The Colonial University: Writing the history

I have forever been preparing for this, but now I am starting it.

I want to write the history of the colonial university in India. 

I was supposed to start this in 2019, but Covid and various personal crisis kept me from it. I am living through yet another crisis, but that only tells me that there would be no better time and that I should get started.

The upside of this current crisis - if there could be any upside at all - is that I am completely grounded and now I won't think of travelling, for work or for leisure, for a very long time. I am recalibrating all my work and focusing on what I can do in the UK, first time in the 22 years I have lived here, and this gives me the stability and focus a project like these demands. Indeed, I am expecting archival work to be done in India and elsewhere, but that is different from spending time in airport lounges. In summary, I am embracing a quieter, boring life, with my only pleasure emanating from doing this work that I always wanted to do.

But what is this work? And why I think it needs to be done? 

There are people who thinks all colonial history has already been written and people have taken sides. The traditional tale of progress under the colonial rule persists but is largely discredited. The nationalist histories had a resurgence but at a time when founders have a bad name, talking about 'Macaulay raj' which made them can't be very fashionable. On the other hand, for the Marxists and the subalterns, there isn't an institution more bourgeois than a university. For each of these camps, writing the history of the university is pointless work or a plain reactionary endeavour.

I see it differently. I have worked with Indian students for over thirty years. As I travelled to other countries and studied their different higher education systems, I have always despaired about the callous disregard we show for our students. I feel that the Indian state feels no responsibility to educate its young people. It is done as a matter of course, with a very narrow agenda and, as CNR Rao once said, through an examination system rather than an education system. I have come to know several private institutions closely, and they are chaos embodied, led by people who have no interest in education and no accountability. The contrast with China, which I also came to know well over the years, couldn't be starker. It has always bugged me why this should be so.

I believe the root of this approach lies in the colonial heritage of higher education. That is, how the Indian universities were established, how a new system of meritocracy was shaped and embedded, and what people read and thought. These institutions were set up for specific purposes - with a narrow agenda - and were not part of the society as such; Indian students, such as Reverend Lal Bihari Dey, were expected to learn morality at home and only English at the college; a tradition that carries on. The histories written so far treat universities as a special type of institution and record bureaucratic histories of them, but I believe that these were a crucial part of the colonial infrastructure in the way they shaped our ideas, about merit, about educated people and most importantly, the relationships between the educated and the rest.

Apart from looking at this project as an attempt at institutional history, I also have an additional interest as an educator myself. My work focuses on the transformative dimension of education, and it is my pet peeve how instrumental the approach to higher education in India is. The transactional approach in some Indian institutions is borderline cynical - that the students want nothing more - and my assumption is that this also stems from how the role of education was conceived within the colonial frame. This is a sociological question and not to be resolved by a historical enquiry, but the question is always there in my mind.

This brings me to my final point, again not part of my research endeavour but a more practical one. I have followed various efforts at de-colonialisation and questioned whether such efforts are essentially nihilistic. Rejection of a point of view just because they were propagated by the colonialists is not, in my mind, the answer: I don't want to go back to creation myths just because Darwin happened to be a nineteenth century Englishman. Instead, I want to break the 'cognitive empire' by reconnecting with social realities and people around me, not in an imagined past but in my imperfect present. I want to commit to decolonisation in action, rather than as a textual and theoretical exercise. The first step of this process, I believe, is to understand how an alien institution takes root and creates new relationships, through an active collaboration of its beneficiaries. 

Very often, my Chinese colleagues would remind me - 'we have never been colonised' - and I would try to counter them, out of my national pride, by saying that this is only technically true. But it is truer than I would readily admit: The strange institution of the colonial university made a lot of difference, then as well as now.