For historians, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi has been an institution of unique importance. Many of the most distinguished have been Fellows here, even more put in hours in the library as young researchers. And 57 of them have put their names to a letter asking the Prime Minister — who, as Culture Minister, supervises the NMML — to intervene in its functioning claiming the centre has “precipitously declined.”

With signatories like Partha Chatterjee, Sumit Sarkar, Mushirul Hasan, Geeta Kapur, Veena Das, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the letter has set off a storm in the intellectual establishment. More so, as it comes just weeks before the end of the term of NMML director, historian Mridula Mukherjee.

The signatories, unofficially led by historian Ramachandra Guha, want Mukherjee, and the “particular faction of a particular department of a particular university in New Delhi” — insiders’ code for the moderate, Congress-loving section of the Left in JNU’s History department — out.

Out of the scholarly Everest of the NMML, out of academic power. The signatories themselves form an unexpected coalition: those, like Sumit Sarkar and Nivedita Menon, seen as more radical than the mainstream “nationalist” left from JNU — usually identified with Mukherjee’s co-author Bipan Chandra — making common cause with those, like Mukul Kesavan, Devesh Kapur and Sunil Khilnani, more traditionally Nehruvian and centrist.

“The petition is ludicrously fanciful,” Mukherjee told The Indian Express from Paris. No, says signatory Rukun Advani. “It raises an important question about institutions under the Congress and the UPA: will they be run by loyalists? Or will they be centres of excellence? What is the UPA’s intellectual direction?”

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