Left not right to fight DU change

By Swapan Dasgupta

Call it prejudice or even evidence of a closed mind, but the mere presence of individuals such as Sitaram Yechuri and Arundhati Roy on the same platform to protest against the newly-introduced Four-year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP for short) has got me all worked up. Don’t get me wrong, it is not that I don’t consider Yechuri or the Maoist-loving Booker Prize winner worthy enough to intervene in a debate on higher education. Both are extremely erudite individuals and Ms Roy in particular has become an international celebrity—a pamphleteer whose reputation is on par with the grand old man for all causes, Noam Chomsky.

The problem lies in separating Yechuri the individual from Yechuri the CPI(M) apparatchik who championed the destruction of higher education in West Bengal; and detaching the delectable prose of Arundhati from her sanctimonious extremism and her profound contempt for the aspirations of the Indian middle classes. When such individuals join hands and team up with teachers who have made a virtue of ideological regimentation and staff room intrigues, it is time to despair.

The despondency is all the more because there is merit in one particular aspect of the Left’s relentless assault on Vice Chancellor Dinesh Singh: the charge that the new curriculum was rushed through and without a wider debate on the conceptual underpinnings of the changes. This isn’t because the VC is temperamentally autocratic, undemocratic and is slavishly pursuing the interests of corporate interests—one of the more colourful charges levelled at the meeting at the India International Centre last Friday. The plain truth is that those entrusted with modifying the curriculum were unenthusiastic about having to depart from their set ways, dragged their feet endlessly and were finally coerced into submitting their proposals at the very last minute which left almost no time for wider consultations. Singh was chasing a deadline and the organised (mainly Left-dominated) teachers’ bodies were hell-bent on preventing the changes. The result was an almighty muddle and a fierce controversy that is bound to affect the new undergraduate programme.

There is also another backdrop to the academic war that has spilled into the public arena. During his tenure, Singh was insistent on one basic point: that the primary job of the university teachers—who are today much better paid than they were in the past—is to teach. His unannounced inspection of colleges and his censure of teachers who were lax about taking classes, evaluating students’ work and even attending college made him thoroughly unpopular and cast him in the role of a policeman.

Yet, what the VC did was necessary. Many of the students I have spoken to have complained endlessly about the indifference of their teachers to taking classes and motivating students to pursue the subjects independently. And a chairman of a college told me in no uncertain terms that the real problem lies in getting teachers to attend classes and teach. All the ideological misgivings over the FYUP apart, the fundamental resistance came from teachers who were loath to shoulder the extra work burden.

Yet, some fundamental conceptual issues remain. The idea of a university pursuing knowledge for its own sake has long been abandoned in India. Those who are truly interested in their subjects (and have the necessary parental support) are inclined to buy one-way tickets to foreign universities. Some two decades ago, studying abroad was essentially a post-graduate option; today, many students find it preferable to escape from the clutches of Indian higher education altogether.

The problem is seemingly intractable. The over-emphasis on foundation courses—some of which sound totally gobbledegook—are aimed at producing a better and more aware class of citizens who will contribute to that elusive exercise of ‘nation-building’. It may well achieve that objective but in the process it is also likely to create a body of bored students resentful of having to repeat what they should have learnt in school, including the so-called life skills.

Yet, the fact remains that Delhi University doesn’t mere comprise St Stephen’s, Sri Ram College, Lady Sri Ram College and Hindu College. They also include colleges where the quality of the intake isn’t on par. The challenge of evolving a curriculum that caters to students who have entered college with vastly differentiated levels of schooling and diverse social backgrounds and those who are worthy of Oxbridge and Ivy League is daunting. My fear is that in striking an aggregate balance, the system will compromise excellence.

There is an additional complication. The spirited intervention of the Left—what the hell was NDA convenor Sharad Yadav doing in such a gathering?—is partially against the way the FYUP was rushed through the various councils and partly against some of the exasperated utterances of the VC. But an equally important part of their resistance stems from the dilution of what one academic confessed was the insufficiency of “progressive” (a euphemism for Left doctrinaire) themes in subjects that were earlier classed as the liberal arts and now go by the name of social sciences. If the Academic Council has indeed managed to reduce the quantum of ideological bias, it is to be complimented. What has to be tested is whether the alternative is academically exacting or is tailor-made for mediocrity.

The FYUP is now a reality. There is little point in confusing students further by making it a one-year experiment. What is necessary is a little open-mindedness and flexibility to undertake periodic exercises in fine-tuning the curriculum. That’s the least the system can do in the face of a significant exodus of school-leavers to foreign universities. 

