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Debaditya Bhattacharya, "The Indian University: A Critical History" (Orient BlackSwan, 2025)
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B
Hello everyone. Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jadon Sir Longcomer, the host of this channel. And today I'm here with Dr. Deb Aditya Patacharya to talk about his book, the Indian A Critical History. Before we move into the discussion on the contents of the book, I would like to ask the author about himself. So Dr. Pathejarya, can you tell us something about yourself?
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C
Thank you. Thank you, Tietem Su for having me here. And so I teach literature at Jamia Millia University, Islamia University. And I have been working on what I prefer to call a historical sociology of Indian higher education. So that's been my work for about more than a decade now, for nearly one and a half decades. So I work on the idea of the university and then I try and place this entire discussion within the policy contexts of India. So that's what I work on.
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B
Yum. That's really interesting. So when it comes to this book, how did you talk about obviously your interest in the university, the Indian education system as such. But in terms of putting this together, where does this idea come from? Was it some kind of a part of some kind of project or what was it?
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C
Yeah, okay. Yeah. So there's a. There's a. There's a Long history to my coming to a critical history of being in university. And I will just very briefly chart out this kind of a trajectory that I charted that I kind of traversed from being a student and a teacher of literature to working on higher education policy. So of course, even now my day job is as a teacher of literature. But I entered the teaching profession way back in 2010, right? So as an ad hoc lecturer at one of Delhi University's colleges and the year that I entered academia, as it were, professionally, right? So while we'd been training to enter academia for a while before that. But the year I entered was also the year when something massive happened to Delhi University and around close to 80 colleges of Delhi University, which at that time admitted about 55,000 students in its undergraduate cohort, right? So in all its colleges. Now what happened at that time in Delhi University was, as I said, a structural change from what was still then the annual mode of undergrad education to the semester system. And this entire change, this entire structural overhaul of higher education in Delhi and in the, in of course, one of the premier universities of the country which admitted, as I said, a massive pool of students from across the country. So what happened at that time was something that never took into account the kind of problems that we as teachers or the students coming from different parts of the country have had to face, right? And there was this new structure which was brought into all these colleges of DU without any conversation with either the teaching workforce of which again, so There were about 9,500 teachers and a massive portion of which, about more than half of which were ad hoc teachers who were working on really exploitative four month contracts. And then there were students coming in from across the country and with completely different historical situations. So for whole whom to suddenly transition from a nine month teaching calendar to a three and a half month teaching calendar in the semester system meant that the system was no longer trying to account for the kind of historical disadvantages that students come with, right? Or the kind of historical situations that teachers were also coming with, right? And that was a major disconnect that I encountered as I entered academia or the teaching profession. That was the major kind of, that was the major disconnect that I felt was, 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. Neither are they interested in listening to what teachers have to say, nor are they interested in addressing the historical and the social situations of students, right? And that kind of forced me so to again rethink the entire scenario within which higher education systems in India work. And then of course, since then, and this is 2010, with the coming in, as I said, off the semester system, what starts is in a sense what we now call the end of, or the beginning of the end of Delhi University. And that was before, let's say, the Hindutva takeover of higher education in India. And since then, things have taken a complete downturn. Right? And of course, much of the discourse, much of the general liberal discourse around Indian higher education goes thus that we had a relatively autonomous kind of engagement with higher education till 2014 happened, but which was not the case and which is something that we had experienced in a very, very firsthand and first person way. But of course with 2014, what happened was there was a complete change in the narrativization of the needs and the policy, kind of the policy directions of higher education. And as some of us would be familiar, so the BJP government came to power with this entire demand and with this entire kind of pitch for a new education policy which finally was brought in at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, when all universities, all educational institutions of the country were shuttered. So the new education policy, which is pretty much the ground on which this book stands. So that is the contemporary conjuncture that this book begins from and returns to. And that policy came in at a time when there was not only no space for conversation, no space for institutional structures of consultation, but also this was a policy which was rammed in without any kind of parliamentary process. Right. So what I really wanted to then think about and which is part of the provocation behind writing this book, is that why do we have to bring in policy changes or structural overhauls within Indian higher education without, number one, taking into consideration or into processes of consultation, the actual people who go out and encounter the system, number one, and number two, through a tremendous process of stealth and silence. Right, so what was this need for a stealth around the bringing in of an education policy which was coming 34 years after the previous one? So what was the staring hurry? So clearly there was something at work and it is that history. Right, so that long history of higher education which has brought us to this point where it's seems that teaching learning is the least of the university's concerns. And there are other things that policymakers clearly have in mind when they think about or when they go out and plan the futures and the fortunes of higher education that brought me to writing this book.
