Yes, we have been wronged, but we must also share the blame for the current crisis in our educational system. We agitate for higher wages but do little to promote higher and innovative standards of teaching and research. We want to promote our material interests and do not take a principled stand on what threaten to divide and weaken our society. We seek promotions without concern for academic norms and qualifications.

Learning and research in our universities is less important now than ever before. In university teaching, what is important is knowledge of one's subject and keenness about what is being done in it. Ibelieve many of my colleagues may not be sensitive to this fact.

Shelley describes the day's work of a poet as follows:

He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The honey-bees in the ivy bloom,
Nor heed nor see what things they be.

These habits are praiseworthy in a poet but not, shall we say, in a teacher. We cannot frame our education, as Bertrand Russell pointed out in his eminently readable On Education, with a view to giving everyone the temperament of a poet. Yet some of the characteristics he elucidated are universally desirable and apply to poet and teacher alike.

Let me shift your attention to a Hindi novel published recently by a leading publishing house. I do so because the storyline centres around the literati, their hierarchies, jealousies, factions and insecurities. The novel brings out the fears and anxieties of educated men and women and uncovers their reactions and responses in a riot-stricken town.

Geetanjali Shree, the author, wrestles withmany ideas, some conventional, others bearing the mark of originality. If read as an intellectual statement, Hamara Shahar Us Baras underlines the doubts and questions that agitate the intelligentsia. The characters, mainly located in a familiar environment, speak intelligibly and voice concerns all too well known in academic circles. The author's own claim is that she ``wanted to write a novel on a subject repeated ad nauseam, expressing new doubts and fears, seeking some clarity, and in a style so easy that it would even be discursive''.

Hamara Shahar Us Baras deals with many facets of university life, some of which are obscured by the rhetoric typical of many a teacher's association. The demolition of the Babri Masjid and its bloody aftermath is the principal reference point; the communal scene prevalent in much of north India through the 1980s unfolds in the novel. The town is a microcosm of heightened communal feeling in the national and provincial arena. Something sinister is creepinginto the atmosphere, revealing itself not just in the bloody outbursts but also in the language and discourse gaining currency among the educated.

A ``new'' person appears with a project to divide people. A ``new'' identity is invented by the propagandists to undermine composite living.

Some characters, living on the fringes of a volatile urban life, reflect on riots, discuss the dynamics of religiosity and religious politics, and think of ways of dealing with the communal menace. They are engaged with the nation and the notions of identity politics in contemporary India.

But this exercise, like many intellectual exegesis, does not take them very far. Some have inherited prejudices towards the Other and are susceptible to communal propaganda. That is why the stereotypical image of a Muslim, bigoted, intolerant and kasai ka kaam karte hain (dealing with blood and gore), recurs throughout. That is also why history is being rewritten in the bazaar and the dhaba to detail how Muslim rulersdefiled temples and forcibly converted people.

In the end, however, these intellectuals emerge confused, helpless and fearful of tearing themselves from their social and cultural upbringing. Hamara Shahar Us Baras traces the contours of this fearful confusion, fearful because "we cannot understand, but we must understand, or else we are just going to be swamped under".

The invisible and undefined narrator records their words, thoughts, feelings and actions. The novel becomes a collage of apparently disjointed fragments, reflecting the trauma and agony of the "town in that year". Don't look for the town on the map or its description in the gazetteer. That town, bruised and battered by the doings of unreconstructed communalists with an insatiable appetite for killing and destruction, is everywhere in India.

"That year" too is not specific. The threat to communal peace does not recede in that town or, for that matter, in any other town.

The `I' unravels the lives of four principal characters --Hanif, Shruti, Sharad and Daddu -- who live under the same roof. Daddu is a venerable landlord, a father figure; Sharad, his son, teaches at a university; Hanif is Sharad's friend and colleague; Shruti is a writer married to Hanif. Each one is anguished by worsening Hindu-Muslim relations and eventually drawn into the vortex of communal politics. Hanif, in particular, feels insecure in his own faculty. Even radical and liberal colleagues sensitise him to his `Muslim' identity. Why, wonders Sharad. What's this glib talk of secularism on the campus? Why victimise Hanif? Doubts, doubts and more doubts. Shruti is convinced that Hanif has been wronged. How is Hanif different from her when they share a common identity? Daddu is different. He does not share such anxieties. He is not overwhelmed by the escalation of violence.

The novel ends where it begins. Daddu, the ever-joyous old cynic, retreats into silence. Torn by conflicting loyalties, Hanif and Sharad drift apart. Shruti is seen visiting Sharad and Daddu.Hamara Shahar Us Baras is a collage of life in ``unnatural'' times, a ``consciousness'' which is scary. A life and consciousness one must begin to understand.