Sunday Pioneer, June 2, 2012

Delhi University's four-year itch

By Swapan Dasgupta

Many years ago, one of India’s most distinguished historians who, alas, has now been lost to the Indian system, narrated his experience of a Central university in India. Having joined the faculty after a long stint in the UK, he was somewhat bewildered when some of his colleagues objected to his presence at a departmental meeting: “He can’t be here; he doesn’t even have an MA.”

The dissenter may have been unaware of the Oxbridge tradition where a good BA degree was sufficient to allow a student to read for a doctorate. Alternatively, he was being plain bloody-minded and using nativism to express his distaste for a Oxford-educated interloper. My suspicion that it was probably the latter was confirmed some years later by one of India’s foremost authorities on political thought—a gentleman with an Oxford and Harvard pedigree.

Like my historian friend, he too had returned to India after a long absence and joined one of India’s most generously endowed universities. His tenure, tragically, proved to be tragically short. He resigned following disagreements over an unstated departmental policy of positive discrimination in favour of the university’s alumni in faculty appointments.

Last week, in an intervention that could be interpreted as an attack on the restrictive practices that have made many universities breeding grounds of cronysism, the junior minister of the grandly-named Human Resource Development Ministry Shashi Tharoor proclaimed his support for the four-year degree course Delhi University is set to introduce from July. Tharoor’s logic was simple: the American 12 + 4 pattern has become the norm. “Indian students with 10+2+3 were made to do an extra year in the US. It was frustrating for many.”

Indeed it was. But the logic of Tharoor’s argument is intriguing. It suggests that the primary purpose of Delhi University is to prepare students to adjust seamlessly into the US campuses. Indian higher education, it would seem, exists to facilitate the inevitable Atlantic crossing.

If the main intention behind adding an extra year to undergraduate courses was to facilitate India’s globalisation, it can be said to involve a grudging acceptance of a new world order. Certainly there is ample scope to make the undergraduate curriculum more rigorous and exacting, and better prepare the minority of students who choose to pursue post-graduate studies in US. The changes may even reek of pragmatism: Indian universities reinventing themselves as variants of Rau’s Study Circle, the well-known crammer for the civil services examinations. 

And why not? For many decades, under the pretence of modernity and post-colonialism, the definition of a university has witnessed dramatic changes. The notion of institutions of learning pursuing knowledge for its own sake has long been discarded. Equally, inculcating “the code of a gentleman and sportsman”—General Smuts’ evocative description of an ideal Rhodes scholar in Oxford—no longer counts as a priority. Instead, India has enthusiastically embraced the virtues of ‘really useful knowledge’, a euphemism for skills appropriate for the white-collar job market.

Yet, there is a fundamental mismatch between preparing students for a US Graduate School, an approach that demands building sound scholastic foundations, and supplying the market with mid-level functionaries. In addition, there are social objectives that the Indian university has to be mindful of. This involves making the curriculum less intimidating to those who were disadvantaged by indifferent schooling. In short, there is a mismatch between what Tharoor hopes and what the human and infrastructural deficiencies will allow the university to achieve. The conflict between quality education and mass education is inescapable. It can be better handled by improving our schools, not by transferring the problem to higher education.

In trying to blend the functions of high school and polytechnic with that of a traditional university, Delhi University may end up falling between two stools. Whereas the façade of the new four-year degree may correspond to the US pattern, the software could well be vastly inferior and, possibly, virus infested.  

The alternative—short of the best and brightest fleeing India at the earliest—lies in nurturing private sector universities that are not constrained by the dumbing down process; institutions where they can discard gobbledegook courses on “integrating mind, body and heart” and concentrate on knowledge, creativity and innovation. 

Sunday Times of India, May 5, 2013

An Airtight Compartment: India's historians prefer committee versions of history

By Swapan Dasgupta

Since clever one-liners are as much a part of a journalist’s stock-in-trade as hard information or penetrating insights, I have often described myself as a lapsed historian. This self-description has served two functions: first, to explain why the past invariably intrudes into my writings on the present and, second, to allay fears of being a crashing bore.

This may seem needlessly harsh on India’s historians — a community that is forever involved in public brawls over one thing or another. In most ‘free’ countries, by which I don’t include China and countries with a Ba’athist-inspired dispensation, historians are among the most exciting people to have as intellectual decorations. They tend to be witty, irreverent, erudite and, most important, quirky. A historian who can discuss corruption in India with a passing reference to Gibbon’s account of the ‘sale’ of the Roman Empire to Didius Julianus by the venal Praetorian Guard is the sort of person we’d love to fly with. In the old days, a savage book review by A.J.P. Taylor was an occasion that we all looked forward to.

