Above Illustration: Amitava Sen

Is the centre’s move to set up foreign varsities an attempt to create a global secretariat class? Education is not treated as a culture of learning but as a way to quick and instrumental certification

By Shiv Visvanathan

Universities in India have been read within a genealogical context. We always date the creation myth of the university to Lord Thomas Macaulay, who was desperate to create the Indian mind as a clerical system. Looking back, I find it odd that the origins of the university system go back to Macaulay because what he created in India, in the presidency towns of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, was the London University of the time, a dour examination system, a conglomerate of colleges committed to certification. London University was intellectually distant from Germanic universities of the time which combined the functions of teaching and research. One has to read Gandhi’s autobiography to understand the inanity of London as a system. What was profound was the way India mimicked it, creating the kunji as a catechism of knowledge. If one uses Macaulay as genealogy, then the university was always a site for the secondary and the imitative, an annex to the imperial apparatus. Macaulay created the colonial imprimatur in education.

To look at Macaulay critically one has to examine the nationalist dream of education. For this, one has read the essays of Patrick Geddes (a noted Scots educationist, sociologist and town planner), Rabindranath Tagore and JC Bose. Geddes, in his town planning report on Indore, read the university as a cosmopolitan system always in dialogue with the dissenting academies. Tagore read the university as a dialogue between the city university of the West, hostile to nature and the forest universities. This is where the mind of India goes back to the sage in the forest who lived in harmony with nature. The nationalist dream of a dialogic university always incorporates the other, while it retained a sense of its plural creative self.

Before we discuss the BJP bill on foreign education, one has to make a choice of creation myths. Is the ancestor of the university the Macaulayite building in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay or is it the unfulfilled dream of a post-Germanic university which Tagore, Geddes worked on? Sadly, the BJP seems to have taken the Macaulayite root to genealogy. It seeks competence through mimicry and it forgoes the attempt to indigenise or translate knowledge. For years, while the Congress was in power, the BJP pretended that the university was the Trojan Horse to power. If one wishes to colonise a country, all one needs to control is the syllabus of a university. When the BJP was in Opposition, it used culture as a weapon. Yet, as the BJP was domesticated in power, it seems to yield to the same Macaulayite sensibilities.

The regime seeks to turn middle class India into a huge secretariat of global capitalism. If it turned India into an electronic secretariat, the foreign universities bill will create in India a global secretariat class, an extension counter of the global regime. The BJP, for all its talk of culture, seems to approve of such cultural secondariness.

One has to try to understand the mindset of the BJP in creating the bill inviting foreign universities to set up base. Foreign education will create new gated communities of knowledge. The comparison used is the idea of Special Economic Zones where the general norms of governance are suspended, creating a “some as more equal than others” syndrome. There is a battle implicit between economics and culture. The regime feels that such universities will create employment and competence. There is a tacit sense that this move has received the approval of the elite which would love to see its children employed in these special enclaves. Present in all this is a dream of privatisation. The privatisation of education, medicine and agriculture has been part of the regime’s policy. The establishment of universities such as Jindal, Premji and Krea was the first step. These institutions were created as private expressions of the public good. The foreign university bill is the next step in this process.

How does one read such a process? One can dismiss it as a short-term economic move, a set of satellite creations to help the crisis of education. But there is a sense of amnesia here and schizophrenia. Let us begin with Amit Shah’s proposal to introduce Hindi. Does one see a hierarchisation of languages as a hierarchisation of the universities and of opportunities? The elite would not bother about populist moves like Shah’s when it realises it can access foreign enclaves in India. In a way, one is sensing not the pluralisation of education but its balkanisation. Education is not treated as a culture of learning but as a way to quick and instrumental certification.

The question of culture, the dialogue of cultures that Tagore spoke about is deeper. Tagore saw culture as play and dreamt of a creative university where cultures of knowledge and learning encountered each other. Education added to the imagination of culture without directly instrumentalising it. At one time, under scientists like CV Raman and Meghnad Saha, we dreamt of national institutes designing their own sets of problems. Today, India is content to let the West define the syllabus and intellectual context as it plays a willing periphery. The emphasis is no longer on cultural autonomy and intellectual imagination. It is on productivity, an idea that banalises creativity.

There is a civilisational question which our narrow nationalists do not understand. India seems to accept development as defined by the West as the dominant discourse. It is almost signalling an abandonment of the search for alternatives, of a different future. It is in line with the BJP sense of culture which problematises the past but has ceded the future to the foreign university. Education now appears like a 3-in-1 ice-cream where each strata can have its own lick.

There is also a wider issue of democracy. I am talking of the internal democracy of the academie. Look at the pattern of decisions from the dismemberment of the UGC, the Kasturirangan report which fractionalises education into skill and the rise of private universities as a prelude to the foreign universities bill. The academic as agent, as discussant, is missing. He is no role player in the future of his own world; he is a mere employee and hardly a participant. Discussions are reduced to governmentality without democratic or intellectual content. This bureaucratisation of education emphasises goals like control, productivity and instrumentalisation but it has lost the vision of education as autonomy, immunity and peer group decision-making. The decline of internal democracy, the idea of foreign universities as gated communities is something we need to discuss. The demands of pluralism cannot be met with the balkanisation of institutions or the fragmentation of the vision of education.

One wishes the bill had been more experimental and playful, looking to create hybridities, making hyphens across projects which evoked a planetary rather than a global consciousness. Issues like the Anthropocene can be treated in a more challenging way with the university becoming a commons for such problems. One can invite civil society to participate in these problems and articulate its dreams and anxieties into research problems.

One almost senses the new ministry of education is a bit like Kafka’s castle. An ordinary academic or citizen has little say in what is happening. Worse, the absence of debate, of side bets on education, makes the prospect dismal. It is almost as if India prefers to colonise itself into enclaves rather than admit that it lacks the political and intellectual will and the ethical creativity to create an institutional blend of imagination and justice. Education is treated more as a law and order problem than a challenge to the creativity of democracy.

To end on a more constructive note, before we hypothecate education in part to foreign universities, let us, as dissenting academics, propose an experiment. Firstly, even if the bill is a fait accompli, let us debate and let the academic provide a report on it. This should include an ombudsman for each enclave, not as a policing model but as feedback for dissent, debate and alternatives. Secondly, let us improvise a cost-benefit beyond skilling and certification and evaluate these enclaves in terms of intellectual standards. Three, let us have a dialogue with these groups on issues of the academics of the future. Let us hopefully introduce a plurality of styles instead of a redundancy of liberal arts, tedium and management. A debate is critical and critiques are essential. One is not asking for more from a regime which is hostile to academic life in an academic sense.

—The writer is a member of the Compost Heap, a commons of ideas exploring alternative imaginations