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B
Yeah, I mean, those are some Concrete questions, and I mean very interesting ones. And this is something again, you have really expansively tried to address in the book. And we'll try to go to all of those questions one by one, whichever questions that we can actually unpack. As of now, the first one that I can bring is this idea. We should talk about this aspect or the idea of Indian university as such. And where you talk about this aspect where, okay, when we talk about Indian university as such, it's not the matter of indigenizing the university as such, but then also the question of how university can be both Indian and universitarian as such. So can you unpack this about the Indian university?
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C
Yeah, yeah, sure. So the thing is, of course, I mean, there is a way in which this formulation gets bandied around in today's times, right? And of course the general kind of nationalist jingoism around everything Indian, as you said, right. So this kind of, this kind of a rather, rather contorted desire, right? So. And a rather rather, I think the better word would be this perverted desire to kind of look at everything through the lens of indigenization, right. Is, is of course the, the immediate conjuncture within which I thought it's important to bring in this formulation and try and unpack its, its histories, right? So I, I began by asking this question whether there is, is something like an idea of the Indian university, right? So, and that is the question that I, that I actually try and pursue through the entire book, right? So does the Indian university have an idea or is it a completely loaned concept? Right. So, and, and of course, in the kind of contemporary debates and discourses around Indian universities, there are two primary kind of tendencies, right? So there are two primary desires that one can identify. One is to try and constantly go back to a myth of origins and a myth of rather pure origins, right? In the great ancient Indian universities of Takshila, Nalanda Vallabhi, Vikram, Sheila, Udantapuri lore, right? So. And the other would be a certain kind of a liberal nostalgia and hankering for the liberal metropolitan university as it came to us through colonial intervention, but of course then had a certain kind of a post colonial history of experimental institution building, right? And has had relative degrees of success at different places, right? So I wanted to basically try and take this question and see whether then, right? So the story of the Indian university has to be necessarily a story of origins or a story of relative successes, right? And if we tie it to this kind of a binary, right. Of either it being a return to the glorious past which is in itself a mythological frame or a certain kind of a nostalgia for great institutions, then probably we miss the actual question at stake, right? Which is what I just posed, which is that whether there was at all an idea of the Indian university, and I try and answer through the book that there was no idea idea of the Indian university. And what if we do not have an idea, a neat, let's say, totality of an idea, right? So a neat concept of the Indian university. What we are left with then is just the mere fact of, of the institution. We are just left with, let's say, the physical fact of the university and the physical infrastructures of institutions. So then must the story of India's universities or must the history of India, of the Indian university be necessarily a. Of let's say, central universities and state universities, the little institutions and the great institutions, the colonial example and the post colonial experiment, or the liberal university and the technical institute. So do we have to necessarily fall back into this kind of a hagiographic account of specific institutions if we do not have an idea of the Indian university that goes into its it's becoming and being. So I try and find a middle ground, right? And when I say middle ground, I don't mean a political middle ground, right? So I try and say that what really connects the Indianness of the Indian university, as you put it so well with let's say the university and character of the Indian university, is the concept of a public, right? And what I then go out and try examining, right? So it is probably the idea of, or the, or the, or the material experience of publics, right? So how is it that that the Indian university, in its historical instantiations, in its historical variations, how is it that it has attracted or repelled Indian publics? What has, what has the relationship between the Indian university and Indian public's been? And that is the question that I primarily try and probe through the book. 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, right? And that is what I wanted to probe in trying to understand how the Indian university could be investigated or examined as a creature of history and not just as a creature of a mythological imagining or a certain kind of a nostalgic lament. Yeah, yum.
