A protest erupted in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay day after the institute cancelled a lecture by cultural activist, literary critic and former professor Ganesh Devy.
According to reports, around 25-30 students and faculty members of IIT Bombay gathered at PC Saxena auditorium, where the lecture was supposed to take place, on Wednesday to register their protest.
The protestors read out Professor Devy’s written work and discussed education in India. He is a former professor of English at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
The cancelled lecture was about Devy work titled ‘The crisis within: On Knowledge and Education in India’. Students and faculty were informed a month in advance about the scheduled talk. However, the event was cancelled by authorities due to unforeseen circumstances.
According to the Hindustan Times, the committee responsible for regulating lectures at the IIT Bombay campus made the decision to call off the lecture.
Talking about the cancellation of his lecture, Professor Devy told the Times of India: “It is difficult for me to understand the motivation behind calling off the event. If I could deliver a lecture at IIT-Guwahati, another central institute, governed by the same regulations, then why not IIT-Bombay?”.
Saying that “Such last-minute cancellations do leave a bitter taste,” the professor added, “I had sent them the synopsis of the lecture almost a month ago. The discussion over this started about four to five months ago and after a lot of deliberations on both sides, Jan 31 was finalised for the talk. The book that I was going to speak about is published and is in the public domain. I do not think this has anything to do with the content of the book or the topic of the lecture, nor do I wish to build a hypothesis around it. They are a scientific organisation, and I would like to believe that the reasons are not irrational”.
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