Prof Vishwanathan 'blamed' for not granting Kannada studies at JNU

Umar Sharieef | NT

New Delhi/Bengaluru: The Jawaharlal Nehru University, popularly known as JNU, Delhi, awaits grants to revive the chair of the Kannada study since its suspension.

Constituted in October 2015, the chair has been suspended from August 2020. The suspension of the department was the result of the retirement of Purushottama Bilimale, who headed the chair.

Since then, the state government has not taken any initiative to appoint a professor and bring back the chair to life.

Speaking to News Trail, Purushottama Bilimale said the absence of revival was due to the absence of the status report about the department to the state government.

“There has been no report submitted by the current professor of Kannada studies at JNU to the state government. The state government must know the status of the chair to revive and develop the regional language. However, the current professor has not submitted any report after 2020”, he said.

The chair started its activities in October 2015 but was officially inaugurated on November 26, 2015. The former professor also questioned the contribution of Vishwanathan, the current professor who heads the Kannada chair at JNU, after assuming the post.

He also added that he requested Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to sanction a grant and revive the chair.

“The current professor doesn’t do his duty and acts accordingly with the right wing and RSS agendas”, Bilimale alleged.

Professor Vishwanathan didn't respond to News Trail's questions on it.

Interestingly, the chair saw 60 students from various centres attend the class and 42 of them completed the course by reaching the intermediate level, while 8 students reached the advanced level from 2015-2020.

While the chair, under Bilimale, has taken multiple translation projects intending to render into English a whole gamut of classical and non-classical Kannada texts of seminal nature, the present situation, according to a few researchers passed out in 2021, says it fails to create self-confidence, personality skills and spread Kannada based research worldwide.

At present, the Department for Tamilology is the first department of a South Indian language at JNU, located in the Northern part of India.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin released Rs 5 crore for the proposal under a fixed deposit in September 2022 to include the Tamil chair in the Centre for Indian Languages at JNU.