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B
You, you have just mentioned this and you mentioned about this idea of, you know, ancient universities, its greatness and all, and you kind of argue that you know, it, it is an ideological shortcut that obscures the present need and exclusions as such. Can you unpack this a little bit more? Yeah.
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C
Ah, yes. So that is what the first chapter of the book is all about, right? Where I actually get into some deep plumbing of the historical archives around these institutions that are today bandied, right? And if you look at the NEP 2020, the National Education Policy 2020, which I began by referring to as the immediate context from which I return to this historical examination of the Indian university, you will see that the NEP 2020 waxes eloquent about these great ancient Indian universities and which comes with a certain kind of a claim to priority, which comes with a claim to purity, as if we've had been, we've had the university before anyone else could, could ever lay claim to it, right? So I try and go back to the history, to the actual historical archives around these, these universities, right? What, what have been called universities to Basically dis. Dispel the argument that they were universities, right? I go out and say that they were anything but universities, right? I try and look at references of Takshila from the Jatakas. I look at how Nalanda has been spoken of in the travel accounts of, let's say I Sing or Huan Song, right? And try and look at how these centers for learning, as they have been called, cannot be called universities at all, right? So Takshila, if anything, was just a center, so it was just, let's say, what one can call a network of ashram settlements and which were largely brahminical ashram settlements, which again, had certain codes of access, which had some explicit rules of entry, and where specifically the Chandal caste castes, right? So the low castes were not allowed, right? And these were largely, as I said, right? It was largely a concentration of ashram settlements, right? So around individual teachers with no cooperative consciousness of being an institution, and which is what makes the modern idea of the university, right? So that there has to be the consciousness of a community, right? And that consciousness of the being a community in conversation, right? Which is what is often called a corporative consciousness, right? So that is something that you don't find in any of these institutions. Nalanda, on the other hand, was of course, a Buddhist site of disputation, but of religious disputation. But if one again goes into the history of Nalanda, one realizes and which is true of the other Buddhist centers as well, right? So Vallabh bhi, Vikram, Sheila as well. And which is also stuff that I try and look at in the first chapter, one gets to realize that these were really monasteries and not just monasteries, they were. They were primarily Sangharamas, right? So which is where the Buddhist Sangha, right, would come and retire, right? So they would come and kind of. They would kind of rest, right? So these were resting places during the monsoon season, right? So they were basically rain retreat, right? Where the Sangha would come and engage or indulge in Aram. And because the Buddhist Sangha, right? So to. To, during certain parts of the year, would retreat into these monasteries, right? So obviously there were. There were moments and encounters, right? So that were happening between the Buddhist monks, right? So which were of course, around religious forms of disputation and which have then been, in fact, far later kind of histories which have been given the shape or the form of a university, which it never had, right? So that is the argument that I actually try and lay out through the first chapter where I go into these historical archives and try and bust the myth of these great ancient centers of learning being universities, which I go out and say they will not.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And when we look at India, obviously the idea of university education is very much influenced by colonialism. And here York talks about this idea of education being a political technology as such. And you also try to unpack these problems within the post colonial reforms in education as such. And so can you unpack this little bit more for us? Yeah.
