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Join MemoriesShanti Swarup, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Panjab University, passed away peacefully in his sleep at his residence in Athens, Georgia USA on March 21, 2020 at the age of 96. He was married to Rajni for 69 years. She passed away in 2017. He is missed by his children and grandchildren, his extended family and many former students and co...
Shanti Swarup was born on 1st January 1924 in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), West Punjab (in present-day Pakistan). He attended high school in Muzaffargarh where both his father and grandfather were leading advocates. After completing high school, Professor Swarup pursued both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Political Science from DAV College in...
Jim Howland
But for the brief interruption caused by the trauma of the partition, Professor Swarup taught Political Science at several Panjab colleges from 1946 through 1955: Firozpur, Jalandhar, and Ludhiana. He began his PhD work at the Indian School of International Studies, New Delhi in 1955. He undertook a study of the Chinese Communist movement and becam...
Jim Howland
In 1964 he returned to India where he served in the East Asian Division in the Foreign Ministry where a key contribution was his prediction of the United States’ Vietnam debacle. In 1966, he accepted an invitation as Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Thereafter, as Professor and Department Head he helped to launch two new de...
At the age of 44, he served as Acting Vice Chancellor of Dibrugarh University. He was a superb administrator and because he was so popular among the students, BK Nehru, Governor of Assam at the time, asked him to permanently accept the position. Professor Swarup, however, turned down the offer because he felt that he still had a long teaching and r...
In May 1973, the Vice Chancellor of Panjab University, Dr. Suraj Bhan invited Prof. Swarup to occupy the Panjab University Lala Lajpat Rai Professorship of Political Science. Professor Swarup retired formally in 1984 from Panjab University at the retirement age of 60. Immediately thereafter, in succession he accepted a pair of 3-year visiting prof...
Jim Howland
Jim Howland
Jim Howland With Rajni and Heera at United Coffee House, Delhi, 2017.
Jim Howland In his study at the Park View City flat, Gurgaon, January 2018.
In the final weeks of his life, Prof. Swarup took up a review of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, re-reading the work and examining reviews and discussions to see how interpretations of Kuhn's work had evolved in recent years. It is fitting, altogether in line with his temperament and his entire career, that at the age of 96 Shanti S...
Jim Howland Downtown Athens, Georgia--celebrating New Year's, Christmas, and Shanti's birthday, though certainly not in that order.
He was first and foremost a critical thinker. He would call himself a dialectical thinker and historicist with a great deal of respect for history. He was a rationalist in the classical sense; he had a strong belief that scholarship must be guided by a “scientific temper” (to use a Nehruvian term), critical inquiry and healthy skepticism, a thoroug...
During his long career, his principal teaching and research areas of interest were Political Philosophy and International Relations. He cited many great thinkers as influencing the development of his own views, including Homer, Socrates, Marx, J.S. Mill, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi and Nehru. In Nehru he saw a renaissance man of the Age of Reason, a li...
Key threads that governed Professor Swarup's thought and praxis throughout his career--critical thinking, integrity, Socratic humility and just plain goodness. As a rationalist he was firmly atheist in his views, yet he had great respect for egalitarian religious leaders, especially Buddha, Jesus and Guru Nanak. All these combined influences were r...
He helped to build university departments with talented academics. It was well-known that he would not be swayed by political influences, however powerful. Vice Chancellors and Heads of Department who were interested in establishing excellent departments with meritorious faculty who would pursue serious scholarship and modernize their syllabi were ...
It is such considerations that drove his choices during his career. It was his deep passion for advancing the greater good, a caring civil society, based on high moral values and standards that drove him to develop critical thinkers with a scientific temper around him. It is these factors that drove him to collaborate with academic peers, administr...
His integrity and love for egalitarianism and critical thinking were also evident in the manner in which he sought to develop the critical faculties of his students, colleagues and his own children. He was not authoritarian. He did not impose his views on them. Rather, he sought to persuade them through reason and argument. He may have erred on the...
His scholarship, and his reputation for the relentless pursuit and advancement of excellence in the social sciences in general, and the study of political science in particular, was recognized in various ways. The University Grants Commission invited him to serve on high-level decision-making panels such as the Subject Panel in Political Science an...