JNU: The Making of a University

Jawaharlal Nehru University, or JNU as it is popularly known, is perhaps India's grandest of nationalist institutions. It embodies the spirit of an earlier nationalist quest for autonomous and excellent intellectual life. In the choice of the issues and the confidence with which the disciplinary boundaries were questioned, JNU tried to constitute itself as an ethical alter ego of the nation. JNU - The Making of a University is an examination of how an institution comes to life-from its conception in 1964, to 1989 when it entered a phase of major transition. It brings to life the intricate web of relationships between the founding principles of the university, contemporary politics, social transformations and the historical trajectories of Indian intellectual and institutional lives. The book is a chronicle of how the community of scholars and students navigated contested domains of emerging disciplines and organized politics and how they tried to infuse life and movement into them in a completely new and uninhabited physical and intellectual space. Packed with details-based on parliamentary proceedings, newspaper accounts, interviews, pamphlets and a host of other primary sources-and replete with anecdotes and a rare intimate knowledge, this is not just the story of a university, it is also an intellectual history of India. Educated at St. Xavier's College, Ranchi and at Centre for Historial Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Rakesh Batabyal has been a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (1996 - 1999), National Institute of Punjab Studies (2004) and was the Inaugural Chair of Contemporary Indian History at Tokyo University (2010). As Deputy Director of the Academic Staff College of Jawaharlal Nehru University, he is credited with making the college one of the most dynamic academic centers in the country. Batabyal teaches history of Media at the Center for Media Studies in JNU.