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C
Right. Okay. So that's what I try and do when I name the project as a critical history. Right. So, so, and why do I not call it just a history of the Indian university is also precisely the answer to, to the question that you just posed. Right. So, so the reason why I call it a critical history is because I think the university has to be made into a site of its own critique and which is how I try and work this book out. Right. So how is it that we're. That one can actually come to the ground or the fact of the university while also engaging in a, in a critical or a reflexive look at its own pasts and its own histories, Right. So if, as I said, there is no idea of an Indian university to begin with, then what we are left with is the fact of the Indian university. And one has to enter the fact or the physical kind of infrastructure of the Indian university with the desire to then probe. Right. The, the, the recesses. Right. Of thought. Right. So to probe the, the kind of historical transformations that this physical fact of the Indian university has undergone and which is what I tried doing from colonial to post colonial times. Right? So where again, the primary prism through which I look at this history, in trying to call it or in trying to work out a method for critical history, is the publicness of the Indian university. Now I try and show that with, of course, in the second chapter, I take up the period of the long 19th century, right? So from the 1813amendment to the Company Act. Right. So to 1904, which is when the Indian Universities act is brought into force and which is what sets up universities as residential teaching institutions through the long 19th century. Right. When we see the colonial government. Right. When we see, as a matter of colonial policy, there is an attempt to try and set aside public monies for higher education, there's a tremendous amount of anxiety about who these publics are that will enter the space of the university with the state funding of higher education. Right? And that entire debate through the 19th century, I try and show happens around the fear of a certain caste insurrection of the Indian of Within the Indian University, I try and show how with the, as I said, with the institution of a certain logic of public funding, right? With the institution or with the setting aside of, of public money or public monies for higher education, the immediate anxiety and the immediate fear that bursts onto the scene of the, the, the physical site of the Indian university is the fear of the caste marked body, right? So is, is the potential of higher education becoming a means of caste mobility. So we see through the long, yeah, through the long 19th century, one sees that with, on the one hand, public financing, the real fear lies in the entry of unwanted publics, right? So cast marked publics within the Indian university and which then turns by, around the turn of the 20th century, we see that, that what happens as a result because of the fear of publicness, because of the fear of the caste marked public, right? So what we see the Indian University actually transforming into is a site of a private life of the mind, right? Where the Indian University by the early 20th century becomes a site of private intellectual adventure, right? And of course a private intellectual adventure that can primarily be engaged in or indulged in by the, the upper caste Hindu folks, right? So, so, and that then becomes the cause of another kind of anxiety of publicness, and which is what I chart through the later period of anti colonial nationalism in India through the early decades of the 20th century, leading to Indian independence in 1947. I survey that entire period to again track the anxieties that one sees now, having dealt with the question of, of caste and having successfully kind of having successfully eliminated, right? So the threat of the low caste body, right? So now the site of threat and anxiety becomes the question of religion, right? And it is with a certain kind of a mobilization of what I call a seva, right? So a certain kind of a service disposition, right? So which is what then we see the RSS making use of, right? But the seva ethic was not something that was invented by the rss, right? It was not something that was invented by the Hindutva. It actually has its roots in the Swadeshi moment, right? So in the moment of Swadeshi and boycott, right? So of colonial institutions and this kind of a desire to consecrate the private life of the intellectual to the service of the nation and the entire rubric through which this kind of a consecration of the private life of the mind to the service of the nation is happening is through what I call the rubric of religion. There is a threat and the threat that is being therefore kind of lived away from or the threat that is being constantly neutralized through the seva ethic is an alternative communistic imagination of the mass or the public, right? So, and that is the fear that then creates what, what I call a certain communal unconscious for the university in the early 20th century. And then I go out and survey post colonial policy documents and policy experimentation in the life of the Indian university. And I go out and say that it is both the caste unconscious as well as the communal unconscious, right. Which had already been ingrained. The life of the Indian university through the colonial period is what gets successively reinstated, of course, at different levels and in different degrees through the post colonial history of Indian higher education, right. So I look at different commission commissions and the reports of different committees, right. From the Radhakrishnan Commission all the way down to the second national policy on education, right. And try and understand how the fear of the public that we had seen both measured in terms of caste as well as religion, right. So how that fear of publicness is something that gets reformulated and reinstated in the history of the post colonial university as well, till we of course come to the contemporary moment in the national education policy, which is when I go out and contend in the book, something completely different happens.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And I actually want to unpack the post colonial aspect that you talk about a little bit more because you also argued that there's this aspect of class and caste hierarchy that in the post colonial time which was not directly addressed as such, but then it was addressed to this idea of the ideological aspect of excellence of universities as such or institutions in that sense. Can you unpack like that aspect a little bit more?
