Indian University is a complex amalgam of society, history and public policy that is supposed to describe functional periodisations, educational initiatives, reforms and social consequences with global influences. The evolutionary making of Universitas Indica is both introspective and exploratory as it intertwines and cross-fertilises the ideas and philosophies from India and the West, constituting the Indic Bharat or intellectual construct of India as it is known today.
India’s educational heritage runs deep in the localised models of education, theoretical and skill-based training, and was the ‘Beautiful Tree’ that Mahatma Gandhi spoke about at Cheetham Hall. This was supplanted by the Colonial University, an exclusive adaptation of the European Model in Asian colonies. Steeped in Greco-Roman emphasis on logic, science, philosophy, law, literature and medicine, the Colonial University pushed India into modernity as perceived in Europe and perfected the mission of Anglicisation, making it the ultimate cultural conceit of the Edwardian Age. The privileged few to receive this brand of education became more westernised than the West itself.
The Nationalist University, a unique refrain churned out of India’s ever-appealing saga against colonial shackles, was India’s moment to realise that it was nobody’s business to dictate on domestic university education, and that it was purely a ‘nationalist’ affair. This current manifested in the landmark initiatives of Swadeshi colleges like the BHU, IITs, etc., which became the educational edifice for self-sufficiency as a precept of indigenous discoveries and cultural awakening. This also doubled as a rising symbolism for the nationalist intelligentsia, where the politics of post-independent India was dabbled in its infancy.
The Public University, a post-colonial development based on the prevalent mores of global ideologies, was the product of destiny. It was driven by the socio-economic duopoly of the Cold War era that ensured the encompassing canvas of higher education across multiple streams and learners, a much-needed one that intellectually triggered critical discourses on law, society, economy and a revised historiography. The resulting debates and discussions till date continue to be a merry-go-round with its own rounds of victory and loss, unable to decide not only what is right but also who is right.
The Liberal University, a centre-piece of the globalisation era, was the prodigal child of the Colonial and Public University models, with a trans-Atlantic current viz., the American influence, with its resource-rich infrastructure and trans-disciplinary themes that served an academic cocktail of sorts. Gaining freedom of thought and artful expression, it knew the dynamics of shifting ideologies and came to mediate in the shaping of public policy at every level.
The progressive participation of private institutions came in the late 1980s, when there was a convergence of state and private interests in the reality that university education was to be re-localised in private initiative and globalised in content and curricula. These independent institutions, each marked by their own systems of educational philosophy, became the panorama of India’s educational map, where student-centric innovation found utterance in the neutral spheres of personalised attention to students. This converted the Indian middle class into a globally mobile diaspora, redeeming the nationalist pledge for self-reliant education and the commitment to ensuring global connectedness in the nation’s growth.
The Indian University this far is hence an evolutionary trajectory delivering multiple outcomes and output—creating administrators for government; employees and professionals for heavy industry, agriculture, law and medicine; teachers, poets, artists and thinkers to redefine the 21st century as truly Indian. Its transformation from a cluster of regional colleges based on mass production orientation and its unbridgeable divergence with core academic pursuits to a multi-disciplinary, multi-interest, diverse conglomerate of students and teachers is still a never-ending journey constantly at cross-roads with shifting goalposts.
However, this remarkable voyage in higher education was a matter of both providence and policy consideration. Institutionally, just as the Indian University negotiates a crucially contested via media between online and offline methodologies of pedagogy in the post-Covid-19 phase, it flourishes as the oldest surviving exemplar of diversity with reciprocal accommodation, culture with graded compromises, nationalism with global meaning, research with employable relevance and teaching with natural reverence in service.
The new addition to the ever-mushrooming brick and mortar is the gargantuan and voluminous bits and bytes. The Covidian conundrum has disrupted policymakers, who are confronted with an avalanche of ideas and solutions that strike as an online tsunami to deceivingly wash away the foundational structures that form the intellectual contours of India’s brick and mortar institutions. Will teacher-student ratio, citation index, etc., be replaced by bandwidth-headcount ratio and digitisation index? A clear answer is not possible but a possible answer is clear—it has to be a mixed method that doesn’t close India’s educational edifice but opens India’s online orifice. Thanks to the coronavirus, the idea of offline plus online education is spreading virally.
Amrith Bhargav
Advocate, Madras High Court
S Vaidhyasubramaniam
Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University
(Email ID: vaidhya@sastra.edu)