There was a time, that lasted roughly half a dozen decades between the 1960s and the early 2010s, when the trend among young candidates seeking admissions into undergraduate college/university programmes in this country used to be, broadly speaking, as follows: on one hand, the well-performing candidates would normally take up a highly coveted and often expensive undergraduate programme in any of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, supported of course by scholarships in certain cases; and, on the other hand, the ones who could not perform so well in their final high school board examinations would typically gravitate towards various BA programmes offered by the humanities and social sciences (often pejoratively called the ‘arts subjects’) departments in various degree colleges and universities across the country.
This general trend gave rise to two categories of students from the high school-level upwards: one being the ‘science student’, treated as a star of sorts within their family and extended social circles, besides attracting all the limelight in their schools/colleges; and the other being the lacklustre ‘arts student’, greeted coldly by their family members and sometimes even by their teachers, and easily dismissed by most as a no-good for the job market. Until recently, these constituted two almost distinct classes of young people in India, each near-complete with their attendant socio-economic privileges or the lack thereof, thanks to the differential treatments from their respective social milieus as well as from various state/central governments towards these two categories. The country’s major merit-based government-sponsored scholarship schemes, like the INSPIRE, KVPY, or National Science Olympiad Programme, are all directed to STEM students unilaterally, to this very day.
However, through the last five odd years, signs of changes in this trend are becoming apparent. With the emergence of undergraduate and postgraduate degree/diploma programmes in fields like liberal arts, public policy, or leadership studies, where the focus and approach are multi/trans-disciplinary rather than being anchored on a single humanities/social sciences discipline, a steady flow of high-scoring, meritorious high school students are lining up for admissions into universities that offer degrees or diplomas in these fields. The increasing popularity of these fields is a distinct sign of the shift in cutting-edge approaches to knowledge production and dissemination.
In recognition of the complexities inherent in the human subject as well as in its interactions with an ever-evolving society, economy and natural environment, the education sector seems to be gearing itself up for a systemic change in this country after quite some time. Notably, it is the growing number of private universities in India that has taken the driver’s seat in steering this paradigm shift in the country’s education scenario. And rather than being localised, the shift appears to be a cross-continental, even a global phenomenon. It appears that after almost two centuries of domination, the post-enlightenment European approach of watertight compartmentalisation of knowledge disciplines is once again receding into a more classical European system, wherein different epistemes are treated holistically, and where analyses of disparate phenomena try to reach a synthesis of knowledge.
Not content with mere chronicling of modern India’s immediate response to this changing scenario in global education — with its visible repercussions in the domestic education sector — a thinking Indian would also raise the question that concerns the same issue at a deeper, long-term level: what is going to be India’s unique contribution to such systemic change? Can India, a country which aspires to assert her own distinct identity in the world and apply her unique home-grown approaches to solve local as well as global socio-economic and moral problems, offer something from the rich legacy of her own civilisational heritage to the ongoing restructuring in higher education?
This question is particularly important in view of the fact that the said civilisational heritage of India includes a vast knowledge component and an awe-inspiringly large, diverse, and unbroken textual tradition — one that has recently (i.e., in the last two centuries) fallen into grave neglect in its original homeland.
This neglect is particularly rampant in the Indian academia, i.e., in the public and private Indian universities and institutes of higher learning; but it is also visible in the traditional seats of knowledge — places like Sanskrit/Vedic pathshala-s, tol-s, and gurukul-s, which have been instrumental in preserving Indian epistemes along with the ancient textual tradition of India down the centuries, and yet, in recent times, which have become stagnated in respect of churning out original ideas and creative syntheses of the past with the ever-evolving contemporary moment. Both these spaces need attention from the government and philanthropists, they need fresh blood (which will organically flow to these areas once the former need is fulfilled), and, above all, they need a liberal outlook as far as production and dissemination of knowledge are concerned.
India has much to offer in terms of both material hardware and methodological software to the emerging modes of knowledge production and dissemination. When India’s public institutions as well as regulatory bodies of higher learning, which (barring a select few) are usually reluctant to systemic changes, are finally forced to respond positively to this shift, compelled by the constructive impetus from private institutions, we will need to be prepared on multiple fronts. Basic checks to that effect would include: knowledge resources, such as textbooks, medium of instruction, libraries (both physical as well as digital), quality peer-reviewed journals, and, last but not the least, best-in-class instructors with a strong background in research and publication. And here we have room for work.