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C
Yeah, yeah, okay. Yes. So I, that's, that's again, the, the fourth and the fifth chapters, right. Of the book actually try and, and make this argument about what happens through the postcolonial period of Indian higher education, where in the fourth chapter I look at the immediate post independence period, right? So from 1947 to 1986, which is the year of, of the coming into being of the second national policy on education, right. And in the fifth chapter I look at the period from 1986 to 2012, right. Which is what then leads to, let's say, the kind of stage for a triumphalism of the Hindu, right. So by 2012, the symptoms of it are already quite there. Now I try and say, which is, is part of the kind of narrative that I'm setting up in the second part of this book and particularly through the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters, I try and say that what I called the feudal unconscious and the communal unconscious of the colonial university, right? So measured along its fears of questions around caste and religion are what then get recoded, right? So through policy experiments in the post independence period, right? Where I look at the Radhakrishnan Commission report, I look at the Kothari Commission's report, I look at the 1986 moment and I look at all of this in the context of what is happening in the field of politics as such, what is happening in terms of, let's say, the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s, early 1970s, leading onto again what we call the Navnirman Andolan and the Sampuna Kranti Andolan, right? And the emergency. So I try and look at the political economy of Indian higher education, Educational policymaking Tree of India and try and say that what in the immediate post independence years one sees happening is that through a welfare ideology, through a certain idea of national welfare, right? So there is a deliberate attempt at trying to also skirt past the questions of caste and religion, right? So these are questions that are not addressed, right? So in any substantive sense by any of the policy instruments that one sees in the first 40 years of India's independence, right? So, and that is what I try and then bust about this, this liberal idea of welfarism, which is what I see, go out and say, uses the rubric of class to skirt past the difficult questions of caste and religion which had already been coded into, let's say, the history of the colonial university for about one and a half centuries before that, right? So the exact fear of the public that we had seen, right? So coming to haunt the body and the life of the Indian university through the 19th and the early 20th centuries is what we see being skirted past, being escaped from in the first 40 years. And then I go out and look at how between 1986 and 2012, right, in almost the span of three decades, right around the turn of the millennium, what is happening is again something very interesting, right? So there's what we in popular terms call a transition from the logic of national welfare to the logic of the market. And I'm going out showing through an examination of higher educational policy that the market then comes in as a savior of sorts of. Right. So the decades of disconnect or the decades of willful neglect, right, of the real indices of caste and religion based differentiation within the life of the university and within therefore histories of merit, right? Those discontents, right, those forms of disaffection are what capital makes use of, by peddling capital, right? By peddling the market, as it were, as the point of correction. By peddling the market as a site of redressal, of decades of discrimination and decades of willful structural neglect. Right. Of questions of caste and religion. So I try and look at how the market comes in precisely as, as an equalizer of sorts, right? And that is what one sees through those nearly three decades, that the market is almost kind of being peddled as a promise of, of redressal, right? From historical injustice, right? Where it's goes out and becomes then, right? So the responsibility of number one, let's say the philanthropy of local communities and which is what, what, what I chart the history of, right? So how the community becomes the bailout mechanism for the state. So what has been neglected by the state structurally and historically becomes the space for the community to step in and address the, the differential histories of merit and achievement or competence, right? So in the life of the Indian university. So I, I, I basically try and look at that transition from an ideology of national welfare to the rule of the market as precisely making use of what I had already diagnosed as the pathology of a feudal and a communal unconscious in the life of the colonial university.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
- [36:15]
C
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B
I remember it was just about when I, you know, got admitted to PhD that a new education policy came into. And then I remember going through there, reading that people are arguing, discussing about that and all. And so here we come to your chapter on new education policy which you call Ask the Age of Platform University as such. And obviously the idea of education and university as such is something, as you clearly pointed out, is something which is continuously being should be debated about and is debatable as such. And for the listeners here, obviously many people wouldn't know what the Indian new education policy is all about. But also you kind of argue here that, you know, the new education policy prepares students for what is called as the KIK economy, which compromises the disciplinary rigor and public mission sacrifice to market volatility in that sense. So can you unpack this idea of new education policy as such and in relation to your argument a little bit more? Yes.
