This is a guest post by ANIRBAN KAPIL BAISHYA and DARSHANA SREEDHAR

Ratan Tata Library, Delhi School of Economics…3rd June, 2013. The time was 11:30 AM, the weather outside, a little more than merely hot. The head librarian sat in his armchair in an air-conditioned room, a television screen playing back CCTV footage from each and every corner of the library.

We were two students from a different University in the far side of the city. An hour long journey and an enthusiasm to scour one of the best libraries in town had brought us here. We were armed with our “recommendation letters” from our supervisors, asking the concerned library or archive to grant us access to its collections. We had used the same letters on a number of occasions earlier, gaining access to libraries and archives across the country including places such as the National Film Archive of India (Pune), Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata), Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi), Centre for Development Studies (Trivandrum) and a host of others. We were hoping that the RTL might also offer us something for our respective “research” projects, one PhD and the other MPhil.

We emphasize  the word “research” here because our encounter with the librarian, was a rude awakening to the realities of the very confusion that shrouds the term. We are aware that each library has a very sacred duty…to protect the books it houses. The RTL’s CCTV system was very much in place to take care of that. What shocked us however, is that one of us was denied permission to even look at the collection on the basis of the aforementioned confusion about the term “research.” The reason, as the librarian put it was that if one is doing an MPhil, the parent institution should be enough to sustain the research, or else they should not be running an MPhil program. What might have seemed like a very legitimate remark to the custodian of knowledge was an affront to the very notion of an MPhil degree. Is an MPhil degree not worth the same kind of dedicated research, albeit on a smaller scale, as a PhD? The librarian, we would like to suggest, was victim to a very common fallacy which results when the two senses of one root word are collapsed together without a consideration of the fine lines that separate them. The root word in question here is the Greek “akademeia” which lends itself to two English words, “academy” and “academia.” While the former means a particular institution, housed in a particular place at a given point of time, the latter refers to a larger set of attitudes and approaches towards learning. The Delhi School of Economics for example, is an “academy” in the sense that it exists in the city of New Delhi, was established on a particular date and caters to a certain number of students and faculty members within its buildings. What it facilitates and what connects it to a larger world of higher education and research is “academia” and it is in the latter sense that it transcends the finite trappings of its physical address. The librarian’s denial of access we feel, accrues from a belief that “academia” necessarily requires an “academy.” Hence the strong contention that the “parent institution” should be able to provide the required resources. This results in a coerced closing down of boundaries where “academia” is reduced to the “academy” which is to be protected from outsiders. Institutional affiliation, in short, was the order of the day. The question that we are faced with then, is what happens, for example, to the independent researcher who might not be affiliated to any institute, but whose own research practices might be no less deserving than that of an institutionally affiliated one.

We then decided to take, what seemed to us to be the most legitimate course of action at the given moment. We approached an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and got our University recommendations forwarded by him. Contrary to our expectations, this only worsened the situation. On producing the letters for the second time, we were promptly accused on “playing politics” and lectured on the total authority of the librarian. On trying to plead the case, even the one who had initially been granted permission was now denied rights of usage. Clearly, even though the librarian kept on saying that the library treats everyone as “equal,” and does not discriminate on the basis of “caste, creed” and so on, a different kind of discrimination was in place. Aghast at the turn that events had taken, we now decided to go meet the Director of the Delhi School of Economics on the recommendation of a few Professors. We had no hopes of getting access to the library when we met him. We did not even approach him to make that attempt. What we wanted instead, was to get some clarification about what kind of a researcher gets entry into the RTL and on what basis. However, when we explained our situation to him, he was nice enough to write a note on the same letters asking the librarian to grant us access and to take a look at the library…getting copies of material, he told us, would come later and require consideration and we were fine with this clause. At this point, even getting a look at the collection seemed like a celestial boon. When we met the librarian with the letters for the third time, he promptly revoked the earlier denial of permission to the PhD request saying that he had never denied this permission in the first place. To the MPhil request however, his answer was still “A BIG NO.”