Historians were very clever but they could also be rather nasty people, especially when bitching about fellow historians. I recall the casually devastating observation of the Cambridge historian, Eric Stokes, that someone must have thrust a copy of a Rajani Palme Dutt pamphlet in the hands of an ageing Sarvepalli Gopal. It was a not-very-subtle way of suggesting that Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru was riddled with dogmatic certitudes and, perhaps, was characteristic of the university he inhabited in old age.

Even ideological convergence didn’t automatically promote conviviality. I particularly recall Eric Hobsbawm’s carping observation in Interesting Times that E.P. Thompson was “a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts but two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass”.

Maybe it was Hobsbawm getting his own back on Thompson for his disavowal of the Communist Party after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the so-called ‘revolt of the intellectuals’. However, I detected a conflict of temperaments. Despite a commonality brought about by a shared vision of proletarian power, these were two different individuals. Hobsbawm was an austere, refined patrician, strangely reminiscent of the pre-war European man of letters. Thompson, by contrast, was emotional and excitable and very English. Hearing him declaim passionately about subjects as diverse as nuclear disarmament and the Luddites, he often reminded me of a radical vicar, always at odds with Lambeth Palace but yet accepted in the Church of England.

The sheer versatility of the tribe, the ability to garnish academic rigour with individual eccentricities, have added value to the public standing of historians. Because the study of history is, by its very nature, riddled with tentativeness, historians have helped embellish the past with insights of human behaviour. Just as no two histories can be the same, no two historians should be or even aspire to be the same. There is nothing more unprepossessing than histories written by a committee or disputes involving the past being resolved through a show of hands.

Ironically, both these are routine occurrences in India. “Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec,” was the only advice that Winston Churchill, then prime minister, proffered his education secretary, Rab Butler, during the passage of the Education Act of 1944. How to tell the story of Empire was for teachers, historians and society to ponder: it was not something any government could speak for the nation. Yet, in India, history writing is a preoccupation of the State and the successful historians are the ones best able to translate political priorities into a committee version of history.

Where the stories of the past are, ideally, replete with question marks of uncertainty and tentativeness, the history-speak of India is over-stuffed with certitudes, the ‘correct’ views. Sometime in the early 1990s, the Indian History Congress decided to settle the question of whether a temple predated the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya through a show of hands. The display of professional democracy, unfortunately, told us more of the historians of India than it did about a dispute that divided India emotionally.

All this circumnavigation is in aid of an anecdote. Some three months ago, I was hugely excited after reading Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson, a book I hoped many more people would buy and read. It so happened that I bumped into one of the pillars of India’s historical establishment at a dinner around that time. I couldn’t resist telling her about the book and about Ferguson’s earlier works. “That’s not history,” was the icy retort.

Ferguson, by the way, is a professor of history at Harvard and was also a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Yes, he does a lot of television but his scholarly credentials are very kosher.

Since it is rude to press a disagreement at a social occasion — I’ve had whisky thrown at my face for informing an earnest sociologist in 1996 that Uma Bharti was a personal friend — I left it that. However, interactions with students of history at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University resulted in two surprising discoveries. First, that Niall Ferguson was indeed shunned by the academic pundits, maybe because his books, like Heineken, reached parts that others don’t, and second, that it was just not done to blend the scholarly with the popular, a euphemism for the non-professional historian.

The envy part of the story is understandable but the rejection of the non-tenured historian is baffling. Earlier this year saw the publication of Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng, a Briton of Ghanian origin who, apart from having a doctorate in history from Cambridge, is also the Conservative member of parliament for Spelthorne in Surrey. Kwarteng also wears an old Etonian tie which makes him triply suspect.

Kwarteng’s thesis is compelling: “The British Empire was nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who shared a common culture, but who had very different ideas about government and administration. There is very little unifying ideology in this imperial story. It was grand and colourful but it was highly opportunistic, dominated by individualism and pragmatism.”

Expressed in another way, Kwarteng has argued that there was no grand imperial project that led to half the world being coloured in red by 1918: the Empire resulted from a series of local decisions, some well-considered and others, such as the annexation of Burma, a consequence of impulsiveness.

