From Persistence to Permanence: Reviewing 'The Indian University'

Growing up, I had little to no conscious opportunity to engage with conversations around caste, either academically or personally. As I entered academia and slowly started to observe the feudal currents of caste unfold across all walks of life, it evoked in me a sense of shame and guilt. It revealed the silence of my insulated life against the unrealised possibility of oppressed voices. Driven by my ignorance of this active social phenomenon - a dubious debt – I now seek to explore, as a Ph.D. scholar, the conundrum of equity and access around liberal arts education in India.

It is in this context that I turned to Debaditya Bhattacharya’s The Indian University: A Critical History. The text interrogates enduring narratives woven by established statistics on access and parity in Indian higher education. Through a critical excavation of the policy archives - from the Radhakrishnan Commission and its offshoots extending all the way to the NEP 2020, Bhattacharya exposes the diligent neglect of the historical effects of social hierarchy. He lays bare what he calls the ‘delicious irony’ hidden within education commission reports, pushing me to ask an indelible question: Can the pursuit of quality be truly united with the exigency of equity? This remains an unsettling thought.

This seems agonisingly difficult when the social system is predicated on the feudal structure of caste and religion. Moreover, with the advent of 21st century’s neoliberal demands, the consequential economic reconfiguration has come to entrench the historical inequity many times over in privatised models of innovative higher education. While acknowledging the educational policy mandates toward social welfare, Bhattacharya argues that these policies were infected by the ‘political effects’ rather than the ‘social priorities’ of the university. In doing so, he explicates the state’s distinct lack of a proactive social vision to dismantle the historical inequity of access in higher education.

His debunking accounts of the socio-political rhetoric surrounding ‘welfare’, ‘merit’, ‘fairness’, ‘community’ reveal the multidimensional weight of these terms. The painful realisation is that the resolution of this question is not just an educational project but one that concerns the nation on the whole.

Landing on Bhattacharya’s book soon after reading Saikat Majumdar’s compelling liberal ‘artscience’ vision as a curricular and pedagogical route to knowledge in College: Pathways of Possibility gave me a penetrating insight into a kind of fracture in Indian higher education that initially appears to be entirely different problems. Yet, essentially, both scholars lament the betrayal of the twin pillars of education: excellence and access. Both reveal how these ideals have been marred and compromised by socio-political forces that gradually metamorphose into the inner psychological force driving discrimination. However, while the force that Majumdar highlights is the lack of groundwork for educational excellence due to the system’s inheritance of a colonial-bureaucratic model, Bhattacharya argues how this pursuit of excellence has been

systemically denied to the marginalised groups through the historical architecture of social exclusion.

For instance, in the chapter, “Post-Independence University Planning (1947-86): The Ideology of Welfare", Bhattacharya contends that educational opportunity, measured in the humanist terms of ‘talent’, ‘ability’ or a resilience against social odds was central to Radhakrishnan Commission’s vision of ‘welfare.’ He argues that it rarely acknowledged the historical effects of structural discrimination within spaces of intellectual instruction.

By quoting from the Radhakrishnan Commission’s report which posits: “Education, according to the Indian Tradition is second birth, dvitiyam janma”, he argues that general education, intended for ‘Citizenly Training’ and directed towards intellectual enlightenment for a newly independent nation-state, was dedicated to offering dvitiyam janma (the ‘second’ birth). Noting that this formulation potentially reproduces the dvij (twice born) upper caste status, he asserts that it followed the intrinsically caste-differentiated economy of intellectual rights, which historically allowed Brahmanical education for the upper-caste Hindu students alone.

He also points out that, on the other hand, by framing it as ‘Workerly Education’, the Commission falsely diagnosed the causes of rural underdevelopment as a mere lack of economic measures. Thus, by voiding the history, the report projected a structure where class overrides all other markers of birth and identity, becoming the primary deterrent of academic success, reducing the complex problem of social inequity to a simple economic problem. Bhattacharya’s delineation of this mechanism brings to the fore the dismissal of caste hierarchy disguised as ‘welfare’.

Among many such expositions, another startling one is found in the chapter, Reaping Dividends on Discrimination: The Neo-liberal ‘turn’ to the market (1986 – 2012). Quoting NEP 1986/1992, Bhattacharya indicts how the state has gradually transferred the responsibility of addressing the historical injustices to the ‘(local) community first, and then to the (global) market.’ He argues that this was branded as ‘a new design for human resource development’ – a vermilion mark masking the state’s withdrawal.

India’s transition into the neoliberal regime is often traced in academic discourse as a departure from the ‘welfare’ state to the rule of the market. However, Bhattacharya emphasises that ‘this lament makes sense only if welfarism was innocent in the first place.’

What particularly resonates with my research is Bhattacharya’s denunciation of NEP 2020. He scrutinises its championing of liberal education as a prophecy for ‘the coming fourth industrial revolution,’ and ‘the rapidly changing employment landscape.’

Historically, liberal (or broad and multidisciplinary) education was constructed as the prerogative of the privileged. Now, the new emphasis on education that cuts across traditional disciplinary distinctions ties it explicitly to human resource development for the 21st century job market. Yet, by defining ‘multidisciplinary’ through courses like “The Art of Being

Happy”, “Digital Marketing” as Bhattacharya writes, the policy ruptures the object of interconnected fields of inquiry as these courses have little to do with either the rigorous methods or the critical practices of knowing; instead, they serve as a route to dilute the very essence of interdisciplinary liberal arts education such as that Majumdar has formulated.

While NEP 2020 under section 11, “Towards a more holistic and multidisciplinary education”, positions education in Takshashila and Nalanda as non-Western sources of liberal arts education, Majumdar cautions in his article titled, “Indigenous models of liberal arts should beware of ethnic chauvinism”, that the openness and flexibility of interdisciplinary liberal arts education must not be consumed by the Hindu-Brahminical parochialism that fosters social exclusion. Bhattacharya, for instance, has shown that even within Hindu traditions, education was plagued by caste hierarchies, denying access to the ‘untouchables.’

It is instructive to read Bhattacharya’s work through the lens of Meera Nanda’s arguments about anticolonial Hindutuva in India. In her book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism, Nanda argues that the Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right, despite their political opposition, bear a striking similarity: both are united in their search for ‘alternative modernities that are no longer bound by the ‘western’ model of modernity and belong to the family of “conservative revolutions” against Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism on behalf of indigenous traditions.’

It is here that Bhattacharya’s work stands apart from the ‘Postcolonial Left’ framing that Nanda calls into question. Even as he challenges the Hindu Right’s ideals of social exclusion, he grounds his critique in a rationalist defence rather than a revival of tradition. Notably, his historical analysis of ancient Indian universities demystifies the past, revealing that from Takshashila to Vikramashila, scholars were trained more for ‘religious evangelism’ than for intellectual pursuits. This distinguishes his scholarship from romanticisation of the indigenous that Nanda cautions against.

The density and the depth of Bhattacharya’s book provides a critical lens to widely misunderstood dimensions of policy reports and demands a far more extensive reflection than this brief engagement. For early-career researchers, overlooking this work would shape a significant gap in their understanding of Indian higher education, particularly as it is rendered through the rhetoric of policy. It is indeed an essential, unsettling, and indispensable critical history