Within the changing environment of Indian higher education, a slower yet powerful shift is occurring in India’s public engineering institutions, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Historically regarded as a bastion of science and engineering, the IITs are becoming more responsive to the issues of the humanities and social sciences, facilitating productive interchanges. These emerging perspectives do reflect more of a pedagogical trend; they indicate a cultural recalibration, a remaking of how knowledge is produced, valued, and mobilised.
The Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) departments at IITs are meaningfully engaging in global discussions around AI ethics, environmental justice, health communication, and digital literacy. These disciplines are no longer mere appendages to science and engineering but are now substantively engaging with questions of technological development and public life that sit at the heart of humanity (Kaur, 2005).
Therefore, at IITs, interdisciplinary work has become more than a buzzword; it’s emerged as a necessity. The humanities are not just involved; they are leading the way by suggesting that knowledge detached from context can be as dangerous as ignorance.
Scholarship around interdisciplinary work introduces real tensions stemming from a lack of dialogue, differing disciplinary methodologies, and the absence of a common vocabulary (Frodeman, Klein & Pacheco, 2017). Yet these tensions can offer new sites of inquiry. While an engineering discipline might focus on refining algorithms, scholars in the humanities at IITs are exploring how the same data technologies are shifting human behaviour and institutional and cultural practices.
Students in these institutions are not just coding or innovating, but contemplating their societal impact. Hence, the changes are not just tweaks to the curriculum; they represent a more significant shift in how knowledge is being conjured, taking into account not just a logical or scientific shift of temperament, but where the experience of each life matters. Scholars are exploring in-between spaces where media studies meet algorithm design, where literature and cognitive studies intersect. The intention is not to dilute expertise, but to connect it.
These shifts raise more fundamental questions. What do we mean by ‘valuable’ knowledge? Who has the privilege to decide what counts as literature, or art, or insight? For instance, take the Nobel Prize in Literature. When Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, won in 1997, and Bob Dylan in 2016, many critics baulked. They were not ‘real’ writers, some argued. While others saw it differently. After all, Fo and Dylan were both storytellers in a more encompassing way. Their stories were never supposed to just be read; they were meant to be heard, felt, and performed, like the epics of Homer and Kalidasa, the plays of Shakespeare. Maybe this was a return to the roots of literature.
This very rethinking is happening in the humanities classrooms of IITs. Scholars are not only analysing printed texts; they are exploring how Instagram captions and hashtags shape public discourse; how digital platforms like YouTube, Facebook become the repository of language, art, and practice, indigenous or otherwise; or how algorithms control what we read, and how digital archives are reshaping our cultural memory.
Discussing interdisciplinarity is much easier than doing it. Conventionally, research funding happened horizontally, but now momentum is building towards the diagonal, raising the question: what role should academics (and academic institutions) play in an evolving world characterised by technological acceleration and cultural upheaval? For decades, STEM disciplines were measured by quantifiable outputs: patents, products, and market impact. But that feels increasingly small in the wake of climate change, AI ethics, and social disconnection. Hence, the questions we face today are not only scientific; they are also social, cultural, and moral. What is emerging within these IITs is a conscious reframing for seeing code and computation in the larger context of history, ethics, language, and social practice.
As India endeavours to establish itself as a globally relevant knowledge hub, this interdisciplinary current that is developing within the IITs is likely to be one of its greatest assets beyond metadata and computation. These institutions are not only edifying engineers and scientists but also training the next wave of thinkers who will grapple with the ethical, social, and political implications of their work. The growth of interdisciplinary research in the IITs will not simply depend on institutional changes, but is contingent upon the gradual shift in academic outlook and engagement.
Moving in this direction will require institutional and intellectual courage to move beyond the comforts and legacy of established models, and seek a more inclusive, responsive way of ‘knowing.’ However, should the preliminary signs be considered, the journey has already begun.
References
Frodeman, Robert, Julie Thompson Klein, and Roberto C. S. Pacheco, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Kaur, Ravinder. “Locating the Humanities and the Social Sciences in Institutes of Technology.” Sociological Bulletin 54, no. 3 (2005): 412–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23620616.
(The author is an Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Patna)