One form of parochialism is identity politics. Particularly in staff appointments, the claims of caste or region or religion can play as significant a role as academic qualification or distinction. Often, the candidate with the best connections gets the job rather than the best candidate. And so, as André Béteille notes, ‘the disputes that now dominate many if not most of our universities are not over the principles and methods of science and scholarship; they are over pay and promotion and the distribution of seats and posts among different castes, communities, and factions.’
A second form of parochialism is ideological. When the NDA government was in power in New Delhi, there was much criticism of the role played by the HRD minister, Murali Manohar Joshi, in placing, in important posts, intellectuals more amenable to his own political ideology. The criticism was just—it would have been more just still if it had acknowledged that in this respect Joshi was merely following the lead of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which, in both West Bengal and Kerala, has consistently interfered with university appointments. Between 1977 and 2011, for example, no critic of Marxism stood a chance of becoming the vice chancellor of Calcutta University, or even of becoming a head of department in that university.
A third form of parochialism is institutional. There is, in almost every Indian university, a marked tendency to employ one’s own graduates to teaching positions. This inbreeding has infected even the best departments in the best universities. Thus the history department in the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the sociology department in the Delhi University are largely staffed by those who have, at some stage or another, passed through the same portals as students.
Whether based on identity or ideology or institution, these varieties of parochialism have had a corrosive effect on university life. They have undermined the quality of teaching, narrowed the range of subjects taught, and polluted the general intellectual ambience. By now, they have collectively impacted millions of Indians, who got a more limited education than they hoped for, or, indeed, deserved.
Provincialism apart, there are other hurdles to the fostering of a plural ethos in the Indian university. One is short-sighted public policy. In the colonial period, the best science in India was done in the universities: by scholars such as C.V. Raman and Satyen Bose in Calcutta; Meghnad Saha and K.S. Krishnan in Allahabad; T.R. Seshadri in Delhi; and K. Venkataraman in Bombay. However, at Independence the decision was taken to set up a series of laboratories under the auspices of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). It was made clear that these would be the favoured sites for research, and that the universities would focus mostly on teaching. The best talent drifted away to these prestige institutes, impoverishing the universities. On the other side, without the challenge and stimulation of students, laboratory science got steadily more bureaucratic, and did not deliver on its promises either.
In any case, in the Indian context what C.P. Snow called the ‘two cultures’—the humanistic and the scientific—always had an uneasy relationship. Almost from the beginnings of modern education, Indian men were brought up to believe that the ‘arts’ were inferior to the ‘sciences’. Even in universities where the two coexisted, science students or professors scarcely came into contact with their counterparts in the humanities. After Independence, apart from the CSIR, the creation of the Indian Institutes of Technology also contributed to the further moving apart of the two cultures. Although the IITs had departments of humanities, their concerns were integrated in a desultory way into the curriculum. The precedent had been set, well before, by the Indian Institute of Science, whose original charter (influenced by its visionary founder, Jamsetji Tata) had room for a department of social science, which, however, remains to be activated a century after the institute’s founding. And so the finest young minds in the sciences have been encouraged to cultivate an indifference to (and even contempt for) the social sciences and history.
The plural ambitions of the Indian university have also been severely tested by a now-rampant populism. I have in mind the widespread suspicion of what are termed ‘elite’ departments and ‘elite’ universities. There is continuous pressure towards the equalization of resources, so that the public pie is shared equally by institutions good and bad, old and new. Institutions that were intended to be small and select are urged to let in more and more students, regardless of whether they can maintain standards while doing so. Where institutions of excellence should serve as a benchmark towards which others can aspire, they are instead asked to come down to the level of the lowest. In this manner, policies conducted in the name of democracy and egalitarianism serve only to degrade the education system as a whole.
These prejudices sometimes operate within a single university. Thus the Delhi School of Economics has long attracted widespread (and, for the most part, undeserved) opprobrium. Professors in other departments resented its international reputation, actually a product of intellectual excellence and an institutional culture of teamwork, but in the eyes of its critics a consequence of western-oriented ‘elitism’. Successive vice chancellors sought to erode its autonomy and bring it on par with, or down to the level of, the other departments of Delhi University. Teaching vacancies were unfilled, sometimes for years upon end. Proposals to reform syllabi were held up. The end result could have been foretold—the Delhi School of Economics no longer has an international reputation.
