Residents of Calcutta all know at first or second hand about the great Bengali tradition of the scholar-teacher. They know of minds shaped and lives transformed by economists like Bhabatosh Datta and Dipak Banerjee, by historians like Susobhan Sarkar and (more recently) Rajat Ray, by anthropologists like Nirmal Kumar Bose and political scientists like Buddhadev Bhattacharya. These teacher-scholars have awakened in their wards a search for disinterested knowledge as well as a penchant for disputatious argument. To invoke the dedication of a book by a celebrated former student of Presidency College, these teachers each stoked many a novice's first doubts. While cheerfully conceding Calcutta's precedence in this regard, I want to say that other cities and universities have also had their exemplary figures. And I want also to suggest that in many ways the most effective college guru has generally been a teacher of English literature. For literature embraces the whole of the human universe in a way that the more specialized social sciences do not. Poetry and works of fiction are celebrated in themselves, for how they say what they say, but they are cherished also as a window into the wider world, for their insights into the functioning of family and community, society and the state. Thus one reads Milton and Kipling for the beauty of their language, but also to understand the compulsions that have led one set of humans to dominate or resist another. Down the decades of the 20th century, the best teachers of English in the best of India's colleges came to acquire a special halo of their own. Among these English teachers have been - to name names for illustrative purposes only - Amal Bhattacharjee and Sukanta Chaudhuri in Calcutta, Kamal Wood and Homai Shroff in Mumbai, Muriel Wasi and Meenakshi Mukherjee in Delhi, and K. Swaminathan in Chennai. The celebrated teachers of economics were listened to only by students of economics, but teachers of English counted as their chelas their own students as well as those drawn from other disciplines. Aspiring historians and chemists were drawn to the lectures of K. Swaminathan or Kamal Wood for the elegance of their diction as well as for the deeper understanding of human emotions that their teachings conveyed. Dignifying this elevated company was T.G. Vaidyanathan, whose death in Bangalore last week marked, for that city at any rate, the end of an era. 'TGV' (as he was always known), studied in Madras and taught in Assam and Hyderabad before moving to Bangalore's Central College in 1966. He taught here for a further 25 years, and maintained an active presence in the city's intellectual life after his retirement. TGV left behind three published books: a collection of his essays on film, an anthology of cricket literature, and another anthology on Hinduism and psychoanalysis. But like some of the other names I have mentioned, TGV was a teacher first and a scholar and writer only second. His forte was the spoken word, in the classroom or outside it. Those who came to hear him speak were students of English, of course, but also students of economics and law and business and chemistry. There were also plenty of those, like myself, who were never students of Bangalore University but who had come to take a special delight in listening to TGV speak. I sometimes felt that TGV was a Bengali intellectual trapped in the body of a Tamil Brahmin. Where Tambrahms are highly security-conscious, checking their bank balance once every other week, TGV lived only for his ideas. And while his caste men tend to speak condescendingly of 'idle gossip', he had the bhadralok's love for the adda, and especially the adda centred around himself. Even his particular enthusiasms were as often as not Bengali. He wrote with great insight about the films of Satyajit Ray. Six of TGV's essays on Ray are reprinted in his Hours in the Dark. It is said that the master himself felt that this Tamil from Bangalore understood his craft better than many a Calcutta critic. Another of TGV's Bengali heroes was the pioneering psychoanalyst, Girindra- sekhar Bose, the dedicatee of his edited collection, Vishnu on Freud's Desk. He drew the line, however, at Bengali cricketers vastly preferring Vijay Hazare and Vinoo Mankad to their eastern contemporaries. One of the nicest things about TGV - again, something that is wholly un-Tamil - was the absence of cynicism. He took as fresh and as robust an interest in contemporary films and novels as in the classics about whose virtues he had preached in the past. This, as Bangalore changed and became software- and dollar-obsessed, made him something of an anachronism in the city where he had chosen to make his home. But it made him warmly nostalgic about his visits to to a place he called 'Cul-khut-aa', where (so he liked to believe) new ideas still generated more interest than new fashions or commodities. TGV once told a student that he would want to be reborn in Calcutta. As if in preparation, a map of the city hung on his walls, alongside portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jayaprada and Hazare. His native Madras he found oppressive; Bangalore was better, but Calcutta would be better still. He liked to tell the story of a journey he made in a crowded Chennai train, where he was chastised by a sour fellow-traveller for standing in the way of the passengers coming in and out. 'All you have done is talk', grumbled the man. 'Had it been Culkhutaa', TGV would comment, 'the fellow would have joined in the conversation, rather than complain about it.' One must not romanticize the figure of T.G. Vaidyanathan. He could be controversial in print and overbearing in person. He enjoyed the deference of students and was puzzled or angry when this turned, as it sometimes did, to defiance. He counselled his students on career and marriage, being pleased when his advice was taken, but hostile when it was not. And while he enjoyed intelligent conversation, he enjoyed it best of all when its flow was guided, orchestrated and dominated by himself. These aspects of his personality will come as no surprise to Bengalis, whose own scholarly mentors did so often share them. Still, when one views TGV's life and career in the round, one cannot but be struck by its integrity and (it has to be said) nobility. I was never TGV's student, but I knew him long enough to appreciate how nobly he fulfilled the best traditions of his calling. One illustration of this was the lack of favouritism in how he treated or responded to those who had passed through his classroom. A former student had had a nervous breakdown after being deported from America: disowned by his family, he roamed the streets and cafés of Bangalore, living off the remains of his modest inheritance and from supplements provided by friends. Another student was a Rhodes scholar who had gone on to work for the Ford Foundation and the United Nations, and to move close to the corridors of intellectual and political power. I happened to know both men, thus to know also that TGV always showed an equal concern for each, and was as delighted by a visit from the scholar as from the tramp. Teachers like T.G. Vaidyanathan are rare in any time or place, but rarer still at the present time and place. For the calling of the college or university teacher has been gravely degraded by the twin pressures of commerce and politics. This is especially so with regard to the humanities, spheres of learning which are sharply scorned in this bottomline-driven age. Once, some of the finest minds came to study and teach subjects like history and literature, subjects which are indispensable to a proper cultivation of the mind. In India, these disciplines have long fought a rearguard action, against parents who questioned what use they had for their wards. Once, one could at least argue back, to claim that they helped equip you for the civil services. Those arguments do not hold water anymore, for fewer people now want to join government, and the civil service syllabus no longer favours the humanities. With recent changes in the economy and in middle-class mentalities, the case for literature and history has become pretty near hopeless. These changes are, in double quick time, affecting the quality of those who choose to enrol in the humanities, and of those who choose to teach them. Which is why a tribute to T.G. Vaidyanathan must eventually, and regrettably, become an elegy to the calling of the scholar-teacher itself. ramguha@vsnl.com