In post-independence India, the fetish for technocratic education has been a long and deep one. But in the last decade, the nation has shown clear signs of fatigue with this obsession with professional training, most of which has centred on engineering. India’s most celebrated institutes of technology education, however, were always meant to go beyond mere technological competence and create a holistically educated technocrat. But this vision has tended to fall by the wayside in the feverish dream of quick upward mobility offered by an engineering degree from an elite institute.
However, recent curricular transformation at these institutes has been something of a personal experience that has come to me following a book I published last year, College: Pathways of Possibilities , outlining a vision of liberal arts education in 21st century India. It has given me a string of unexpected associations with leading institutes of engineering and management in the country. Far more than the traditional universities of arts and sciences, these professional institutes have shown a keen interest in this particular vision of “contra-disciplinary” artscience education, especially as a way of bolstering the high-powered engineering and management curricula that form the core of their educational vision. In return, during the visits to these institutes, I have learnt much about their holistic liberal arts curricula that have received renewed energy in a globalised, economically resurgent India.
Vision for education
At an event hosted last November by the prestigious Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS) Pilani, the Director, Ashoke Kumar Sarkar drew my attention to the fact that BITS has placed its core curriculum for professional engineering training in close association with a subsidiary curriculum of liberal education in the humanities and the social sciences at least since the 1970s. Which is not at all far from the original vision behind the IITs, the brain-children of India’s first Prime Minister, the science and research-focused Jawaharlal Nehru. Some of these institutes were shaped after the vision of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has claimed not only ground-breaking linguists and economists on its faculty, but also a robust curriculum of the humanities and the social sciences where such liberal intellectuals could play out their pedagogy.
What is happening in these elite Indian institutes today, however, goes far beyond this historical foundation. Take, for instance, the newly endowed Partha S. Ghosh Academy of Leadership at IIT-Kharagpur, which plans to develop an innovative curriculum in the humanities, including ancient philosophy, to blend with the core curriculum in the engineering fields. The anticipation of fundamental shifts in the world economy in the near future, driven by a need to reinvent the foundations of capitalism, is the prime impetus behind the shaping of this interdisciplinary curriculum — according to alumnus Partha S. Ghosh, a US-based academic whose donation shapes this academy.
The elite institutes of management have shown an even keener interest in the liberal fields of fundamental humanities and social sciences to enrich a core curriculum of management training.
Multi-dimensional
Last year, I conducted a couple of workshops and panel discussions at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, initiated by the interdisciplinary interests of the institute director, Rishikesha T. Krishnan, an expert on innovation, and Dibyadyuti Roy, a literary scholar specialising in digital humanities. While at the institute, I learned about their five-year integrated programme in management, initiated in 2011 to combine a three-year undergraduate education in the fundamental arts and sciences with a two-year MBA, integrated with each other. The idea is to build professional training on a foundation of multi-dimensional breadth where the humanities and the social sciences occupy a key place. It promises a 21st century Asian articulation of a Peter Drucker-like vision of management studies that enriches from a multi-dimensional humanistic consciousness. Similar programmes, I heard in my conversation with Krishnan, are also in the works at IIM Bangalore.
The fields of professional training, I learned at an event discussing the liberal arts with a group of Mumbai physicians at Breach Candy Hospital, have been subjected to the colonial bureaucratic model just as restrictively as arts and sciences education in the great public universities in the country. The entrance exam for the MD programme, said the noted physician and writer Dr. Farokh Udwadia, is as narrow an exam in rote learning as are the clerically modelled exams in English, philosophy, or economics.
It was never as clear as it is in India today that both professional and the liberal fields of study yearn for a real shot of innovation. The enrichment of the professional with the liberal seems to be ambitious, yet the necessary solution. It is only natural that along with the fundamental sciences, the humanities have acquired a new urgency in the innovative liberal arts curricula in these elite programmes of professional training.
The writer is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
