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| Prof S.Naganath |
He was a good teacher, a great scholar and a
loving father combined into one. When I was seven years old he suffered a
paralytic stroke and became bedridden. After a few months he recovered his
health and resumed teaching in Maharaja's college, Mysore. Though all the post-graduate
departments had been shifted to the new Manasa Gangotri campus (Jayalakshmi
Vilas Palace), he was given special permission to engage M.A. classes in
Maharaja's college by the then Vice-Chancellor I often escorted my father in
the Tonga to the college and was in the habit of peeping into his classroom to
see what was going on there. I usually saw him seated in a chair ether
delivering a lecture or dictating some notes in a staid manner. After
thirty-six years of successful teaching career the first D. Litt scholar of the
Mysore University had been made a full fledged professor of History during the
last six months of his tenure. He had accomplished this despite his physical
infirmities like poor eye-sight, deafness and paralysis, which had affected the
left leg, hand and to some extent speech in the initial stages.
He had grown bitter in life and disillusioned
with the quagmire politics of the university. There was already a perceptible
decline in academic standards. The university had assiduously denied him with the
professorship almost till the end of his service.
At one point of time the university authorities
had serious doubts about his physical fitness. So they referred him to the
chief physician of the K.R. hospital.....
