You can construct a cutting-edge archaeological demolition of the latest Ramjanmabhumi controversy in a radical leftist blog. You can be an acknowledged scholar in Renaissance Humanism and orate in the classroom on the complexities of non-articulated communication. But since Prudence is the new name of the game in racing to (re)build India Shining, you can wear at least two hats. You can, when the suavely smiling Human Resource Development Minister lays out his blueprint for New India — toward which you are lured by the possibility of a role in its fashioning — graciously convince yourself and others that maturity means taking cognisance of an age that “demands an image of its accelerated grimace.” And so you can pull caution and far-sight out of your front pocket, while you keep your conscience appeased by nursing your intellectual and political predilections in your hip one. You, we fear, are the dangerous face of the Humanities academic in today's minefield of higher education in India for, you are neither the unreasonable table-thumping banner-brandishing revolutionary nor the meekly acquiescent yes-person with no mind to call his or her own. You occupy, you believe, a useful liminal space — but your liminality is devoid of fertility, and it signals the grave for the future of the University in India.
And why would that be so? Consider the scenario of Indian Higher Education, circa 2010. The MHRD is laudably exercised about the shamefully low number of graduates in our country of teeming billions. Our Harvard-educated Minister Kapil Sibal has devised a sagacious plan to alleviate this handicap in 10 years flat: a multipronged attack by which the number of graduates in India will leap from 14 million to 44 million by 2020. As Mr. Sibal outlined in his address to the automobile industry on December 6, he will increase avenues for vocational training that will make a substantially larger number of youth suitably employable. Then he will revitalise the university education system in order, apparently, to rescue it from falling into mediocrity. Most of us should have no quarrel with a governmental desire to produce a variety and range of eligible workforce to contribute to the national exchequer and the notional contentment-quotient in equal measure. So what is it that makes us so suspicious of these avowed measures of prudent ambition being framed by the MHRD now?
We would need to re-examine the blueprint for our university system that dispenses degrees from the bachelor's to post-doctoral levels to probe this sense of the sinister in the MHRD's machinations for now re-carving a utilitarian profile for it. Of the 44 million graduates who will be sent from the best to worst universities in India by 2020, a significant number will presumably still be streaming out of the Humanities: significant not so much in actual numericals, perhaps, as in — as we perceive it — their projected, imagined contribution to the New India apparently still “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” Mr. Sibal and his team seem to be of the belief that a birthing needs to be forceped which trims the emergent graduate baby of any of the flab of the imaginative, the ruminative, the philosophical, the archaeological. Cleverly, however, the suggestion is not to throw the baby out with the birth-water, but to muddy the habitation and reroute the pathway: so, energise (a dead) History as Tourism Studies, revitalise (a moribund) Political Science as a Policy Programme, resurrect (an obsolete) English Literature as Communicative Global Language Skills.
To this worthy end, a new governmental body that will map and mould this brand new (or branded) Indian graduate is in process of being set up — the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) — that will replace the University Grants Commission (UGC) and function under the direct control of the MHRD, even while the Bill proposing this new commission sanctimoniously professes to promote autonomy for universities: as G. Krishnakumar has commented on the NCHER in The Hindu of March 1, 2010, “One discernible tendency in the Bill is to centralise the powers to shape the nature of education. Education was a State subject; it was changed into the concurrent list. The present Bill raises the apprehension whether it would finally become a Central subject.” We agree with him that it would be nothing short of “disastrous” to so impair the federal nature of crucial structures in the country, amongst which higher education is key.
And let us not harbour any illusions about the behemoth's capacity to innovate, morph, and engulf critical voices within its belly. The juggernaut believes in efficiency, and will brook no contrary viewpoint. But this augurs well for people who can and do think in terms of finesse and criticality in Humanities studies: because such enormous hubris is likely to sputter, in spite of its acute confidence and suavity. The point is, can the opposition come together, strategise and queer the pitch for this bulldozing machine?
However, just valiantly standing up to this multipronged re-hauling of higher education is an option which has ethical panache on its side but little long-term effect in tangible idioms. Another university group is notoriously pacifist, hoping that the scenario will improve magically: they will have to eventually capitulate and integrate. Otherwise, by the time the 18th century-poetry scholar is forced to write grant applications for doctoral projects funded by the Ambanis and the Tatas for improving communicative skills in their workforce, the script will be lost.
The first station involves consciousness-raising. It is a completely fallacious argument that liberal reform of the Humanities in India means sacrificing nuanced, reflective reading and solid writing skills for a new breed of a cheap, malleable workforce with communicative dexterity to emerge. This is precisely what Mr. Sibal means when he says that we are seeing the rusting of the West and the shining of the East: that the West has human resource but no jobs, while India has jobs but no trained personnel. This is a short-sighted libertarian dogma which has nothing to do with liberalism. Human wealth is not created in serious liberal societies by lowering the benchmark of higher education in this manner. Liberal education is a sustained and controlled matter, where practicality is directly related to searching analyses and the fecundity of thought processes. The real leaders of the market know this, and often get their best recruits from the Classics and Rhetoric departments. It is a pity that the flag-bearers of liberal India have no clue about such a pedigree of liberalism which would actually raise the stakes of a poor and uneducated nation.
Most importantly, those in the Humanities need to develop a long-term strategy that must be deeply critical, but executed with the acumen of deft chess players, flummoxing this vision of New India with crafty manoeuvrings. No one can take away the classroom space. Nor can the MHRD spy around corridors where contrarians and heretics blossom. A subterranean culture of the questioning spirit should foster in these spaces; a new generation of students must be steadily nurtured who will take on the authorities in their laziness of thought and crassness of aesthetics. Alongside, serious research by teachers will provide both moral fibre and scholarly relevance to undermine the seemingly open-and-shut case of the reformers. This is the real democratic tradition of the Humanities that must be salvaged and saluted.
( Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty teach at the Department of English, University of Delhi .)
