Суд над Бхагавад-гитой / Attempt to ban Bhagavad-gita

http://www.livemint.com/2012/01/11193200/Back-to-the-USSR.html?h=B

Back to the USSR

Mapping Russian influence in Delhi
Mayank Austen Soofi





The possibility of a ban on the Bhagavad Gita in Russia recently upset many in India, a country where an entire generation grew up reading Russian fairy tales, magazines and novels in the 1970s and 1980s.



Statue of Leo Tolstoy

Delhi still has a few landmarks that remind old-timers of the erstwhile Soviet Union’s hold on once-socialist India.


One such reminder stands at a busy traffic intersection. His arms crossed, beard flowing, Leo Tolstoy gazes towards the Janpath outlet of McDonald’s in the colonial-era Connaught Place.

The author of Anna Karenina is not the only Russian giant on Delhi’s cultural boulevards. A little further east to Mandi House stands the poet Alexander Pushkin.

You may wonder who unveiled these statues? There are no plaques to provide answers. Why them? Why not Mirza Ghalib or Munshi Premchand?

“Tolstoy’s statue in Delhi’s heart is apt,” says historian Mushirul Hasan, who is writing Mahatma Gandhi’s biography. “Besides being a great novelist, he was special to India because of his proximity to Gandhi, who was influenced by Tolstoy’s ideas on non-violence, chastity and sexual abstinence. Indeed, Gandhi went on to create a farm in South Africa that he named after Tolstoy.”

“The Russian language was being taught in Delhi even before independence, but the phonological education in Russian started in 1965 with the setting up of the Institute of Russian Studies, which was given space in the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi campus,” says Ramadhikari Kumar, president of the Indian Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature, and a retired professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). It was there that the institute, now called the Centre of Russian Studies, finally found a home. “In 1955, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited Moscow, followed by premier Nikita Khrushchev’s trip to Delhi. Immediately afterwards, Russia started helping India in setting up a steel plant in Bhilai and oil refineries in Koyali and Barauni. Russian, the language of a superpower, became a weapon to boost your career.”



Russian Centre of Science and Culture; below statue of Alexander Pushkin

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) shaped Delhi’s intellectual life in the 1960s and 1970s. The left-leaning romantics were regulars at literary evenings of the Russian Centre of Science and Culture. Kurta-clad ideologues lambasted American imperialism at seminars in Sapru House. Maxim Gorky’s Mother was the cult classic. Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Pushkin were on the must-read list. If you wanted to make a statement, Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don was the book of choice.


According to Prof. Kumar, JNU’s Russian language institute, which has around 150 students in a batch, has produced more than 400 teachers. “By the 1980s, 40 Indian universities had set up departments of Russian language, mostly manned by degree holders of JNU,” he says. “The Russian government offered our students fellowship programmes that included free food, lodging and some pocket money.” The funding stopped after the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991.

“We’re asking the Russians to introduce at least a limited number of fellowships,” says Prof. Kumar.

Today, Gorky and Sholokhov are rarely found in bookstores, but Tolstoy remains in vogue. “He is a classic author,” says Mirza Afsar Baig of Midland The Book Shop in south Delhi’s Aurobindo Market. “We sell 40 copies of War and Peace every month.” In Delhi University, 250 students have Tolstoy in their master’s course in literature.

Over the years, the Russian cultural centre’s influence has waned but a quick browse through its website shows an active monthly schedule: lectures on Russian literature, the tercentenary celebrations of scientist M.V. Lomonosov, an exhibition by painters Zhanna Yakovleva and Dina Kalinkina. The centre also offers Russian language in capsules of four months, and takes a maximum of 25 students in a batch.

Some parts of Delhi, it would seem, remain firmly attached to the days of yore.