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C
Ah, okay. I mean that's pretty much my favorite site, right? And that's, you would have already guessed that that is pretty much the, the stage from which I embark on this journey. This, this historical examination of the non existent idea of Indian University and therefore its, its transformations. Right? So, so and I thought that the NEP 2020 is, is indeed the most real and the most kind of lived fact of our lives today. And therefore one must really try and unpack the mysteries of the NEP as it were, right. Or the slights performed by the NEP 2020. So just to kind of give you a sense, as you said, right, so give our listeners a sense of what this NEP2020 does. I keep saying that the NEP 2020 is like a masterpiece of irony, right? It works with it. And I go out and say this all the time, that it makes irony into the language of policymaking, which is quite something. Right? So now what do I mean by making irony into the language of policymaking? So if one goes into the text of the National Education Policy 2020, which is something that of course the, the current ruling party BJP had come to power on the promises, right? So a part of the BJP's campaign before it actually came to power in 2014 was also around the need for a new education policy. And soon after it came to power in 2014, in within a year's time, it set up a committee, right? So to come to draft a new education policy, the committee was called the Subramaniam Committee and it submitted a report, right. Which was to then become the template for coming up up with a new educational policy framework. And the committee submitted that report in 2016, but which did not go down very well with the government, right? So which is again quite an interesting thing that in 2016, after having spent quite some resources and quite some time talking about the, the arrival of a new education policy, the report that is submitted by the committee that was tasked with this policy framework was completely junked. So it was dismissed and it was thrown into the bin, right? And then the government comes up with a new committee in 2017. So there's another committee which is set up by, headed by somebody, a space scientist called Kasturi Rangan and which then goes out and engages in nearly one and a half years of, of policymaking labor and submits a report in 2018, in December 2018. Now December 2018 was just about four months before the general elections of 2019. And the ruling party BJP was at that time really on unsure ground. They were really uncertain about which way the elections are going to go. So what they did was and they did not want to play with the sentiments of people around an issue like education which would and mobilize the fortunes and futures of education for the next two decades. So they just completely sat silent on the report of the Kasturi Rangan committee for the next few months till the Modi government was sworn in with a brute majority in May 2019. And within almost a week of the new governments coming to power. So this new committee report was unveiled, right? And it was unveiled as a draft national education policy of 484 pages. And then the pandemic struck, as we all know, right? So and in the middle and at the peak of the pandemic, right, without any kind of a charade of a parliamentary discussion, right? So BJP anyway had a brute majority in parliament. But even without going through the charade or the illusion of a parliamentary process, right? So they brought in the new national education policy, right? So in 2020, without any kind of public debate, without any consultation with the actual stakeholders as we call them. And that was what really made me try and think about what is it. So that requires this kind of a stealthy kind of determination of the long term futures of education in the country. And as I said, when one goes into the policy document, there are all these iron that stare at you, right? So that literally kind of stared into one's faces. One's face. And let me just give you a few examples. The first is for example, this new education policy goes out and says that we have to increase the enrollment ratio and its favored kind of obsession with what is called the ger, the gross enrollment ratio, which basically is a measure of the number of youth within the 18 to 23 age group, right, enrolled in higher education. So it goes out and says that we are going to double the number of enrollments in Indian higher education while quartering the number of institutions for higher education. So we will increase the GER from what was then 26.3 to 50 in the next two decades is what the NEP2020 says. But we will slash the number of institutions from what was 52,000 at that point of time to what the NEP gives an arithmetic of, which is 12,300. Now how do you manage that? How do you reduce the number of institutions to 1/4 and increase the number of enrollments to double, right? Then this new national Education policy goes out and says that the purpose of, of higher education now is no longer about employment now, which was a completely new conjuncture, right? So in the history of neoliberal policymaking, right, coming from, as I said, the rule of the market and the logic of the market, where all higher education or all education had to come with an economic justification, where all higher education was finally about bolstering the employment prospects and employability of