35. Vidya Das Arora (Interview

Ms. Vidya Das Arora

Vidya Das Arora the senior most faculty member in the Department of English at Gargi College wears several hats beautifully. Very few people might know that she was once areporterforthe Swaziland Times, that she has shortlistedfilms for Doordarshan, and has been an active peer-reviewer for important academic texts for Penguin. She has been a pillar of the Gargi institution in very labourintensive but crucial administrative roles, such as serving as advisor to the college students union, besides leading the Women’s Development Centre here as it’s founder convenor in the troubled and activist 1980s, besides putting in place several institutional structures for a dignified collegial environment.Her own deep knowledge and appreciation of the arts-- drama and theatre, film, music and all literature has benefited long decades of students involved in co-curricular work in the college’s WesternMusic, Theatre, Literary and CreativeWriting and Film Societies, many of which she helped found. On the more conventional academic plane, Vidya is a name to reckon with in contemporary drama, critical theory and translation (especially Odia). Despite her many accomplishments, this pioneer is characteristically shrouded in Sphinx-like mystery and keeps us wondering. Here is our interview with her for Bitacora’s first issue.

Qn: Considering your long teaching experience, what are the most striking changes in this University over the last four decades you have observed? More specifically, what are the changes in classroom realities you have perceived over the decades?

35 years of teaching is a very long time. I’ve seen huge changes in student profile, in higher education policy and in the conception of what constitutes an appropriate syllabus for our discipline. Some of these changes have been very heartening, some, due to piecemeal legislation and faulty or hurried implementation, have made teaching less satisfying than it once was. In terms of the classroom, the short semester and the large class size makes the teaching experience too impersonal for me. The older system allowed more space and time for individual attention and interactions.

Qn:How does your students’ identity as young women, in your view, express itself in your time with them in college? How have these realities changed since your own days as a student in DU?

I was a student in the seventies. We were a rebellious generation and deeply affected, both intellectually and politically, by events happening around us in India and across the world. Students today seem more driven by their personal goals. But I appreciate their self-confidence and ability to just be themselves.

Qn: How does your identity as a woman and/or a feminist affect your work as a teacher and a scholar?

My identity as a woman and as a feminist (and I’m not afraid to take on that label) certainly affects my work as a teacher and scholar. It guides my choices, my principles and carries with it an awareness of the huge responsibility we have of shaping the minds of young people at the thresholds of their lives.

Qn: What are the differences you perceive in translation to and from English and Oriya?

I have only dealt with one-way translations, with Odia as the source language and English as the target language. I was part of a project for the creation of a translations bank. My purpose was to make Odia writing accessible to the English language reader. Most educated Odias read English. But others have done excellent English to Odia translations.

They are allied fields, aren’t they? All modes of cultural expression. As teachers, we have always tried to give our students some exposure to the other arts even when they have not been part of the syllabus. That creates a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural negotiations of an age.

Qn: What drives you in your work a scholar and teacher in this institution? What ‘alternate reality’ would do you wish for here?

The only thing that drives me is the hope that I can maybe make some impact on the intellectual growth of our students. If even just a few students of a class feel changed by our teaching, our co- curricular activities, our interactions outside the curriculum, it is enough. We are educators, first and foremost, and I hope we shape our students just as we were once shaped.

Qn: What are the most important attributes a young humanities scholar in Indian academia

today needs to retain her/his ethical framework?

Given the recent devaluation of the Humanities in Universities across the world and the struggle to retain the values and directions of the stream, written about at length by Chomsky, Eagleton, Nussbaum, Delbanco and many others, I would like to remind my students that it is only the Humanities that teaches us the legitimacy of multiple truths, differing perspectives, alternate realities, within a basic framework of a just and democratic system. It teaches us how to live, not how to make a living. I am appalled at the upsurge of intolerance I see in spaces around me. We are able to talk about alternate realities in imaginative spaces but find it increasingly difficult to respect alternate realities in our own social spaces. We can maintain our differences, our dissents, without turning into adversaries over whom coercive power, in one form or the other has to be exercised.