For the uninitiated, College Street is probably one of those places in the eastern Indian metropolis of Kolkata that will definitely not appear to be ‘in synch’ with the times. But if your definition of modernity and laissez-faire aren’t strictly codified in terms of steel-and-glass edifices and chic coffee shops then College Street will definitely rank on your bucket list for a trip to Kolkata — a rather run-down Indian Coffee House, Calcutta University, Calcutta Medical College and Hospital, Presidency University and the umpteen number of make-shift book stalls dotting roughly a 1km stretch of the thoroughfare are reasons enough for one to soak up life ‘as it is’ and not necessarily what ‘it should be’, as one J.B. Priestley would perhaps have said!
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And talking of Presidency — deemed an autonomous university in 2010 — the lime-and-white heritage structure with its crimson borders is one of those institutions in a 329-year-old city whose heritage status as a seat of higher learning is legend — lending as much nostalgia to an alumnus’ fondness for his or her alma mater as it does to a time-traveller’s penchant to stop time in its tracks.
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Founded in January 1817 by a glittering array of social reformers — foremost among whom were Raja Rammohan Roy, David Hare and Rani Rashmoni — Presidency University, earlier known as Hindoo College and then Presidency College, has produced two of the six Nobel laureates with unmistakeable links with Kolkata. Dr Amartya Sen, who had won the Nobel in Economics in 1998, and now Dr Abhijit Banerjee, the latest recipient of the coveted award for Economic Sciences, have both walked through the haloed portals on College Street during their undergraduate days.
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Born in the days when the social reform movement was sweeping through Bengal in an audacious challenge to orthodoxy and regimentation, Presidency has stood its ground as a premier institute that has zealously guarded its blue-chip credentials even amidst the searing tumult of a bloody Naxalite movement of the 1970s or for that matter the anarchical throes of the heavily politicised student agitations that rocked the city in the 1980s and 1990s. With the vast majority of higher education institutes in the metropolis having grappled with socio-political turbulence of some sort or the other over the last five decades or so, it is indeed amazing how Presidency has still managed to steer clear of the cacophony and commotion to a large extent — producing two Nobel laureates within a span of roughly two decades bears testimony to its resilience in buffering the ravages of time and any form of socio-political or cultural decadence. True, Presidency, too, has had its anarchical portends, primarily in the form of student agitations — the most recent being the one last year when 50 students went on an indefinite hunger strike over their demand for hostel accommodation. But those have just been islets of transitory disruptions in an institute that has never lost sight of its primary objective: Pursuit of knowledge.
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The point was driven home by Presidency University alumna, Sucharita Sarkar, an associate professor with DTSS College of Commerce, Mumbai University. “The fact that several decades separate Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee shows the consistency of Presidency’s excellence,” she told Gulf News over the phone from Vienna on Wednesday, where she is currently attending a seminar. However, Sarkar had this to add: “It may ground the euphoria a bit to remember that multiple institutions have shaped Sen and Banerjee, not just Presidency. But for now, that’s not stopping me from boasting about my college to my colleagues in Mumbai.”
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And it is only in the fitness of things that Presidency University’s umbilical cord is attached to a city that has produced a total of six Nobel laureates, including Sen and Banerjee. Starting with Sir Ronald Ross, there are five others who have been selected for the most sought-after prize on this planet, in memory of Sir Alfred Nobel — namely, Rabindranath Tagore, C.V. Raman, Mother Teresa, Sen and now Banerjee. All six have had some connection with the city and have called it home at some point of time in their life and career.
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As India hails yet another one of its ‘Nobel’ sons, Kolkata and Presidency University have enough reasons to celebrate.
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The Kolkata connection with Nobel:
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When Abhijit Banerjee’s name was announced as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, along with his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, he happened to be the sixth person to have won the prestigious prize with some link to the eastern Indian metropolis of Kolkata.
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Sir Ronald Ross: His work on malaria won him the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902. He had discovered that the salivary gland in the mosquito was the storage site of malarial parasites and with the help of infected birds, he first demonstrated the life cycle of the parasitic organism causing malaria. On February 17, 1898, he arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata), to work in the Presidency General Hospital and immediately carried out research on malaria and Kala Azar. The Ronald Ross Memorial arch outside Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital in Kolkata bears testimony to his path-breaking discovery and his unmissable link with the city.
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Rabindranath Tagore:
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He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his collection Gitanjali published in London in 1912. Tagore was the first Indian and also the first non-European to have won the Nobel. Popularly known as the Jorasanko Thakurbari, Tagore’s ancestral home in Calcutta is a heritage building and a must-visit site for residents and tourists alike. The plaque outside the building reads: “Rabindranath was born breathed his last here.” The house, in its current form, is a museum dedicated to the bard, members of his family and to the Bengal Renaissance movement. Rabindra Bharati University in the northern fringes of the city was also named after him.
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Sir Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman:
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He was an Indian physicist who conducted ground-breaking work in the field of light scattering, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. He was the first Asian to have won the prize for achievements in the field of science. Raman discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes its wavelength and amplitude. This later came to be known as the Raman Effect. He continued with his research Calcutta, where he became its honorary secretary. Raman referred to this period as the golden era of his career.
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Mother Teresa:
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She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. When she was 12 years old, the Catholic Albanian girl, known as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, decided to devote her life to God through services to the poor and the destitute. She joined a nunnery and was sent to Calcutta to be a teacher. Once in Kolkata, she had a new name: Teresa. While in Kolkata, she founded a sisterhood called Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity helped build homes for orphans, nursed lepers and the terminally ill in Calcutta. Until this day, there is a regular flow of visitors to ‘Motherhouse’ in the Missionaries of Charity on Sudder Street, to pay homage to Mother (now Saint Teresa).
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Dr Amartya Sen:
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This economist and philosopher is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. He won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1998. Interestingly, it was another Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, who christened Sen as ‘Amartya’, meaning immortal. In 1951, Sen joined Presidency College in Calcutta and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Economics. When he was nine years old, Sen had witnessed the Bengal famine that killed three million people. That was 1943. Decades later, in 1981, Sen published his pivotal work, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, in which he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities.
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Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee:
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This Indian-born American economist shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their ‘experimental approach to alleviating global poverty’. After completing his graduation from Presidency College in Calcutta, Banerjee went to Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard for further studies. When he was just six years old, Banerjee had seen for himself where exactly the poor slum-dwellers lived – in shanties just behind his home in Calcutta. Later, poverty alleviation and discarding stereotypes governing the ‘poor’ became seminal to his research work along with his wife Esther.
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