Vidya Bhawan Society

In the memory of Prof Rajendra Singh

That many of us would witness the departure of Prof Rajendra Singh so soon is still difficult to believe. He was a major linguist of the past few decades and his work in Phonology, Morphology and Sociolinguistics and in South Asian linguistics will always be remembered and valued forever. After getting his Ph D from Brown University, he joined the University of Montreal and made seminal contributions in phonology and morphology. Prof. Probal Dasgupta remarks: “His 1987 article 'Well-formedness conditions and phonological theory' (Wolfgang Dressler et al.[eds] Phonologica 1984, 273-285) was a much-cited landmark paper that helped change the course of phonology.” Similarly, his work on Whole Word Morphology provided a completely new paradigm for examining the formal relationships obtaining among words. In fact, similar things can be said about most of his interventions into the nature and structure of language and its relationship to mind and society.

He was on the Advisory Board of LLT and was a very special person for the Vidya Bhawan Education Resource Centre of the Vidya Bhawan Society (VBS), Udaipur. He promised to spend a few weeks every year at VBS, and shared its dream of building bridges between the academia and education professionals of all kinds. He helped us conceptualize and eventually conduct several of our international seminars; the proceedings of some of these seminars have been published and translated into Hindi. He conducted courses on some aspect of language every year to enrich the resources of the Vidya Bhawan Education Resource Centre. Some of these included lectures/ discussions/ workshops on 'The Nature of Language' (published in English and Hindi as separate monographs from VBS, Udaipur, 2008); a lecture series on the Greco-Roman tradition in language teaching (likely to be published soon); a course in academic writing etc. He often 'blamed' some of us for pulling him into the discourse on 'Indian English' (IE) but that intervention on his part resulted in a position on IE that became a major site for discussion across the world. The 'Afterword' to the 1994 Sage volume (R K Agnihotri and A L Khanna, ed., Second Language Acquisition) initiated that discourse and it reached its climax in the publication of Indian English: Towards a New Paradigm (R K Agnihotri and Rajendra Singh, [eds.] 2012 Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi).

Those of us who were fortunate to share evenings with him at Udaipur remember him with great affection, respect and awe. Every time he concluded a discussion, we used to wonder how he could digest so much knowledge. Though he was always so humble and gentle in his academic discourse, he was never willing to surrender an inch unless there was a solid reason to do so.

VBS salutes him and would always cherish memories of the precious moments he spent with the VBS faculty.

Vidya Bhawan Society