Jadavpur University JU is a premier public research university located in urban metropolitan city of Kolkata, West Bengal.
It has two campuses: the main campus at Jadavpur and the new campus at Salt Lake, approximately 12.6 kilometres (7.8 mi) and 8.8 kilometres (5.5 mi) from the city centre respectively. A third campus is due to open at the site of the erstwhile National Instruments (CSIR India), opposite the main campus along the Raja S.C. Mullick Road.
One of the three universities in modern India,set up by the British in Calcutta in 1861 as a means of spreading western philosophical thought among the elite in India and to create in the words of Lord Macaulcay, “a class of Indians who would be Indian in blood and colour but western in thought and ideas.” This initiative was furthered by the passing of the Universities Act of 1904. This resulted in the reorganization of the Calcutta University’s Senate and Syndicate by the nomination of more white members into them, which in turn would enable the government to control its policies. The government also decided to disaffiliate many private Indian colleges, which had come up lately and were regarded by the Government as hot beds of nationalist agitation. The measures stirred the educated middle class to move for alternative systems of education.
The nationalists in the freedom struggle of India dubbed the Calcutta University, another pillar of India’s education movement, as “Goldighir Ghulamkhana”, or the slave house of Goldighi, with reference to the lake adjacent to Calcutta University, and the number of graduates it churned out who were used in British merchant offices as clerks. Hence, the need for setting up an institution which would impart education along nationalist lines was strongly felt by the luminaries of the period. The real impetus though was provided by the partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon, the then Governor-General of India, into East Bengal on the one hand (the area that was eventually to become Bangladesh in 1971) and West Bengal and Odisha on the other. On 16 November 1905, the Landholders Society organized a meeting at Park Street, attended by around 1500 delegates, including Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo Ghosh, Raja Subodh Chandra Mullick and Brajendra Kishore Roychowdhury. The idea of the National Council of Education was mooted here. While in a meeting held on 9 November 1905 at the Field and Academic Club, Subodh Chandra Mullick pledged Rupees one lakh for the foundation of a National University in Bengal. The objective in setting up the institution that was to challenge the British rule over education by offering education to the masses 'on national lines and under national control'. Generous sums of money were also donated by Brojendra Kishore Roy Choudhury, Maharaja Suryya Kanto Acharya Choudhury and Rashbihari Ghosh, who was appointed the first president of the university.
