Professor Anil Bhatti passed away last week. Things have been so busy, I did not even have the time to think about it. Now that the weekend is done and I have managed to sleep a bit, I am thinking of my times with Professor Bhatti.
I was a young undergrad in 2003 when I first heard about Anil Bhatti. Everyone spoke very highly of him, the great Indian scholar of German Studies. As long as I was at JNU, I was not formally taught by Professor Bhatti. Our interactions were through conferences organised at JNU where he deliberated on different topics.
In 2007, I moved to Switzerland for doing an MA in German Linguistics. During my time there, if any faculty member from JNU came to Bern, I made sure to go and say hello to them and, if they had the time, show them around the city. I met Professor Bhatti a few times when he was in Bern.
The most memorable of these meetings was in early 2014, when I attended a Winter School in Bern on cultural transfer. Professor Bhatti was one of the invited speakers there. He spoke on similarity – a counterweight to the idea of difference that has shaped intellectual thought in the humanities and social sciences for long. I was taken by the idea of similarity. It was something new; something I had never thought of before.
My interactions with him at the Winter School shaped some of my writings, most importantly my doctoral thesis where I emphasise the need to discuss 'similarity in diversity' in language policy research. His idea that 'the defence of heterogeneity means that we do not grant to the differentiating features of homogenisation (race, ethnicity, religion, and language) any substantial ontological status that could lead to divisive criteria for the formation of social organisation forms such as nations' shaped my thinking.
I continued my discussions with Professor Bhatti after the Winter School and regularly wrote to him to seek his guidance on topics I found challenging. Years later, when I joined JNU as a faculty member, Professor Bhatti was quite happy. I kept on meeting Professor Bhatti to discuss ideas, sometimes at JNU or sometimes at the India International Centre. There was so much to learn from him.
Now that Professor Bhatti is gone, I feel a bit numb. It is yet to sink in. His health had not been good for a while, and during my last visits to New Delhi, I was not able to see him. Being based in Cambridge now, I could not even attend his funeral. I did not have the privilege to spend so much time as his former colleagues, but I still felt close to him.
Professor Bhatti said: 'the right to diversity and alterity must be coupled with the "right to be similar".' It is a beautiful humanitarian thought that I keep in my mind whilst writing. Not everyone can create a theoretical paradigm.
Rest in peace, Sir.
Comments