student learners, right? So suddenly here is a policy which comes out and says that, that employment is only a byproduct, right? And what we really want to train students into is the practice of citizenship. Now. Now what is this practice of citizenship? And that is what requires us to kind of pour a little longer and deeper right, over the text of the policy which then goes out and says that the purpose of Indian higher education has to be to return to the glorious Vedic Hindu past on the one hand, right? And to also then make the glorious Vedic Hindu past become the stage for the fourth Industrial revolution, right? So it is this kind of a forceful welding of the liberal and let's say the neoliberal, as it were, that then becomes the, the reigning rationale, right, of this kind of higher education as a site of citizenship training. Now I go out and look at these contradictions, right? So look at these ironies that actually overlay the document of the NEP 2020 to make a larger argument. And that larger argument is that while through the rest of the Indian university's history, beginning with the colonial institution of the modern university, as it were, all the way down to, let's say, the neoliberal university, right? So which is what I discussed in the fifth chapter, all the way up to 2012, right? So through this entire period one saw really is a certain fear of publicness, as I said, right? So there was a certain fear of publics, right? And therefore a range retreat into the private life of the mind, right? Into the virtues of private intellectuality, into a certain kind of a disinterested attitude towards knowledge, right? And which could then become the ground for private intellectual pursuit. Now what we see with the NEP 2020 is something very interesting where the fear no longer is in publicness because the publics have been already kind of exercised right from the body of the Indian university, right? And there has to be a complete re engineering of the Indian university now in its Hindutva variation, right to the general will of the public, right to a certain populist notion of the public, right to a certain majoritarian imagination of publicness. So the fear actually is no longer of publicness, which is what we had seen happening through centuries before that. But the fear now is of the private intellectual, right? So, so, and therefore what the NEP actually makes a case for is, is interestingly around the fear of intellectuality as a private virtue, right? So where even at the private level, right? So the practice or the pursuit of knowledge itself become, and therefore what the university must now become the stage for is what I call the peddling or the sale and the trade of non knowledge, right? So, and which is what the NEP calls multidisciplinary education, right? So, so where you have, right up an entire bar basket of absolutely trivialized, right, absolutely nonsensical courses like the Art of Being Happy or the Science of Happiness or let's say a course on Fit India or a course on Swachh Bharat, right? And that has to be made the basis and the ground for university education. So where knowledge is as even a private virtue, as even a goal of private pursuit, so it becomes irrelevant to the life of the university. And that is what I say is the coming in of the platform university, right? Where you have something called the Academic bank of credit and the UGC's regulations. The UGC is the regulator, is the national regulator of Indian higher education. It, it is the full form of which the University Grants Commission, the UGC has a set of regulations about the Academic bank of Credit which goes out and says that now only 50% of the credit worth of an entire course is to be earned by a student from the institution of enrollment. The remaining 50% can be purchased online from let's say a stock market, a share market, so of the country's universities where you can purchase a course from any university anywhere, right? So a course on science of happiness and a course on, let's say cultural literacy or emotional learning and a course on Vedic mathematics, right? And then bring it all together so it all, it becomes about trading differential shares, right? So all of differential worth and value, right. On the platform of Indian university systems. So that is when I go out and say what the NEP does is that it platformizes the Indian university and makes it all about what I use the reference of David Theo Goldberg. So there is what we now see in Indian higher education a certain kind of uberization, right? Where it is all about finally an act. The university is now an app where you can just purchase little tradable derivatives from. And these derivatives are actually bundles of non knowledge which, which go out and assure you that the future is anyway unknowable and uncertain. So the best way of hedging against the risks of an unknowable future is not through knowledge, but through non knowledge. So, so you have to basically purchase non knowledge and hedge against the infirmities of an unknowable future. That is the logic of derivatives trading as a risk management model within what one can call the platform economy.
- [52:05]
B
Yeah, I mean this has been a very wonderful conversation, many very interesting ideas. And as we come to the end of this conversation, I would like you to explain in short your central idea of heterogeneous publics. To actually put it in short, the whole argument.
- [52:24]
C
Yes, Right. Okay. So what I mean by heterogeneous publics is not the immediate, let's say local public, Right? And we know that being in university, as I, I went on to explain, has always had a fairly difficult relationship with the immediate community. Right. And that's not what I'm arguing for. I'm basically trying to say that if one has to regard the Indian university as a creature of history, then 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. Right. And that relationship, which I claim is a very, very difficult and a fraught relationship, is what we have to come to terms with and we have to work with. Right? So histories of public distrust of the Indian university and which is what we see today. Right. So, so, and we have to work with these histories of, of public distrust and try and figure out ways in which the Indian university can still be tethered to, number one, the question of the publicness of funding, on the one hand, Right. So that the Indian university can only survive if it is public funded and therefore can provide access to publics who have been excluded from higher education. And number two, Right, So if it were to go out and address these forms of historical discrimination that have happened in the name of what is called meritocracy. Right. So in the name of this kind of entire jubilation over merit and private intellectuality. So we have to work past, in a sense. Right, so the. The disconnect between the Indian university and Indian publics by, number one, questioning the groundwork for publicness in funding on the one hand, and number two, in public trust. Right. So how does one navigate that distance? Right. So that we are increasingly witnessing in the space of the Indian university, where on the one hand, the Indian university is increasingly being tied to a loan economy and therefore being pushed away from the public, from the policy priorities of public revenue and public financing. And on the other hand, we have. Right, so a majoritarian populist will. Right, so taking over the Indian university. So how does one move past these two dangers and address the question of publicness?
- [55:18]
B
Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. In closing this discussion, I would like to ask you, what is the current project or what's the current thing that you are actually working on? And if anyone wants to reach out to you regarding your book or any questions that they have regarding your work, how do they reach out to you?
- [55:36]
C
Yeah. Oh, okay. So my current work is another monograph which I've just. I mean, which I've completed and which is currently in the production stage and it should be out in early next. Early 2026. Right. So which is again, a conceptual history of the. Of. Of the university and not the Indian university this time. Right. Where I do a conceptual history, again, of what I call the publicness of the public university by taking four different concepts of publicness. Right. So. And these four different concepts or registers that I look into the histories of would be, number one, community, number two, secularity, number three, solidarity, and number four, freedom. So I try and look at the university's history or the university's relationship with community, secularity, solidarity and freedom, and try and come up with what I call a manifesto for the public university. So the name of the monograph is Making Sense of the University, A Manifesto for Our Times. So where, again, as I said, right, I'm doing a conceptual history by, of course, taking certain vignettes from the recent political history of Indian universities. So beginning with the anti CAA protests, so the anti citizenship amendment protests that happened in 2019, early 2020, all the way down to the hijab ban in Karnataka and the Karnataka High Court judgment, or let's say the entire kind of moment around sedition and the kind of slapping of sedition charges on university students. So I take all these kinds of instances also the murder of Rohit Vemila and the institutional murder of Rohit Vemila, the suicides, right. So that we've seen of Dalit and Adivasi students across Indian institutions. So I take these different kinds of moments from the recent political history of India to again come up with a theory of, of the publicness of the university. Right. And through these four concepts. So that's the current work that I'm doing. And I structure it into a manifesto, as it were. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, I'm happy to engage. And this is, as you can understand, this has been my work for about one and a half decades. So you can reach out to me on my email and my email id is dev dave, but b h a double t01mail.com. So anybody is free to just reach out to me and I would be glad to have conversations.
- [58:28]
B
Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Deb Aditya, for this wonderful conversation. And I'm sure the listeners will be enriched by your insights. And I also encourage the listeners to actually get hold of the book and to actually go deep into the discussions that are there in terms of the conceptual and historical aspect of the idea of Indian university and how you unpack the idea of publics. So thank you very much for being here at New Books Network. Thank you very much.
- [58:55]
C
Thank you. Thank you for having me here. Yo, this is important, man. My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I.
- [59:15]
A
Think they're pace breakers, the ones with all the pockets.
- [59:18]
C
Well, I just got back from vacation and I think I left them in my hotel room.
- [59:22]
A
And dude, I need to replace these shorts. I wear them like every day with.
- [59:26]
C
That Lulu hoodie you got me. Could you send me the link to where you got them? Thanks, bro. Talk soon. Looking for your newest go to's shop.
- [59:33]
A
Lululemon's best sellers now@lululemon.com.