Professor Franson Manjali will remain forever alive through the legacy he instilled in his students throughout the decades he spent at JNU.
Coming from nowhere near the field, his classes sounded complex, disconnected, and challenging for me more at the beginning and less towards the end; I made sound progress going back to my room and spending hours and nights trying to figure out these connections. I thought that he wrongly taught us research methodology to find later and that he showed us what it really is. He was apparently the self and the other!
His classes were INSIGHTFUL; his serious jokes and cynical comments about what Linguistics is now and how it should be reRect the ongoing struggle that should never stop. He loved it when students visited him in the o ce for questions and discussions! His unmatched open-book exams were a solid and serious message for all of us, and it is up to us to interpret them the way we can, as well.
In one day during masters, we had a class in the morning and his was after a few hours. Instead of going back to our rooms, we went to a friend’s house where we smoked up and drank, to come back for his class on time. I sat in the middle row of what I think was Room 004 in the ground Roor. I was high but seeing him and squeezing all my thoughts in that direction, believing that I would listen to him and
understand him differently, though he was for me the one who never wanted to be understood. The discussion went on for a few minutes and following him with all my extraordinary energies, I raised a question and he eventually started answering it. Gradually, the urge to go to the washroom started and my line of thoughts and focus was distracted until it was not possible to hold. At a point, and in the middle of the discussion that he carried on, I thought he answered me, and I decided to leave and that is what I did. I came back relieved but was immediately grilled for disappearing inappropriately after asking a question and leaving in the middle of his answer. His discussions needed a GPS and a tracker, and he may start with a question and spend 90% of the class discussing one detail, making us feel that we lost the connection, until he finally, and mostly after class time is over, brings us back to what could be an answer; in some cases, these “could be answers” may come after a few classes, and it is upon us to track them! Research for him, I came to realize, is a journey rather than a destination, and we may be distracted along the way, but we must not be mis-tracted at the end; there is nothing final!
Similar to many others, Tamam before Manjali is different from Tamam after. We shall live to pass his legacy wherever and whenever possible.
Rest in peace, dear sir; you are in a better place now! Power to your wife and lovers.