In November 2022, the eminent translator, editor, and writer Alok Bhalla gave a lecture on attending St. Stephen's College, in Delhi, in the days following British colonialism and the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent. What follows is Bhalla’s reflection on that lecture and its significance not only to the students but also to himself.

Two days ago, I gave a talk on the Partition of India at my old college, St. Stephen's, and talked a little about Intizar Husain. I usually don't agree to give talks or go to seminars these days. Lectures now seem a bit narcissistic and seminars tend to send me to sleep (partly out of boredom, but mainly because I can barely hear). But I couldn't refuse an invitation from undergraduate students (not teachers and scholars) from an Institute to which I owe a great deal.

I told the students, who no longer remember the College's history as a truly secular place, that my father had started teaching in a Christian Institute in the years before the partition after having studied in Lahore (Pakistan) a decade prior to the partition. They had not been told that Gandhi used to stay at the house of the College's first Indian and Christian Principal and that Tagore had composed the first draft of his Nobel Prize–winning poems, Gitanjali, in the Principal's house.

It was also important for me, as a person who had grown up on the campus of the college, to acknowledge that it was in the college library that I had stumbled upon the diaries of someone called Simone Weil. I had not the foggiest idea of who she was, but I made some notes about what she had said about the nature of violence—notes that I have carried with me ever since. Some of them were prefixed to my first books on the Gothic novel, some to my different essays on the partition, and, most recently, some to my five-volume work on the Gita and the Mahabharata (entirely inflected by Weil and Gandhi and the Bible—a sort of cosmopolitan placing that will not win me new friends in the present times in India).

As I spoke informally to the students, I felt a sense of completion, a satisfaction that comes with the feeling that I had done all that I could have. Now I could look back without too much anxiety and say to myself that the long journey that began in the corridors of this college and took me to the other side of the earth has been fulfilling (and far luckier) than I have a right to expect (there being people worthier than me who deserved more). So at one end of the journey was St. Stephen's College and at the other a return to the College—a sort of secular pilgrimage (if secular really means of this earth and in this time).