A final hurdle is constituted by the invisible hand of the market. Universities work best when they have an integrated campus, bringing together undergraduate colleges, postgraduate departments of the arts and sciences, and professional schools, thus allowing the students and teachers of these different units to mingle with and learn from one another. Among the major universities of India, only Delhi University even remotely approximates this ideal. The reason for this is that a large chunk of territory was set aside for it when the new capital of British India was being planned. As the university expanded, the new colleges that sought affiliation had to be located elsewhere, but by then the campus itself had a sufficient density of institutions to have a character of its own. It was also close enough to the city to be connected to it. On the other hand, the universities of our other metros, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore, grew in a random fashion, so that their constituent units were far-flung and in no real contact. Since the price of real estate forbids the consolidation of these units, the undergraduate colleges remain isolated from one another and from the postgraduate departments; even the latter are often fragmented, spread unit by unit across the city. Some universities, for example, Bangalore University, then thought to construct a new campus on land available on the outskirts. The postgraduate departments were relocated here, with the undergraduate colleges staying where they were. This new campus has only served to further separate the university from the city whose name it carries and of which it is presumed to be an integral part.
Rising property prices have inhibited the growth of university pluralism in another respect: by making it very hard for Indians to study or teach in parts of India far from their own. In about 1940, a modest apartment could be rented in Bombay at about 20 per cent of a professor’s salary; by about 1970, this figure might have jumped to 50 per cent. Now it must be close to, or even in excess of, 100 per cent. What this means is that the pool of available teachers has steadily shrunk; it now contains only those who have homes in the city itself. The consequences of this for the quality of intellectual life in the university are depressingly obvious.
The market works in mysterious ways. On the one hand, it has discouraged the movement of students and teachers within India; on the other hand, it has encouraged their movement to distant parts of the globe. In the 1960s and 1970s, large numbers of Indian scientists studied and then found employment in western universities; now, they are increasingly joined by social scientists, historians and literary scholars, the trade in whom is especially brisk in the American academy, to meet the demands of the growing Indian diaspora and the
new-found fashions of ‘postcolonial’ studies. Once, names such as Ghosh, Mukherjee, Srinivasan and Reddy were quite common in the payrolls of the universities of Bombay and Puné; now, they are more likely to be found in the faculty web pages of the universities of Minnesota and Chicago.
The influence of parochialism and populism on our universities is, in part, a consequence of the clash or contradiction between two varieties of pluralism. For the survival of the Republic of India it was perhaps necessary to create linguistic states, so as to inhibit the dominance of one language group over the others. However, this enactment of a plural politics at the level of the nation as a whole has sometimes led to a denial of pluralism at the lower levels. This is particularly true in the state sector, where one can manipulate recruitment in a manner that the private sector forbids. Since an overwhelming majority of our universities are managed by state governments, they are particularly prone to local or regional chauvinism.
Ideally, a university would not want to be parochial even at the level of the nation state. The best western universities seek to draw students and faculty from all over the world. Such was also the original intention of Rabindranath Tagore’s university, as witness the name ‘Viswabharati’. That our universities become more international in their composition may be too much to hope for, but let us at least try and make them adequately Indian.
V
Writing in 1968, the sociologist Edward Shils singled out student unrest as a major threat to the proper functioning of universities in India. Shils observed that Indian students had been restive in the 1930s and 1940s as well, but that this had found a focus and a constructive outlet through the independence movement. In the 1960s, however, student protest was directionless; it was, in fact, a form of ‘juvenile delinquency’. Indian student agitation, wrote Shils, was ‘demoralizing and degrading the academic profession which is already in a worse situation than one cares to see’. If unchecked, student unrest would disrupt more than the universities—‘if they go on, they will demoralize the Indian police services and render them incompetent to maintain public order or they will precipitate harsher repression resulting in many deaths which will in turn place very heavy strains on the Indian political system’.
These predictions were not entirely falsified. A few years later, students across India found a focus in the JP movement, which did in fact ‘precipitate harsher repression’ as well as the heavy strain on the Indian political system known as the Emergency. Still, it would be unfair to blame the general deterioration of our institutions of higher education solely or even primarily on discontented students. Indian universities have been undermined from above rather than degraded from below, corrupted and corroded by the forces of parochialism and populism itemized in this essay.
This writer is not the first to comment on the dangers of parochialism in the university—nor, to be sure, will he be the last. In September 1962—a month before war broke out between India and China—a group of liberal intellectuals met in Bombay to discuss the prospects for ‘a national university’. The convenor of the symposium, the mathematician A.B. Shah, pointed to the ‘growing regionalization of the universities under the pressures of a developing multilingual society’. This ‘process of regionalization’, he continued, ‘is accompanied by increasing fragmentation of the intellectual élite and a weakening of the university tradition, which was never very strong in India’. Shah felt that the solution lay in ‘the creation of a few national universities that would keep the tradition of the university alive till experience makes men re-examine the wisdom of what they have done’. He identified five likely carriers of this noble ideal—the three ‘premier universities’ in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, plus two new universities to be sited in the north and the south respectively. These national universities, he felt, ‘could ensure the continuity and development of all-India cultural life so essential in the context of regionalization’. They would ‘provide the nation with a window to the world, and also a yard-stick by which the work of the regional universities could be evaluated’.
