Two sides of Osmania University –bright and dark

When Osmania University was established by Nizam, he introduced Urdu as medium of instruction and subsequently Arts, Science, Commerce and even Engineering and Medicine were taught in Urdu, instead of English. While it was appreciable to teach in Urdu which was administrative language of the Hyderabad princely State, it denied education in mother tongue Telugu, Marathi and Kannada which used to be spoken by larger population than Urdu speaking people in the State.

Only after the merger of Hyderabad State into the Indian Union, after the historic Telangana armed struggle, things started changing. During Nizam’s rule, the university produced graduates and post-graduates for the clerical needs of the State and intellectual atmosphere was not encouraged.However, universities and educational institutions cannot be in isolation from society. The unrest and turmoil in the society reflected on the campus from time to time. ‘Vande Mataram’ movement was suppressed and large numbers of students were expelled.

P V Narasimha Rao was one of them. He pursued his studies in Nagpur University later.Osmania fought a big struggle for university autonomy. It is a place of secularism. Many students from downtrodden sections of society have come up on the campus in recent years.The right wing students’ organisations always tried to use force and violence against rivals. That is because of ideological bankruptcy. Those who do not have confidence of their capacity to convince at least the neutrals, if not the opponents, their reasoning and arguments will resort to violence.

They resorted to suppress others with the help of administrative, political, judicial and police forces. This made Rohith Vemula to kill himself in Hyderabad University. Assertion of student organisations belonging to downtrodden sections is appreciable.University is not a factory to produce graduates, clerks and staff. It should be a place which shapes its students as intellectuals. A free and pure atmosphere of freedom should be there to breathe knowledge. It should be a place of clash of minds and not physical clashes.

Vice-President Hamid Ansari quoted from John Henry Newman the idea of University: “A university is a place of concourse, whither students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge; a place of communication and circulation of thought – It is a place where enquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by collusion of mind with mind and knowledge with knowledge – this creates a pure and clean atmosphere of thought, which students can breathe. ”Let Osmania University rededicate itself to be a free institution of knowledge for our students on the occasion of centenary.

By Suravaram Sudhakar Reddy