A university is one of the great inventions of modern life. It is a theatre for ideas, a domain of play, and a commons for dissenting academics. Yet the university as a vision is in dire straits in India. As a sociologist put it, “We talk of the idea of a knowledge society as if the university is not part of it”. My friend explained it further. He said, “A university is not a place for being and becoming. It is an instrumentalist project for any group.”
He added sarcastically, “Look at the advertisements. It is Kota, Rao’s study circle, Byju’s that take pride of place. The tutorial college, emasculating and instrumentalising knowledge, has taken pride of place. Institutions that facilitate entry are more important than the idea of the university itself.” In fact, he tiredly suggested that the director of these tutorial academies should be made chairman of UGC. It fits the Macaulayite project of India as a nation of clerks better. India wants to play secretariat to the world.
Ravi Subramaniam, former director of the Raman Institute, put it crisply, “Indians today take pride in being the best summarisers. We are no longer the original scientists, the creative geniuses that Raman and Ramanujan were”.
My cousin, a student at Princeton, told me about his encounter with William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor. He was attending Shockley’s lecture at Princeton when Shockley referred to JC Bose. He said, “There was the genius of Bose, the rest is toilet paper.”
It is not just the sense of the university as a pilgrimage and exploration of ideas that we have lost. We also lack a sense of the university as a way of life. When a JNU Vice-Chancellor apologises for the university being anti-national, she is seeing the university as a cadre of ideologues, not ideas. Ideology is procrustean and frozen; ideas are an effervescence of possibilities. More, the everyday joy of learning and being is lost in these official narratives. Let me contrast it with two stories.
ALSO READ | A tale of three concepts in independent India
One of my students, a woman, came to me in the final semester and said desperately, “You must export me. I can’t go home. My father will marry me off to a businessman. For my parents, 18-22 is freedom." Once we have left the university, that sense of ease is over. We have to wear the corset that society dictates. This leads me to the second story. I had gone to Bangalore for an open meeting about admissions to a liberal arts department. The students were good, but what was more moving was the interest and enthusiasm, parents especially mothers, showed. Many had been marked before they finished their degrees and were nostalgic about their time, dreaming they could go back to these courses. I wonder why the university has no place for the housewife as a scholar, creating openings for students between 40-50 to relive and invent a world of knowledge. The university was a state of being, of joy, where the processes of knowledge and the gossip of student life were central. Treating it as a piece of academic plumbing makes it obscene, even surreal.
Few see the university producing its own world of values and ideas of itself. I remember my days at the Delhi School of Economics café, frequented by greats like Amartya Sen, Sukhmoy Chakravarty, and Ramachandra Gandhi. They were legends to the outside world. Yet the epic figure, in a more domestic way, was a gentle old man who would quietly have coffee in a corner. Students greeted him in delight and reverence. He was the teacher Frank Thakurdas. He influenced no policy and has no place in textbooks, but he lives in the heart of his students. He taught to enjoy and dream political science. He was the legend, the teacher incarnate, the man around whom stories grow. People who graduated would come back for a darshan of this old man, smiling gently, debating Socrates and Aristotle for fun. Only a university can create this kind of man, loving books, ideas, sharing them, living simply. It was the frugality and the charisma of such scholars which made the university attractive.
There is a joy of learning and teaching the university embodies. I remember the botanist Professor Mohan Ram had dropped in one day. He saw my friend’s daughter, learning the names of plants, stumbling over a radish. Quickly like a Walt Disney of Botany, he drew a radish, its roots a subtle, simple, archetypical radish. It was elegant, magical. He was called ‘Radish mama’ after that. I remember him moving from radishes to discuss Nicholai Vavilov, the Russian botanist, with me. Learning had that sense of exploring and sharing, a creation of an oral perspective that no digital class can capture today.
Memories become crucial to university. It cannot survive without storytelling. I remember my PhD guide Andre Beteille, a legend in the sociology department. We used to quarrel over everything from ideas to events to my delays in submitting my chapter. We met once thirty years later in Canada. He stopped, looked at me impishly, and said, “I am still recovering from you.” I remember when he was on the board for a Professorship, he chose me. He told the committee, “He is my first choice, but remember, there is no one I disagree with more.” That sense of the toleration of difference that made a university no longer exists. The sadness begins there. Saluting these scholars is not enough. One has to protect the worlds they lived for. It was not a narcissistic world. There was a wonderful sense of everydayness and discipline. Beteille would write two paragraphs minimally every day while I watched sceptically. He told me simply, “that makes a book a year”. A simple statement before the idiocy of Scopus and other productivity schemes was hatched.
The sadness is that a university as a commons and one of the last domains of crafts is not recognised. We are converting it pragmatically into a set of functions. First, as an interlude from employment, as a cadre for politics, as a bureaucracy for certification. We cannot survive the deadwood of technocratic thought as embodied in the Kasturirangan report. The university needs a new manifesto written by scholars, teachers telling its story, articulating its dream. They have to challenge the banalisation of the university. Only then can the sadness of the university today find some hope, some claim to a playful future.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with The Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations