Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Debaditya Bhattacharya, "The Indian University: A Critical History" (Orient BlackSwan, 2025)
Host: Jadun Sir Longkumar
Guest: Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya
Release Date: September 19, 2025

Overview

This episode features Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya, a literature professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University, discussing his new book "The Indian University: A Critical History". The conversation delves into the idea and evolution of the Indian university, critically analyzing its historical, social, and policy contexts. Dr. Bhattacharya challenges conventional narratives of Indian higher education, particularly the claims rooted in both ancient mythologies and colonial legacies, and scrutinizes the current era shaped by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The discussion is structured to trace the university's journey from colonial inception, through postcolonial welfare and market phases, to today's "platform university" model under NEP 2020, all while interrogating themes of publicness, exclusion, and the university's relationship to society.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Bhattacharya’s Academic Journey and Motivation for the Book

[01:41–09:26]

• Dr. Bhattacharya started as a literature teacher and became interested in the structural and policy shifts in Indian higher education.
• His entry into academia coincided with Delhi University's drastic shift from an annual to a semester system in 2010—a top-down reform, implemented without consultation with teachers or consideration of students’ diverse backgrounds.
• This experience made him question the policymaking culture around higher education in India, feeling policymakers were disconnected from actual teaching and learning.
• The 2014 political transition (BJP taking power) and the release of NEP 2020 during the pandemic (without public debate or parliamentary discussion) heightened his concerns about the lack of democratic process in policymaking.

Quote:

“That was the major disconnect that I felt was part of the entire process of policymaking in Indian education, right? Where it seems that policymakers don’t really care about the teaching learning process anymore.”
— Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [07:32]

2. The Idea of the “Indian University” — Between Myth, Memory, and Materiality

[09:26–15:34]

• The concept of an “Indian university” is often romanticized through either:
  • A mythologized return to ‘ancient’ Hindu/Buddhist centers like Takshila and Nalanda, or,
  • Nostalgia for postcolonial adaptations of the liberal/metropolitan university.
• Dr. Bhattacharya challenges both camps, arguing there is no singular, core “idea” of the Indian university—what remains is the material institution and its physical/social infrastructure.
• He proposes shifting the focus from institutional hagiography to an analysis of the university’s relationship with “publics”—how universities have attracted or repelled diverse Indian publics throughout history.

Quote:

“What has been the Indian university’s relationship with publicness and which I go out and show through the book has been a really checkered and a really, really fraught history.”
— Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [14:24]

3. Debunking the “Ancient University” Narrative

[16:50–21:12]

• The book’s first chapter rigorously interrogates the glorification of premodern Indian learning centers like Takshila and Nalanda, which, Dr. Bhattacharya argues, were not universities as we understand them today.
  • Takshila was a loosely organized collection of Brahminical ashrams, with strict rules of caste-based exclusion and no institutional or communal consciousness.
  • Nalanda and other Buddhist centers functioned as monasteries (sangharama)—places for religious retreat and disputation, lacking the corporative, secular, and community-based features defining a modern university.
• He contests the NEP 2020’s ideological shortcut, which uses these myths to justify present exclusions and evade current needs.

Quote:

“I go out and say that they were anything but universities... these centers for learning, as they have been called, cannot be called universities at all.”
— Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [18:32]

4. Colonial & Postcolonial University: Politics, Caste, and the “Fear of Publics”

[21:12–29:10]

• Colonial authorities introduced public funding for higher education but were anxious about lower-caste and other marginalized publics using universities for mobility.
• This resulted in strict gatekeeping: universities became predominantly upper-caste and Hindu, practicing what Dr. Bhattacharya calls a “private life of the mind”.
• The fear of caste (in the 19th century) and the fear of religious diversity (in the early 20th) deeply marked university policy and practice.
• Nationalist reforms built upon these exclusions, fostering both a “caste unconscious” and a “communal unconscious” that continued into post-independence reforms.
• These anxieties are visible in key policy documents from the Radhakrishnan Commission onward, resulting in structural avoidance of questions of caste, class, and religion.

Quote:

“I try and show how... the immediate anxiety and the immediate fear that bursts onto the scene... is the fear of the caste marked body... the potential of higher education becoming a means of caste mobility.” — Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [24:31]

5. Postcolonial Shifts: From Welfare to Market

[29:10–35:53]

• The post-independence era substituted difficult questions of caste and religion with a liberal rhetoric of national welfare; meritocracy replaced measures for inclusion.
• From the late 1980s to the 2010s, as the logic of market reforms took over, universities began to shift responsibility for inclusion and redress from the state to philanthropy and local communities (with market and “community” acting as bailouts for what the state neglected).
• This period set the stage for the “triumphalism of the Hindu,” whose symptoms appeared before 2014.

Quote:

“The market then comes in as a savior of sorts... the decades of willful neglect of the real indices of caste and religion based differentiation become the space for the community to step in...” — Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [33:31]

6. NEP 2020 & the Rise of the “Platform University”

[37:26–51:51]

• Dr. Bhattacharya’s central critique: NEP 2020 is an “ironic” and stealthily enacted policy that platformizes the Indian university, prioritizing market volatility, modularity, and “non-knowledge” over public mission or disciplinary rigor.
• Key ironies:
  • NEP promises to increase enrollment (GER) while radically reducing the number of institutions—purportedly by clubbing colleges under a few “multidisciplinary universities” and pushing for online, app-based education.
  • The discourse shifts from universities’ role in employment to “training for citizenship,” but links this paradoxically to a Vedic Hindu past merged with a tech-driven, app-based, uncertain future.
  • NEP introduces concepts like the “Academic Bank of Credits,” allowing students to mix and match courses—often trivial or ideological—traded in a university “share market” model.
  • The older fear of “too much publicness” (lower-caste, minority or radical publics) has been replaced by a fear of intellectuality—the “private intellectual”—and an embrace of majoritarian, undifferentiated publicness.
• Dr. Bhattacharya calls this the “platform university,” likening it to an Uber-like model of education where knowledge is fragmented and commodified.

Quotes:

“The NEP 2020 is like a masterpiece of irony—it makes irony into the language of policymaking, which is quite something.”
— Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [38:41]

“The NEP actually makes a case for... the peddling or the sale and the trade of non knowledge... that is what I say is the coming in of the platform university...”
— Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [47:44]

7. The Central Idea of "Heterogeneous Publics"

[51:51–55:06]

• Dr. Bhattacharya’s conclusion urges a return to the university as a public institution, focusing on its ability to address historical exclusions and re-anchor itself in genuinely public funding and public trust—not just an aggregation of local “communities.”
• He defines “heterogeneous publics” not simply as immediate communities, but as the diverse and sometimes distrustful collective for whom the university must work, fund, and create knowledge.
• Two central tasks: ensure public funding (to maintain access) and rebuild public trust by facing, not skirting, difficult questions of historical discrimination and meritocracy.

Quote:

“The relationship that we have to look at is the relationship between the university and the publics that it addresses or the forms of public opinion that it tries to correct... we have to work past... the disconnect between the Indian university and Indian publics...”
— Dr. Debaditya Bhattacharya [52:15]

8. Upcoming Work & Contact Information

[55:23–58:15]

• Dr. Bhattacharya’s next book, expected in early 2026, will be a conceptual history of the public university globally, built around four key concepts: community, secularity, solidarity, and freedom.
• He welcomes contact and further discussion via email: devdevbhattt01@mail.com.

Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

| Timestamp | Quote & Speaker | |-----------|:---------------| | 07:32 | “Policymakers don’t really care about the teaching learning process anymore...” — Dr. Bhattacharya | | 14:24 | “What has been the Indian university’s relationship with publicness... a really fraught history...” — Dr. Bhattacharya | | 18:32 | “They were anything but universities... these centers for learning... cannot be called universities at all.” — Dr. Bhattacharya | | 24:31 | “The immediate fear... is the fear of the caste marked body... the potential of higher education becoming a means of caste mobility.” — Dr. Bhattacharya | | 33:31 | “The market then comes in as a savior of sorts... those forms of disaffection are what capital makes use of...” — Dr. Bhattacharya | | 38:41 | “The NEP 2020 is like a masterpiece of irony—it makes irony into the language of policymaking...” — Dr. Bhattacharya | | 47:44 | “The NEP actually makes a case for... the peddling or the sale and the trade of non knowledge...” — Dr. Bhattacharya | | 52:15 | “We have to work past... the disconnect between the Indian university and Indian publics...” — Dr. Bhattacharya |

Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• [01:41] — Guest introduction and academic background
• [09:26] — Defining the Indian university beyond myth and nostalgia
• [16:50] — Busting the ancient university myth
• [21:12] — Colonial and postcolonial university: caste and religious politics
• [29:40] — Postcolonial university: market, class, and avoided questions
• [37:26] — National Education Policy 2020 and the platform university
• [51:51] — Defining and reclaiming “heterogeneous publics”
• [55:23] — Forthcoming work and contact information

Final Thoughts

Dr. Bhattacharya’s work calls for critical engagement with the Indian university as a historic and sociopolitical site, challenging both the glorification of mythic origins and the complacency of status-quo policy discourse. His diagnosis of the current trend—a shift from exclusion of publics to exclusion of intellectuality itself—serves as a warning and a rallying cry for those invested in a genuinely public, inclusive, and critical university system.

For listeners interested in the intersections of education, policy, society, and democracy in India, this episode offers a thorough, lucid, and impassioned examination of the university as both an idea and an evolving institution.