05/09/2020
Dear Sudhakar,
Dear Hari,
It has been a pleasure, on behalf of our Department, to put together the attached booklets in honour of you as people and of your inimitable contribution to the making of the Department of History, Ramjas College.
It is no exaggeration to say that an entire exciting ‘Naya Daur’ of teaching at Delhi University, stretching roughly from the late 1970s/early ‘80s to 2010/15 or so, came to be embodied in, and constituted by your ways of being and working at Ramjas. This is among the major reasons why your retirement, Sudhakar, in December 2019, and yours Hari, in August 2020, feel strikingly different to the retirement of many other valued colleagues in recent times. We are bidding farewell, it seems, to not just two stellar individuals who were incomparably good at their work, but equally to the precious values, rhythms, principles and educational practices of an entire world that is rapidly passing, if not being cruelly snatched from us.
It has taken a while for many of us in the department—partly because of the global derangement triggered, though not caused by the current pandemic—to even begin to acknowledge the enormity of the loss staring us in our faces with your retirement. I still do not know how we are actually going to come to terms with this, forget ever making our peace with it. Preparing these two little booklets, far from helping in this process, has in fact, ended up acutely intensifying the awareness of all that has already, and is likely to be further gone with the two of you leaving Ramjas, the abiding legacies of the time you spent here notwithstanding. Yet, in present conditions of enforced isolation, this was the least we could do to say our ‘salaams’ to you and to wish you both the very best for the years ahead.
You might like to know that Anurag, our student from the current Third Year batch eagerly proposed to digitally sketch the lovely cover portraits for the booklets, while the closing sketch is a picture taken of the original that had adorned the notice board on the wall of the Department Room since 2010, in which year it was made by our former student Rajesh. Old friend of the Department, Harsh Kapoor, volunteered to help with the layout, and the suggestion that we bid 'Farewell' to both of you preferably on Teachers’ Day, came from Ashutosh, currently also in his Third Year.
Among all those who have written for the booklets or taken the initiative to draw and contribute in other ways, as also among many others who might not have been able to do so at this moment, the hope is that Ramjas will stay with you, as you will, with us. We hope too, that these little e-gifts, together with the framed 2010 sketches for each of you and printed versions of these booklets--both to be presented to you as soon as possible--shall remain your ‘marvelous possessions’ for the rest of your lives. It would of course, be a dream come true if these warm expressions of farewell could in fact signal the beginning of efforts, individual and collective, towards archiving and writing a People's History of the Department of History, Ramjas College. This, for all you know, might also become a way of making up for the unavoidable weaknesses and inadequacies of this first bid to say 'good-bye', Sudhakar and Hari.
With love,
Mukul.
Please find attached the e-booklets bidding farewell to Sudhakar and Hari and wishing them for Teachers' Day. These little e-gifts could not have seen the light of day but for the positive ways in which students and teachers of the Department responded to the proposal to say 'good-bye' to Sudhakar and Hari in this form on this day in current conditions of enforced isolation. So thank you, good reading, fun viewing, and do circulate these booklets as widely as possible.
Hari sir- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-PkXrb-8aCCq9S2w9P6O_7IVQsf0hr3-/view?usp=drivesdk
Sudhakar sir- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-4M051fY4xNSFQSnbVWrB8aDni0o5d04/view?usp=drivesdk
Portrait Credit- Anurag Singh Kushwah
