Remembering Professor Akhil Hazarika

Sanjeev Kumar Nath

(Sleep is not, death is not;

Who seem to die live.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Illusions”)

I have met people who say that they have never had a good teacher in school, college, or university. I don’t know what they mean because I don’t remember any bad teacher. Each was unique in his or her own way; everyone was different, but no one was bad.

However, among my teachers, a few were truly extraordinary, and one of these few with whom I also had the opportunity to get quite close was Professor Akhil Hazarika of Jagannath Barooah College, Jorhat.

Those who are in the business of teaching teachers, those who tell teachers how to teach, seem to believe that anyone can become a good teacher if only he or she learns the correct methods of teaching. Contrary to what these teacher-trainers say, however, I believe that a truly good teacher is born, not made. Either one has it in oneself, or one doesn’t.

Training can indeed help, but cannot make gold out of brass. One can take music lessons and become a reasonably good musician, but to become a real musical wizard, one must first have the magic of music inside. Exceptionally good teachers are people with the magic of teaching in their soul; it is not imported from outside; it is not learnt.

Professor Akhil Hazarika was, without any doubt, one such extraordinary teacher. He is the kind of teacher who teaches you the “how to” of thinking and learning. He is the kind of teacher who is not ready to give you ready-made answers to your questions, but will take great pains to make you find your own way, to enable you to solve your problems, to engage critically and intelligently with a text.

When he taught us Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, it was quite clear that he was not so much interested in merely “finishing” the text, as is usually done by many teachers anxious to complete their allotted task, but in teaching us the ways in which we can come to grips with an enigmatic text, in teaching us the art of reading itself.

Give someone a fish, and he eats for a day; but teach him fishing, and he eats for a lifetime, as the Chinese proverb says. That is what Hazarika Sir did. He taught you fishing instead of giving you a fish.

Remembering Professor Akhil Hazarika — Photo by Pramod Tiwari on Pexels.com

Sadly, we live in a market-driven world today, and in such a world, those who can sell themselves best, succeed best. Professor Akhil Hazarika was a man of multidimensional skills, but his impeccable integrity and sense of self-respect prevented him from promoting himself.

I think his translations of ancient Greek and Roman theorists (Aristotle, Horace, Longinus) and Shakespeare deserved far better response from Assamese readers than the response these translated texts have received so far. I had the opportunity of reading the scripts of one or two of his several radio plays, and I was struck by his dexterity of using the Assamese language, and of finding equivalence with English both in terms of vocabulary and context.

We shared a million moments together, and I enjoyed and gained from every moment I spent with Sir. Sadly, for the last few years we were not in touch. I was myself going through some rather harrowing times, and he himself was not well. And then when I called one day, he sounded somewhat curt and dismissive, and I misinterpreted that as some kind of unexplainable irritation with me.

And we lost touch. I ought to have persisted in trying to contact him again, but may be partly due to my foolishness and partly due to the difficult times I was also undergoing, we lost touch. And now we have lost him, for ever.

But perhaps we haven’t lost him at all. He is in us, he is us—all the thousands of students he taught over the years—for he didn’t just teach English; he himself was the greatest lesson for his students. He was a lesson in unassumingness, in honesty and integrity, in unconditional love. What greater lesson can a teacher teach?

27-03-2024

Images from different sources

(Sanjeev Kumar Nath, English Department, Gauhati University; sanjeevnath21@gmail.com)

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