One cannot help notice the dearth of substantial scholarship — the kind that is duly rooted in scientific methodology and that which abhors the various hues of ideological grounding – in any discipline at any given point in time after India’s Independence among the various systematic efforts at revising hitherto employed colonial and orientalist perspectives in humanities and social sciences disciplines. The keyword here is ‘systematic’. Of course, there have been some brilliant individuals, who, by dint of sheer diligence in their scholarly work, have given us some very useful exceptions; but rather than proving the existence of a much-awaited ‘rule’ in this case, these exceptions merely accentuate the dearth of a systematic attempt at building an emic perspective that is backed up by a robust foundation of logic and theory of knowledge.
This lack is of a rather serious nature, and cannot be compensated by rhetoric and ideological polemics. Though this last observation holds true for any discipline from the humanities and social sciences (HSS), it needs to be specially emphasised for the disciplines of philosophy, historiography, and literary studies, which depend heavily upon correct understanding and interpretation of texts. These disciplines, in particular, had to bear the brunt of an increasing attack on their respective methodologies over the last few decades, starting in the late 1970s.
Then again, trans-disciplinary endeavours in the HSS, such as area studies, have failed to gain popularity as academic disciplines among students and the research community in Global South countries like India despite their great significance for law, internal security, defence, international relations, diplomacy and other related fields. This is because scholars in these fields have largely remained unsuccessful in systematically and methodically adjusting perspectives to make them contextual for the location of their scholarly practice, thus failing to yield useful applications to secure the country’s interests, and resulting in major negative implications for crucial fields like defence, diplomacy, education, commerce and the economy.
Therefore, substantial scholarship and proper adjustment of perspectivist methodology should be the two focal points of research and training in HSS disciplines in this country. On both counts, some direction may be availed from the successful examples of countries like China and Singapore, that have gained substantially in material as well as intellectual terms by rightly emphasising on their diverse HSS scholarly and educational endeavours undertaken with proper contextual perspectivism. Both merit and funds are regularly and generously flowing into the HSS departments/centres of research and learning in these Asian countries.
Fortunately, with the shifting trend in India’s education sector, it looks like that the above requirements and goals should not remain too far — provided that the country’s thought leaders, philanthropists, and her political leadership continue to provide the required support and fresh impetus to this process that has started off rather spontaneously.
There is one more point of concern. In a neoliberal age, where economy has come to be regarded as the sovereign determiner of the quality of human life, including in its environmental and cultural aspects, perhaps we ought to scrutinise — more closely and more sincerely than we have done so far — the systems and institutions that currently run the show across countries and continents. We ought to ponder over questions such as the following: can we speak in the same breath of preservation and continuation of unique identities, of indigenous values and civilisational heritage, as well as of the defence of political-economic systems and institutions that erode the foundations of communities and traditional cultures?
Transience of social orders and cultures across the globe and the rise of mediocrity in culture, argues the nineteenth-century French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, are outcomes of political systems and ideals that currently dominate the global and national orders. Such arguments are, however, usually dismissed by our contemporary dispensations of intelligentsia, irrespective of their specific positions on the spectrum of political ideologies, as either ‘reactionary’ or ‘elitist’.
The challenge of a new generation of intellectuals coming out of HSS departments and liberal arts universities will thus be to raise sincere questions that can penetrate the garb of spurious enlightenment — feigned in any form and occurring anywhere between the extreme Left and the extreme Right — and to move beyond such thought-processes as are, in the words of the British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, either “intellectually timorous, or too emotionally committed”.
Only then the political and economic systems and institutions, including the education systems and institutions of higher learning, that are currently upheld as sacrosanct by even opposing political ideologies and their ideologues, will be truly brought under a rigorous scrutiny. But such intellectual adventures require considerable courage. Have we such courage in ourselves? Are we enabling our students to acquire akin intellectual capabilities and courageous attitudes through our programmes and curricula, traits as befit the profiles of the twenty-first century’s public leadership? The coming decades, if nothing or no one else, surely hold a definite answer to these questions.
The writer is Assistant Professor and Director of Centre for Civilisational Studies, Rishihood University, Sonipat, Haryana. Views expressed are personal.
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