Defeated by “norms” and “rules”, we withdrew for the day. However, we were still intrigued by the almost zealot-like denial of the librarian. To clarify matters we decided to take a look at the RTL’s website, which the librarian had constantly been evoking to legitimize his enforcement of “rules.” Two clauses immediately struck us when we looked at the library membership eligibility criteria. Clause “G” on the webpage cites that “teachers and research scholars (PH.D) of other Universities and Research institutions (Indian and Foreign)” can be admitted “as guest members for consultation for a specified period on production of his/her registration/recommendation letter duly signed by the Head of Institution/ Department with official seal, two stamp size photographs, identity Card of the person issued by the parent University/Institute and a Fee of Rs.100/-.” The other, clause “E” cites that “Those scholars engaged in higher studies and research under special permission of the librarian on payment of Rs, 1000/- as library security” may also be admitted. What is funnily missing in both cases however, is the status of the M.Phil degree. This is compounded by the fact that M.Phil students of Delhi University are clearly eligible to access the RTL as per one of the clauses. What then is the M.Phil. Degree as understood by the RTL librarian? Clearly, “research scholar” means only Ph.D students according to the website—something that stands in uneasy contrast with the fact that the DSE sociology department’s own clause for direct admission to Ph.D from M.Phil on the basis of meritorious results renders the line between M.Phil and Ph.D, a thinly defined one. On the other hand the clause about “scholars engaged in higher studies and research” is remarkably unclear as to what defines higher studies and research. As far as common knowledge is concerned, both the M.Phil and the Ph.D programs qualify for the definition.
In that case, we are once again faced with the question about who defines the criteria for eligibility, when in the given case, the written clauses are unclear about the matter and very loosely defined. Does it boil down to the interpretation of a fatherly custodian, keeping an “eye” on the house with many electronic eyes? If, as the RTL’s surveillance clause puts it that the CCTVs have been installed to “check entry of unauthorised persons and causing damage to the collection” then what does the librarian become? The librarian in this case is not merely the caretaker or the custodian…rather, coupled with the fuzziness of the written word, the multiplicity of surveillance methods makes the task of the librarian an altogether subjective, even capricious one. Ironically, not far from the RTL, a few blocks down within the same University campus, the Delhi University’s Tagore Hall houses the bust of S. R Ranganathan, who is termed as the “father of library science.” The bust has his famous “five laws of library science” etched on the pedestal. These laws are: (1) Books are for use (2) Every reader his [or her] book (3) Every book its reader (4) Save the time of the reader and (5) The library is a growing organism. In effect these laws mean that the library is an open world in which the books and the readers are in an organic relationship with each other.

However, under the cold gaze of surveillance cameras and the functionalist obstinacy for adhering to “rules” and “norms” (all very fuzzy mind you) on the one hand, and an almost Fordist zeal for efficiency, the library ceases to be all that. The library becomes more like a machine in which one is supposed to find the screws and nuts, pick them up and move on towards constructing the final product, all shiny and ready for consumption. The library, and indeed higher education become parts of an assembly line in which it is the “degree” and the functionality of the degree rather than research, knowledge and argumentation that fuel the gigantic educational machine. The set of attitudes that fuel this rhetoric of functionalist education is not uncommon. Only last year, students of the Delhi University were up in arms against three reputed publishing houses who had filed a case against a photocopy shop (Rameshwari Photocopy), ironically at the Delhi School of Economics, for selling “course packs”, initiating an ongoing legal and “moral” tussle about the issue. In the Rameshwari case, the issue was about copyright versus equitable education. However, here too, the core problem was one of “access.” Who decides how much access students should have, to what material and at what price? On the one hand corporate houses begin to regulate access to education for profit, under the garb of legality and copyright. On the other, we have universities and libraries themselves adopting the same functionalist and “surveillant” rhetoric of the corporate house. The final question to be asked here then, is what does it mean for the status of higher education and research when public libraries begin behaving like private collections? “We cannot go around feeding everyone” is what the librarian had told us that morning. Perhaps he mistook us for silverfish, the book’s worst enemy. We would like to retort, kind sir, that “we did not come to eat your books…we only wanted to read them.”

(Anirban Kapil Baishya  and Darshana Sreedhar are M Phil and PhD students respectively at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University)