Ask any educated person and he or she will remember one teacher with great fondness and gratitude. This article is about one such teacher.
I asked my friend and classmate Brijeshwar Singh if he remembered her as the rest of us did. In response he gave us a tutorial on EK, as she was known. I have used it below. She was not English, he said, as we all assumed, but a proud Ulster woman from Ireland. Apparently she had a tough time there. “India seemed a haven of peace in comparison”. She studied in Oxford, possibly at Lady Margaret Hall. Then she married Gopal Krishna, whose first job was at Kurukshetra University. Then they moved to Delhi which was “much more congenial and she thoroughly enjoyed the stimulating company of some of the world’s best economists at D School”.
“As a teacher she was committed to students’ learning and welfare in an old-fashioned way. She was available for academic consultation at virtually all times.” All of us can vouch for that.
Brij also says cinema was a passion for her. She’d been introduced to art cinema at Oxford and made it a point to watch what little came to Delhi in those days.
Gopal and she became fellows at Wolfson College but without the usual bells and whistles of such fellowships.
“It was sad to see them pushed back to the margins of academia , which was the only career they’d always wanted.”
The last time I met her was in 1990 at the India Library in Oxford. She had clearly forgotten me but when I introduced myself she gave me a cup of tea and a biscuit.
A Mrs Elizabeth Krishna Scholarship of Rs 500 per month has been there for several years at D School. And when I googled her name I came across another grant in her name called the Gopal and Elizabeth Krishna Bursary. It’s on the website of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies!
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