‘Jamia’s Aapa Jaan’: A memoir of Gerda Philipsborn, Aapa Jaan from Germany

Three years at Aligarh Muslim University and addressing a senior as Aapa (elder sister) becomes a cultivated habit. One that continued when I shifted to Jamia Millia Islamia. So, the suffix even with a Jewish name like Gerda would not make me stop to take note. But then, Gerda Philipsborn was not just Aapa; she was and still is the Aapa Jaan of Jamia. And, it was the significance of ‘Jaan’ that moved author Margrit Pernau to explore and write a captivating biography of Gerda and of Jamia Millia Islamia.

If clubbing a person’s life with the journey of an institute seems like an unorthodox method of writing a biography, Margrit justifies it. The subject she has chosen is like a ‘ghost’, with no clear footprints but whose presence can be felt. Margrit writes, “The biography of a ghost necessarily has to be the biography of a community — Gerda’s biography is (also) the biography of Jamia, not because she was so important, but preciously because she was not, and because it is only by bringing the whole (Jamia) biradari into the narrative that we can make her visible.”

So, we find glimpses of Gerda’s life first in Kiel, her birthplace in Germany, in Berlin where she trained to be an opera singer and later in Jamia. Gerda was a part of the 1920s’ art scene in Berlin when she met young academics Zakir Husain, Muhammad Mujeeb and Abid Husain, who hoped to learn western pedagogy and bring new ideas to Jamia, a university that was established in Aligarh in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions.

Greda, attracted to the Zionism espoused by Martin Buber, felt that German Jews should learn from Eastern European Jews, who practised centuries-old traditions. Just before Hitler came to power, she moved to Palestine to learn from them. But she didn’t find her answers there.

The restlessness led Gerda to look towards India and precisely to her friend Zakir Husain; in Abid Husain’s words, ‘a friendship whose depth no one could fathom’. She arrived in Delhi in 1932. By then, Jamia had shifted to Karol Bagh. This was also the year Zakir Husain became the Vice-Chancellor of the university. She was given the responsibility of taking care of the children in the school section.

Gerda, who earlier looked after orphans and the children of Jewish refugees from war-torn Eastern Europe, knew her job. She introduced regular health check-ups, organised extracurricular activities and wrote for Payam-e Ta’lim for the children.

She earned the nickname Aapa Jaan. Following Sughra Mehdi’s biography ‘Bachchon Ki Aapa Jaan’ in 1990, two facilities in the university were named after her — the Gerda Philipsborn Day Care Centre and the Gerda Philipsborn Hostel.

With no diary, letters or memoirs, it may seem that the author has leaned towards obscurantist historiography, where the analysis of texts gives way to guesswork. Margrit, a researcher on Jamia and a professor at the Freie Universitat Berlin, clears her stand: “This is not a work of fiction. Almost all of the facts are borne out by sources.” And in instances where she is assuming a particular situation, she says so. The frequency of ‘informed imaginations’, however, decreases after Gerda’s arrival in India to her last journey to Jamia’s private graveyard in 1943. That is thanks to the written materials in the form of obituaries, a short film by Jamia student Khansa Juned and Mehdi’s biography.

The author is successful in evoking a range of emotions — admiration for the Jamia biradari and affection for Aapa Jaan.