Sunday Posts

India - with its new education policy - wants to make a new start. In a world of weakening institutions, China-US competition and a rapidly changing climate and disease environment, this is overdue. India's young millions is great power, but also great responsibility: If not tended, its demographic dividend can turn into a demographic disaster. But the first call of duty for an Indian educator is to address the elephant in the room. For far too long, Indian higher education carried on the colonial legacy, casting successive generation of Indians in the empire's shadow. Despite its independence, and perhaps because of the troubled legacy of its partition, India remained a marginal player in the world higher education scene, consigned to following the agenda rather than shaping it. Its higher education system, always big and now the second biggest in the world, curtailed its own aspiration and carried on the business as usual. It has failed its people, comprehensively and spectac...

As India's universities fail to cling to their already precarious positions on global league tables, old concerns about Indian higher education have been newly voiced. There is much to be unhappy about, not just the position on the league tables. The skewed structure of Indian higher education means the significant number of bright graduates, educated at great expense by the Indian state, leave India every year for fortunes abroad. Despite the overt focus on technology education in India, the technology gap with its neighbour and competitor for global influence, China, is alarmingly wide. And, for the all their swagger, Indian business schools have languished at the bottom of global league tables and their graduates still struggle to find good jobs in India. But I don't want to lament here about the obvious. In fact, I wish to make a point which is its opposite: The obsessions about global league tables, technology lead or employability, the three key factors dr...

Perhaps this is a distinctly unfashionable question, particularly when so many new universities are being built all over the world and more people than ever before are going to the university. However, unless one belongs to that rare group of people who think that the government - governments, in this case - knows better, this is a question worth asking, as public money is being poured in, either to build greenfield universities or to pay for students attending private, profit-making, ones.  The university leaders usually treat the purpose of universities as self-evident truth and exempt, conveniently, their own institutions from the critical examination they claim every aspect of life should be subject to. However, given the importance of universities in the contemporary cultural life - they are deemed to be the creators of individual worth as well as its judge - some questions are worth asking. To do so, it's important to start at the very beginning, and ask - what are thes...

When the subject of establishing English style Public Colleges in India came up before the British Parliament in the late Eighteenth Century, the proposition was deemed to be both preposterous, as the Indians were deemed to lack the discipline needed for a college education, and subversive, as American colleges were blamed for the loss of British colonies there.  The East India company administrators, however, were establishing colleges in India at the time - Warren Hastings modelled the Calcutta Madrassah following a version of famed Dars-i-Nizami curriculum followed in Awadh, followed by the efforts of Jonathan Duncan, the resident of Benares, to establish the Benares Sanskrit College - but these colleges were classic orientalist projects, for oriental learning and primarily for the benefit of English administrators wanting to understand Indian society and legal system. Such was the motivation of Wellesley's Oxford of the East - the Fort William College in Calcutta - which woul...

As the crisis in jobs becomes apparent, many think that the way to maintain the Middle Class society is to be found in entrepreneurship. In their mind, it is a straightforward transition: People not finding jobs would start businesses. In some quarters, those look for jobs are already maligned - 'Job Takers' they are called - as opposed to those committing themselves to entrepreneurial journey, the 'Job Creators'. As always, the reality is harsher than the theory. But my point is not to challenge the idea that there should be more entrepreneurs. It is how to get there I have questions about. More specifically, my doubts are about the new trend of creating university-based incubators, US style, in the universities in developing countries. The incubators are taking the place of 'Placement Offices' or what was euphemistically called the 'Industry Collaboration Office', becoming the last mile of the students' life cycle in an university or a busine...

For the last year or so, I was trying to achieve a balance between my academic and commercial work. I am lucky in a way because I love the work I do, so it's more than the usual striving for balance between what one loves and what one has to do. Though I get paid to do it, my commercial work is exciting - global, touches many lives and involves ideas. On the other hand, I see my future - few years from now, perhaps - in teaching and writing, and hence, the academic work that I am doing is more than a hobby. Though it still remains a balancing act, I don't necessarily see this as a dichotomous relationship - one or the other - and believe I should do both well. This brings me to the update: That, while I have prioritised on commercial work in the last 10 days or so, I have also made significant progress in focusing my mind on the subject of my research: A history of Calcutta University! In a way, it is obvious: This is the first modern university in India, which happens to...

Charles Wood, 1st Viscount Halifax That the Board of Control of East India Company, the parliamentary body supervising the affairs of the East India Company from London, sent a famous dispatch - dubbed the 'Magna Charta of Indian Education' - in 1854 to Lord Dalhousie, the Governor General of India, proposing the establishment of three Presidency universities in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, is well-known. Lord Dalhousie largely ignored the despatch, and its recommendations were implemented later by Lord Canning, Dalhousie's successor, as a part of wide-ranging reform initiatives after the Great Sepoy mutiny. The origin story, at least for British convenience, is better linked with the dispatch than the mutiny, and so this is how it's told. The Hindu Nationalists in India see the founding of universities as the realisation of Macaulay's dream, of creating natives who are Englishmen at heart; they took to calling university educated Indians 'Macaulay...

I am finally onto a project I always wanted to do: Write a history of the Colonial Universities. Indeed, I start with a very modest work - an essay on the establishment of metropolitan universities (Calcutta, Madras and Bombay first, and then Allahabad and Punjab Universities) in India - which I intend to finish over the next few months. But I hope to make this a prelude to the bigger project, because I see the Colonial University as a distinct form of institution, whose purpose was to educate for the economic purposes of imperialism, and even if the empire is long gone and dead, this institutional form and modes of thinking lives on.   That way, I shall claim, this is not just a freak exercise in academic pretencion for me, but an essential part of my overall work.  While I work on it, I already find it fascinating to study the rhetoric and ideas around the establishment of the Indian universities. The conventional narrative runs along the lines of Orient...