The founding motto of the University of Mysore, Na hi jñānena sadṛśam (There is nothing equal to knowledge) from the Bhagavad Gita, distilled a civilizational conviction: education is not merely vocational training but an ethical and spiritual journey toward Self-Knowledge (Atma Vidya). In harmony with the classical dictum Sā vidyā yā vimuktaye, true learning culminates in Moksha. This ideal also resonates across Dharmic traditions—prajñā (paññā) leading to nirvāṇa in Buddhism, kevala jñāna and the humility of anekāntavāda in Jainism, and gian and seva-guided mukti in the Sikh tradition—affirming a shared commitment to knowledge as liberation, refinement, and unity.
B.G.L. Swamy’s Mysore Diary (a slim yet piercing 81-page chronicle) presents a stark irony: by the late 1970s, the campus that once embodied this ideal—Maharaja’s College and Manasagangotri—had become a place where knowledge itself seemed “liberated” in the most tragic sense, as if it had departed the university precincts. Written with unmistakable clarity, the work reads like a field notebook from the edge of an academic collapse, rendering institutional drift into a narrative of memory, loss, and accountability.
Published posthumously fourteen years after Swamy’s passing, Mysore Diary bears his distinctive signature—trenchant sarcasm, mordant wit, and a satirical edge that converts the horror of daily dysfunction into jolting reflection. The technique is deliberate: the laughter is brief, the insight lingers, and the reader’s journey often ends, as Swamy intended, in the capital city of disgust.
In literary terms, the narrative has the hues of a Shakespearean tragedy staged in lecture halls and committee rooms: a bizarre yet revealing confluence of humoral registers—humour, fury, terror, disgust, and pathos—conspicuously without the śānta (peace) rasa. The effect is cumulative. What begins as an anecdotal diary matures into a methodical autopsy of a revered institution.
Context matters. Swamy did not volunteer for this assignment; he arrived as a University Grants Commission (UGC) visiting professor for a year (1979–80), already retired, and would spend his final months in Mysore. The vantage is therefore unusual and invaluable: an accomplished scholar, freed from local entanglements, documenting a system from the inside with the detachment of a visiting diagnostician and the duty-bound candour of a teacher.
The diagnosis is unsparing. A once luminous Vidya Kashi (Kashi of Knowledge) had turned, in Swamy’s reading, into an educational and cultural crematorium. The tragedy was not precipitated by war or natural disaster but by an inward corrosion of character—the Arishadvarga (kāma, krodha, lobha, moha, mada, mātsarya)—amplified by political power. Within Swamy’s and contemporaneous accounts, the culprits were less a single faction than an ecosystem: caste-based mobilizations that subordinated meritocratic norms, ideological capture including Communist-aligned activism that prized dogma over scholarship, and party patronage (notably linked to the Congress party’s local politics of the era) that reconfigured incentives within departments and committees. The cumulative outcome was predictable: scholars withdrew, standards slackened, and the campus climate turned inhospitable to inquiry.
H.M. Nayak’s foreword to Mysore Diary underscores the same verdict, shaded by grief. Despite a lifelong bond with the University of Mysore and years in positions of responsibility, Nayak records a helplessness before the scale of the damage—evidence that the destructive forces at play were systemic, persistent, and able to neutralize individual integrity. Such recollections, when revisited today, may appear implausible in their severity, yet they reflect a reality many contemporaries quietly recognized.
As a source, Mysore Diary has dual value. It functions as a primary document—an eyewitness ledger of a university’s unraveling—and as a concise chapter in the longer historiography of educational decline in post-Independence India. Read alongside corroborative narratives (notably S.L. Bhyrappa’s autobiography recounting his college years), a coherent, if painful, picture emerges of process, perpetrators, and petty intrigues—Paradise Lost as an institutional genre. Divergent voices exist, as they should in any honest historical reconstruction, but the convergences are too precise to dismiss.
Placed within a broader analytical frame, the Mysore episode illustrates how fragile academic ecosystems become when normative ideals (Na hi jñānena sadṛśam; Sā vidyā yā vimuktaye) are displaced by short-term power calculations. The mechanisms are recognizable across many universities of the period: politicized appointments and promotions, deprofessionalization of academic leadership, ideological activism eclipsing scholarship, disciplinary tribalism, erosion of peer review and mentoring cultures, resource diversion from libraries and laboratories to patronage networks, reputational flight of serious scholars, and the subsequent thinning of research output combined with curricular shallowness.
There is also a civilizational dimension to the critique. The Dharmic educational ethos—so deeply embedded in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions—places a premium on inner discipline (samyama), intellectual humility, and truth-seeking over partisanship. Buddhism’s right speech and right intention, Jainism’s anekāntavāda and ahiṃsā in discourse, Sikhism’s seva and gian-infused responsibility, and the Hindu pursuit of Atma Vidya converge on a shared injunction: learning must refine character and serve society. By this yardstick, politicized campuses that normalize factional loyalty over first principles betray not only a university’s charter but also a wider Dharmic consensus on the purposes of knowledge.
For many alumni and teachers who have walked those corridors, the narrative triggers an immediate, personal recognition: a memory of classes that once brimmed with intellectual excitement, libraries that felt like sanctuaries, and mentors who quietly demanded excellence. The subsequent dissonance—a committee meeting reduced to a counting of blocs or a seminar transformed into a slogan exchange—lands as both institutional and intimate loss.
Methodologically, caution is warranted. A diary is a perspective, not a verdict delivered from an omniscient bench. Yet when a perspective is rigorous, contemporaneous, and triangulated by independent testimonies, it earns a standing in the evidentiary record. Mysore Diary achieves this by eschewing polemic for observation and by converting rhetoric into verifiable anecdotes—minutes, memos, meetings, and the texture of everyday academic life. Read against the broader literature on university governance and campus politicization in the 1970s, its account looks diagnostic rather than merely denunciatory.
The lessons for Indian higher education are concrete. First, insulate recruitment, promotions, and resource allocation from factional capture through transparent, peer-led processes. Second, restore academic leadership as a scholarly vocation, not a reward for ideological service. Third, rebalance the campus public sphere toward genuine debate—rooted in truth-seeking and civility—while protecting space for diverse Dharmic perspectives to flourish in harmony. Fourth, fund libraries, labs, and mentorship pipelines that convert talent into research contributions and public-spirited graduates. Finally, anchor policy to the civilizational telos of education: knowledge as liberation, unity, and service, never as a tool of entrenchment.
Seen this way, Mysore Diary is less a lament than a call to repair. It reminds that an abode of knowledge can be hollowed out by a thousand ordinary decisions—and also revived by a thousand principled ones. Reclaiming the śānta rasa for campus life requires neither nostalgia nor denial, but disciplined memory, institutional courage, and a renewed fidelity to the simple truth enshrined in the university’s motto: Na hi jñānena sadṛśam. To be continued.
Inspired by this post on Dharma Dispatch.
