorship and market-oriented sugarcane and gur production. An unusual village visit came about when some Dalits invited a small group of Thai Buddhist monks, who studied with them at Meerut College, and me to an Ambedkarite wedding in their village.

Apart from the sociology department, the campus had a psychology department, where Prof. Sheo Dan Singh studied Rhesus Macaques. He found clear differences between the curious and aggressive “urban monkeys” and less active “forest monkeys”. Singh’s contribution to the study of primatology has lately been highlighted by some of those who followed in his footsteps. 

Similarly, the Department of Biology was headed by the well-known professor V. Puri. At the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Harindra Singh Balyan is still doing research on genetics and plant breeding, particularly on crops like wheat. He is perhaps the only one from my time at the hostel, who still works at the campus.A few years back, another hostel mate, JK Pundir, who became a professor of sociology after Chauhan, also remained at the campus and rose to become Pro Vice-Chancellor.

Still at work in his mid-70s: Prof. Harindra Singh Balyan with Kiranpal Singh Punia and author on campus in 2023

Not all students were of the serious type, though. Sukrampal Singh, or Bhai-ji, had already stayed in the hostel for quite some time when I arrived, and he managed to stay on for several years after my departure, without passing any exams. In the phrase used by Craig Jeffrey, who has studied student life in Meerut, Sukrampal was engaged in a form of “timepass.”

Nevertheless, a surprisingly high number of my hostel mates ended up getting very good jobs. My class fellow Atluri Satyanarayana became a professor in Allahabad, and Meenakshi also landed an academic job. Among the others, at least one became an IAS officer, and one is said to have become the head of the Intelligence Bureau in Bombay. Another hostel mate recognized me, years later, at the Forest Research Institute in Dehra Dun. He had become an Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer.

I have discussed these career patterns with another hostel mate, Omkar Kaul. We could agree that the high quality of the faculty at the campus at the time probably made a positive difference in a country, where degrees often make very little difference. Nowadays, around 40% of young graduates are unemployed, and it may have been the same fifty years ago.

At the same time, it was also clear that almost all Meerut students lacked the command of English, which is important to reach the top in a discipline like sociology. Gadde Narayana, who taught us while he was doing his doctorate fieldwork on Scheduled Caste members of the Lok Sabha, was more articulate than most of us. He published in the Economic and Political Weekly and later became a consultant. He was, however, something of an exception.

In 1979, the department started an annual journal called Emerging Sociology.  This was about three years before the first volume of Subaltern Studies was published. The latter, highly articulate, endeavour reached a worldwide audience that Emerging Sociology could not even dream of. We were intellectuals doing real fieldwork, but our command of the English language and of theory made us provincial intellectuals, even though we subscribed to the Great Tradition of sociology.

Irrespective of caste, the felicity of the phrase does not come easily to the many, who did not go to a good convent school. 

On one occasion, I wrote a report for Nordic students about studying in India. There, I rather discouraged Nordic students from seeking admission in rough places like Meerut. I gave a copy of the report to the then-Indian Ambassador to Denmark, Shashank. He did not quite agree with my assessment of Meerut. Why should a Meerut background be a bad starting point? Shashank was himself from Meerut!

The university at the time had a good library and a fine head librarian. The city itself also had a few well-stocked bookshops. Many of the books prescribed in my syllabus were subsidized by the P.L. 480 scheme between the USA and India. Thus, I could buy Morris Cohen’s and Ernest Nagel’s An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method for Rs. 10 only. In the preface they stated that, “We do not believe that there is any non-Aristotelian logic, in the sense in which there is a non-Euclidian geometry…” Cohen and Nagel could probably be classified as logical empiricists. This fitted quite well with our sociology syllabus.

There was a doctoral student of mathematics working on topology, but fuzzy logic was not the order of the day on the campus. 

The female students stayed in a separate hostel, but teaching-wise there was co-education. Extra-curricular interaction between the sexes was discouraged even before the rules were tightened after the Emergency was declared in June 1975. After all, the Emergency was the “Era of Discipline” as the title of a book compiling Documents on Contemporary Reality, authored by D.V. Gandhi and Krishna Kant and published by Samachar Bharati in 1976, put it. Compared to Meerut College, where female hostels were virtually fortified, and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, where the future had already arrived, Meerut University Campus was somewhere in between.

Student days: Harindra Singh Balyan, Rajeev Mohan Agarwal, and Krishan Pal Malik taking food at the veranda of the Boys Hostel in the mid-70s. Agarwal and Malik retired as professors of Botany and Plant Breeding respectively, both in Gwalior.

My hostel had its own mess. The students hired the cooks, who mostly came from the hills. Three vegetarian meals a day, with the occasional omelette, cost us around Rs. 100 a month. The mess was not subsidized, but the hostel fee was heavily subsidized. We basically stayed for free.   

Of other important people, I should mention the sweepers and the chowkidars. The sweepers would come every morning knocking on our doors in the hostel, demanding that we issue our orders: “Kya hukum hai?” At times they were excessively subservient. I remember one of them frantically sweeping the path in front of a visiting dignitary with one broom in each hand. Nonetheless, the sweepers did not polish our shoes.

The chowkidars could be heard making their rounds in the night stomping their lathis into the ground. Occasionally an elderly chowkidar would take turns. He explained to me that he had served as a soldier in the Middle East during the First World War. Apart from the chowkidars and the stray dogs, the campus was peaceful and quiet at night.

(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own. He can be reached at: stigtm49@gmail.com.)