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Via Bathinda: Unravelling mystery of age-old riddle

I am nearing seventy. Believe it, for the last sixty-five years, I have been listening periodically to the phrase ‘via Bathinda’. I never bothered to know or explore the logic behind it. However, it was destined for me to investigate the great riddle while being in Bathinda.

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Dr VK Anand

I am nearing seventy. Believe it, for the last sixty-five years, I have been listening periodically to the phrase ‘via Bathinda’. I never bothered to know or explore the logic behind it. However, it was destined for me to investigate the great riddle while being in Bathinda. I was fortunate to get an opportunity in 2011 for an assignment at the Central University of Punjab there. It was a golden chance to find a solution on the spot itself.

I adopted a two-pronged strategy to dig out the rationality behind the phrase. It first meant going through literature on the subject and consulting the local residents or ‘Bathinda vasis’ who have been there for generations.

Admittedly, Bathinda is famous as the political hub of Punjab, a city of lakes and above all for Qila Mubarak where Empress Razia Sultana was imprisoned. But the distinctiveness of the city lies in its association with the word ‘via’. The catch phrase ‘via Bathinda’ is frequently used to take a longer route to reach the destination. At the macro level, it denotes “doing anything in an illogical, abnormal and non-linear manner.”

I tried to correlate the rationality of the phrase with the Transportation Master Plan of 1910 framed by the British wherein a record number of rail tracks — six —were laid in the city. Bathinda railway junction, even in 1901, had rail links connecting it to southern Punjab, Jodhpur-Bikaner, Rajputana-Malwa and was a confluence of the branches of North-Western Railways. Due to limited rail and road network in the rest of India, anyone travelling from Karachi to Bombay had to pass through Bathinda and cover an unavoidable 1,800 miles, instead of the actual distance of 550 miles. Was the network of railway lines of Bathinda, a basis for the origin of the term ‘via Bathinda’? I remained unconvinced.

Recently, I again got an opportunity to be in the city where I was finally destined to dig out the answer to this medieval riddle. The conclusion, based on meetings and discussions with several local residents, was solid, surprising and interesting. The system of education proposed by Lord Macaulay was adopted in India in 1835, which envisaged that English was to replace all Indian languages in Indian colleges.

The first three universities of India, at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, were established in 1857, while the Panjab University at Lahore came into existence in 1882.

At Panjab University, except for girls, no one was allowed to appear in the BA examination as a private candidate, but promotion in clerical cadres required a candidate to be a graduate. For this, there was a provision in the university calendar that a person who passed Prabhakar, Bhushan or Rattan exam, in lieu of BA Hindi paper, could clear any two subjects of the BA exam (of course in English medium) to be entitled to be designated as a graduate, but not BA.

Like today’s Kota, which is famous for the academies of competitive examinations, in the early 20th century, it was Bathinda, written then as Bhatinda, where hundreds of small academies trained boys and girls for Prabhakar, Rattan and Bhushan. All such graduates who preferred graduation by opting for a month’s training at Bathinda and then clearing two papers of BA were called ‘Graduates via Bathinda.’

The writer is a former librarian, PU, Chandigarh

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