Dr. Rimi B. Chatterjee
I have been a paper setter for the controversial Jadavpur University English Admission Test a number of times during my career since 2004, and I have been an insider in the process every single year since 2006. We, the faculty of the department, always prided ourselves on how it was very difficult to cheat in the test, since the only ‘text’ that could prepare you to give a correct answer (for a given value of ‘correct’) was life itself. This concept may be tricky to grasp for people not familiar with the process, so rather than explain it, I give you: the Jadavpur University English Admission Test Question Paper! To be exact, this is the Platonic Ideal I would see in my head whenever I sat down to write questions for this test, and I think my colleagues will agree with me that they too saw something similar when they had their turn at the wheel. If you don’t know what a Platonic Ideal is, look it up. That is not cheating, that is research.
So here it is, the crib sheet of all crib sheets, the hack of hacks, the question paper behind all question papers. If you can answer this to our satisfaction, you don’t need admission through a corrupt and venal administration, you are already a JUDEan, and we invite you to come and visit us with your answers, or post and link them here. As our students already know, that is often the start of a very long and stimulating conversation.
JUDE ADMISSION TEST 20XX
LEAKED QUESTION PAPER
Time: One lifetime Full marks: one life.
Answer all questions in your own words.
1. Would you like to come and listen to the thoughts of some very well trained and curious minds about everything in the human universe? Answer with particular reference to your puzzlements and inferences about said universe.
2. Would you care to untangle the stories of the past from the obscurity of human forgetfulness and bring them to the light of new human understanding? Answer with reference to your favourite historical period and stories about, or set in, that period.
3. Can you distinguish fact from fiction and critically analyse both? Answer with reference to any life experience you may have had, whether real or imaginary, including the experience of reading books or comics, watching films, reading the news, talking to friends and family or playing games.
4. ‘Everything we know, from our dearest personal memories of love and happiness to the most advanced theories of quantum mechanics, is a narrative we tell ourselves about how the universe works and how we fit into it.’ Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.
5. ‘The best poets of the twentieth century had sound engineers instead of publishers.’ Does this statement make sense? Explain your answer with logic and evidence.
6. If a metaphor is a way of understanding one thing by comparing it to another, discuss the suitability of using the metaphor of a volcano to represent a popular uprising. Support your answer with reference to any incident, real or fictitious. If you have also read P.B. Shelley, all the better.
7. ‘You cannot study English literature if you were never taught to spell “Shakespeare” properly.’ Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.
8. Is academic freedom important? Why? Answer with reference to any dinner table conversation you have ever witnessed or might witness.
9. ‘Admission tests are elitist scams that allow privileged wannabe-white babus and mems to continue their monopoly of postcolonial cultural capital.’ Do you agree? Answer with reference to your idea of how a unversity should be run.
10. ‘Only losers study the humanities.’ Is this an example of a prejudice? Discuss your own idea of the nature of prejudice in your answer.
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Dr. Nilanjana Deb
Dear Giant,
Please don’t be selfish. We love playing in your garden, please don’t stop us from doing what we love. Give every young person from every board a level playing field. Don’t put up signboards with high cutoff marks like they do in the City of Djinns, that ordinary children can’t get past. The colleges there that you mention have high cutoff marks leaving many children without a fighting chance.
I was struck by the mmetaphor, “sampling of Oxbridge in the worn walls”. You used it like a blunt machete, to try and hack way at the towering oaks in your own garden – in the shadow of one of which you had once sat down to do research. I know you must be feeling isolated in the present storm, and have written in troll language – Giantspeak – to reach out to sympathisers around you. But then, you called in the North Wind, the Hail, the Frost, and the Snow yourself.
Since you seem to visit your garden rather infrequently, let me tell you about the new plants and samplings that have flourished there in the last 25 odd years. I love gardening metaphors too.
Sampling 1: The English department at Jadavpur University has many teachers such as you and me who have been educated entirely in Indian colleges and Universities. The Oxbridge rant is outdated, nothing radical will sprout from it anymore. All of the JUDE teachers who stood before you during the teachers’ deputation to the EC (and whom you pointedly ignored) were Desi-educated.
And if there are some “samplings” in your garden who’ve been abroad for research, don’t use your axe on them, dear Giant, because it was an Indian poet who said, “Desh Deshaante Jao Re Aante Nobo Nobo Gyaan…” We are a developing country, as you say, and we do need to access the best resources worldwide and bring them back for nourishing our samplings at home.
Sampling 2: The English department has more of Indian writing, South Asian writing, postcolonial literature, cultures of protest, subaltern literature, colonial literature in its vast seed-bank of optionals and cores, than many of the very elite colleges of the national capital named by you. Very po-co, your garden is. And we need to be able to select students who can take in all that po-co stuff and not feel stranded – I know you love po-co too; your “sampling of Oxbridge” post is a minor project of mistimed and misplaced decolonisation targeting people who are thoroughly postcolonial in their own scholarly way. Do take time to look up their writing on a vast number of subjects from urban planning to higher education, you’ll understand.
Sampling 3: There are students from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, special needs and sexual orientations from Bengal and India in JUDE, JUCL, JUB. It’s always been an unruly and colorful place, your garden, from long before you made this your home. As for these dynasties you speak of, banyan trees and other kinds of trees have families and intertwined roots, even you have your own family network – even your elder sister the Giantess has a little dynasty, no? We have all kinds in JU, and everyone is welcome. JUDE has rotational headship, and different people are recruited under different heads at different times. Why accuse all former English HODs of being influenced by some kind of Illuminati? Why be so mean, dear Giant?
Sampling 4: We have a department that is open to all, including those samplings (like me) whose boards did not mark as generously or who took low-scoring subjects in their +2. That was always the purpose of the admission test – to give everyone a fair chance. The admission test is like a seed-bed of samplings, in which every plant gets a chance to prove its mettle, before it is transplanted to the field of humanities.
All in all, dear Giant, your garden has its own knowledge ecosystem, which has proved democratic, efficient and resilient all these years. No matter how long the North Wind and Hail and Frost dance on your rooftop, Spring will return to the garden one day. That’s the law of Nature. Put aside the pen you wielded like a bludgeon, and listen to the children in your garden. Time’s running out for all of us. Don’t let people remember you, when you’re gone, as the Selfish Giant. Open your garden to everyone, including the bright ones without high marks.
Warmest regards,
A Local Sampling
Jadavpur University for Admission Tests 