The JNU may change the reference of vice-chancellor in Hindi from ‘Kulpati’ to ‘Kulguru’, JNU Vice-Chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit said on Monday.
Delivering the Dr B R Ambedkar Lecture Series titled ‘Dr B R Ambedkar’s Thoughts on Gender Justice: Decoding the Uniform Civil Code’, she said the proposal to change the term to Kulguru was intended to bring in more “gender neutrality.”
”It is due for discussion in the Executive Council on September 14, I will be changing Kulapati to Kulguru. When I came to university everything that was ‘he’, I made that ‘she’. Now ‘she’ is used on all documents.
”Even when they referred to me they wrote ‘he’. The idea of Kulpati, I want to call it Kulguru,” she said on the sidelines of the event.
A furore was witnessed during the latest Parliament session when Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury referred to President Droupadi Murmu as ‘Rashtrapatni’, a gaffe he later said was a “slip of tongue.” The clash ignited the debate over use of more gender-neutral terms for constitutional posts.