In the 1970s, the central government did establish one national university in the north (the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and another in the south (the University of Hyderabad). These two institutions, along with the far older Delhi University, have (as Shah hoped) helped in keeping some kind of all-India intellectual discourse alive. On the other hand, the three founding universities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras have become more parochial rather than national in their orientation.
In his contribution to that symposium in 1962, the economist B.R. Shenoy focused on the declining quality of university and college teachers. This, he felt, was due to three reasons: abysmally low salaries, which meant that alternative professions were more attractive; the reproduction in the university of bureaucratic red-tapism, which meant that administrators were more important and more powerful than professors; and regionalism, which ‘on the one hand, repels from the academic profession men from outside the region and, on the other, adds to the pressure for migration out of the profession’. Shenoy also called for the creation of national universities which would be ‘wholly autonomous … free from interference by the government or any political organization’.
This writer is also not the first to sing the praises of university pluralism. In a talk broadcast over the Delhi station of All India Radio on 17th March 1940, Sir Maurice Gwyer outlined what he saw as the future of the university he was then heading. He called, first of all, for ‘the transference of all the constituent colleges of the [Delhi] University to a common site where they may stand together as a solid token of that sense of unity and purpose which is perhaps the most vital element in University life; secondly, the extension of the science laboratories and an increase in our present facilities for the teaching of science; and thirdly, the improvement and development of the University Library.’ Gwyer went on to say that while the other and older universities of India were strongly rooted in their respective towns and provinces, ‘Delhi University should not be afraid to draw its strength from a whole subcontinent. It should be a symbol of what India herself, above and beyond all her creeds or castes, can offer to the world.’
Gwyer also spoke of the importance of the university reducing its reliance on the public exchequer. He hoped that ‘the time will come when to endow a chair of learning at Delhi University will seem to rich men a way, not less noble than others, of perpetuating their memory’. He ended his talk in words that rang true then, and ring truer now:
I am speaking tonight more especially to the citizens of Delhi. Delhi University will always, I hope, be their University as well as a University for all India; and I look forward to the time when they will feel a great pride in its fortunes and in its work. I hope it will be a civic centre in the truest sense, and that those of its sons who are educated within its walls will learn there how to combine a love of their city with a love of their country, to look beyond the immediate conflicts of community and party to the greater unity which lies behind them, and to remember that of all the civic virtues for which a University should stand, a love of truth, a sense of proportion and a spirit of tolerance are not the least.
VI
Not very long ago, India had some fairly decent universities, but a very poor record in removing mass illiteracy. In the past two decades this situation has been reversed. There is a new energy abroad in the school sector, this driven in part by the state, in part by voluntary organizations, and most of all by parents. Once, many poor families chose to put their children to work rather than send them to school. Now, they wish to place them in a position from which they can, with luck and enterprise, exchange a life of menial labour for a job in the modern economy. As the educationist Vimala Ramachandran pointed out in 2004, ‘the demand side had never looked more promising. The overwhelming evidence emanating from studies done in the last 10 years clearly demonstrates that there is a tremendous demand for education—across the board and among all social groups. Wherever the gove
rnment has ensured a well-functioning school within reach, enrolment has been high.’
Recent developments in primary education call for a cautious optimism. On the other hand, our best universities have steadily deteriorated in quality and capability. True, there remain a few well-functioning departments, some very fine scholars and many devoted teachers. Still, I think it is fair to say that in respect of the five criteria enumerated in this essay, the universities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras probably functioned better in the 1930s and 40s than they do now. The halcyon period of Delhi University ran from the 1950s to the 1970s, that of the Jawaharlal Nehru University from the 1970s to the 1990s.
The deterioration that has set in, in these and other universities, has multiple causes. Among them are the varieties of parochialism and populism outlined above. These malign forces have been stoked by the political leadership. Ministers of education in the states work consistently to undermine the autonomy of their universities by interfering in appointments high and low. Ministers of education at the Centre have promoted personal favourites regardless of ability, and also used universities as tools of partisan politics.
In thinking of how best to renew our universities, we must, first of all, rethink our notions of size. Our big cities each have far too few universities for their own, and the public, good. The universities of Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore each have several hundred institutions affiliated to it, with a combined student population that runs into three lakhs and more. How can these institutions be effectively run, how can standards be maintained, by a single chain of authority headed by a solitary vice chancellor?
Second, within each university, big or small, all constituent units must not be treated alike. In particular, colleges and departments with a tradition of excellence in teaching and research should be accorded institutional autonomy, including the autonomy to raise their own funds. Each university must be encouraged to cultivate its own areas of distinction. Those words, ‘distinction’ and ‘excellence’, need to have their meanings restored. For, as we know only too well, in the realm of the academy, parochialism and populism work only to propel a race to the bottom. Why not instead work to ensure that some institutions of quality exist, and that those not yet there are encouraged to emulate them?