In an environment of post- colonial angst, Kwarteng is certain to be regarded as another ‘revisionist’. This may not be an incorrect description if it is assumed that academic orthodoxies, like fashion, keep changing ever so often. But the more relevant point is that a revisionist challenge can only be mounted if the history establishment opens its doors and windows to let the outside air in. If historians choose to live in airtight compartments, they can wallow in their own correctness but with the associated risk of obsolescence and fossilization.

Centres of learning often have their origins in religious seminaries, what in India are called the ‘mutts’. A feature of this tradition is that knowledge is pursued for its own sake. But the self-enforced monastic insularity can also trigger hideous intellectual distortions.

At the heart of the kerfuffle over the inclusion and exclusion in the Delhi University history syllabus of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on multiple Ramayanas is the closed shop. India’s historians believe that to stroll outside their cloistered habitat involves the danger of falling off the edge of the world. No wonder they count for so little in the arguments over India.

Telegraph, October 28, 2011

Much ado about 'Three Hundred Ramayanas'

By Swapan Dasgupta

There is nothing like a good culture war to excite the intellectual imagination. The decade of the 1990s was dominated by the slugfest over the shrine in Ayodhya. It became obligatory for anyone with any pretension of being a ‘public intellectual’ to take sides on this controversy. Neutrality or, worse still, supreme indifference was automatically construed by the dominant intellectual group as tantamount to an endorsement of ‘fascism’.

Then came the kerfuffle over M.F. Hussain’s contentious depiction of Ram and Sita that had the defenders of the faith screaming ‘blasphemy’ and reaching for their trishuls. Here too, India’s cultural community were encouraged to link arms against the vandals.

Now comes a wonderfully contrived dispute over a Delhi University decision to omit an essay on the Ramayana from the prescribed readings for its undergraduate History course. The decision has particularly agitated those with a penchant for progressive pamphleteering: it has been denounced as “academic fascism”—a conceptually intriguing proposition.

The essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” by Indologist A.K. Ramanujan was never intended as an iconoclastic exercise. It spelt out the interesting variations in the Ramayana story in India and South-east Asia with a great measure of quiet reverence. In fact, Ramanujan concluded his essay with a tale of the mental and social elevation of a village dolt after he actually listened to a recitation of the Ramayana.

Yet, because some philistines had objected to the essay being in the list of prescribed texts, the culture war was transformed into a political war. The ‘progressive’ adherents of ‘scientific history’ felt obliged to celebrate the importance of mythology and the folk tradition—which they otherwise debunk—while the other side despaired of a text that injected potentially “blasphemous” and contrarian ideas in impressionable minds.

That such a puerile debate has come to dominate a discussion over the curriculum in a university may seem odd but not surprising. Over the years, the history wars have become a feature of the larger battle over national identity. A feature of this clash has been the tendency of the opposing sides to repose faith in something called the ‘correct’ view of India’s past. With their dominance in the history faculties, the ‘progressives’ have tried to fashion the curriculum in a particular way, using prescribed texts as the instrument of their ideological hegemony. Instead of being an open-ended inquiry into the past, the practice of history in India has been reduced to regurgitating a set of certitudes.

A Delhi University history graduate who won a scholarship to Oxford recently recounted the absurdities of the process. The medieval history readings, he told me, were replete with denunciations of the so-called ‘revivalist’ historians of an earlier era. What struck him as surprising was that none of these apparently flawed histories featured in the prescribed reading lists—not Sir Jadunath Sarkar, not R.C. Majumdar,  and not A.L. Shrivastava. In other words, rather than encouraging students to savour divergent ways of looking at the past, history became a set of acceptable truths and unacceptable untruths—hardly an approach befitting an open and argumentative society.

The problem, it would seem, arises from the dubious practice of listing prescribed texts. In the past, a history curriculum would identify broad themes for study, leaving teachers the independence to recommend readings for further study. A student would be tested in the examination for his ability to construct lucid arguments that would reveal their understanding of the subject. With ‘prescribed’ texts becoming the norm, the student’s scope for demonstrating independence of mind and even originality of thought are naturally at a discount. They are expected to imbibe and parrot prevailing orthodoxies—a process that can hardly be said to be conducive for the training of the mind.

What we are witnessing in India is not an assault on free speech but something far worse, an attack on the spirit of free inquiry. There is something fundamentally skewed with a system of higher education that posits two stark alternatives: a compulsory reading (and, by implication, acceptance) of a scholarly work or not reading it at all. The space for critical discernment is fast disappearing and we are turning into a nation of slogan shouters. 


Sunday Times of India, October 23, 2011