The first woman VC of JNU is from Chennai

by K.R.A. Narasiah

It was an evening of 1992, after my retirement from service and settling down in the then Madras. My uncle Chitti Sundararajan hosted tea to his friends in which he asked me also to join and it was there that I met the late Komal Swaminathan, then editor of Subamangala. He took me aside and told me that Chitti’s life needs to be recorded and he would never do it himself nor allow anyone else to do. Therefore he said that I, being his nephew and a writer, should undertake this job.

I was interested and after a reluctant nod from Chitti, started gathering material for the book that was to be his biography. Naturally I wanted to talk to his colleagues and close friends and found Sri D. Anjaneyulu, (Dhulipudi Anjaneyulu known popularly as DA) a former colleague of Chitti in the All India Radio, to be a well informed source. I happened to read his earlier article about Chitti in Free India under the pseudonym Chitragupta, titled A Maverick among Tamil Writers. Among other things, he had said, “Many writers are there who are praiseworthy, and even enviable. But, when we meet them and talk to them, they only cause disappointment. They are not capable of affection and friendship. . . .they turn out to be bores both in person and conversation. Such thoughts disappear the moment we meet Chitti . . .I dare say his very company is an experience. He belongs to such a vanishing tribe.”

DA later was contributing a regular weekly column Between You and Me in The Hindu and there again mentioned Chitti Sundararajan in one of his stories, criticizing the government’s action in closing down Vanoli, a Tamil programme journal of the AIR that Chitti was editing. Naturally, I chose to meet DA first. When I went to see him in his Mandaveli residence he was quite ill and being attended to by his daughter Santishree. DA introduced me to her and said that she was born in Russia, where his first wife Mulamoodi Adilakshmi was working as a professor of Tamil and Telugu at the Leningrad Oriental Faculty Department. Santishree was born on July 15, 1962, in St. Petersburg.

She had come from Pune to attend to her ailing father and was telling me about his vast collection of books. There were books strewn all over and DA was known to be a voracious reader. Little did I then realize that one day this same lady would be appointed VC of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). An alumnus of JNU, where Santishree did her doctorate in International Relations in 1990, (her thesis on Parliament And Foreign Policy In India – The Nehru Years) she had graduated from the Presidency College, Madras. Her entire learning period of life was in Madras till graduation from the Presidency College, where she earned a gold medal. Originally a student of Adarsh Vidyalaya, she had won over 200 prizes at national and international levels. She won the Elphinstone prize for 5 years in the Presidency College, an unbroken record. A polyglot who speaks six languages including Sanskrit, she started her teaching career in 1988 in Goa University as a lecturer of political science. Besides being a professor of politics at Savitribai Phule Pune University and a guide to several MPhil and PhD students, she has taught papers on mass media audiences, media research, politics and communication at SPPU’s Department of Communication Studies.

Later she went on to do her Post-doctoral Diploma in Peace and Conflict studies from Uppsala University, Sweden in1996 and has a Diploma in Social work from California State University, Long Beach, USA. Santishree has won several academic awards at national and international level. There are also criticisms against her as is natural for any person winning so many accolades, especially because she has been publicly critical of what she claims are incorrect narratives in Indian history. In a webinar to commemorate the 126th birth anniversary of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, she had criticized NCERT for focusing too much on the Mughals and the “Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.” She also claimed that the violence witnessed during “Islamic invasions” had been whitewashed from history.

Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit has been appointed as the 13th Vice Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University. She will be the first woman Vice Chancellor in the history of JNU with the Ministry of Education appointing her to the top post on February 7, 2022. On getting appointed she had said, that her immediate focus would be to provide a clean administration and a student-friendly, gender-sensitive envirironment.

Married to Niranjan B. Pandit, a software specialist, she has a daughter who works in software in the US.

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