During a period when broad changes are reshaping the education sector in India, The Indian University: A Critical History by Debaditya Bhattacharya poses an urgent query: Who is the university actually for? It pierces promotional statements to expose a system characterized by profound inequality, political patronage, and increasing disconnection from its public mission.
Published by Orient BlackSwan, the book’s launch at Jawahar Bhawan in Delhi sparked a timely and engaging discussion on the state of higher education in India. Scholars Zoya Hasan, Simona Sawhney, and Tanika Sarkar reflected on how the book reveals the growing influence of ideology, market forces, and historical amnesia in transforming the Indian university—steering it away from its democratic and emancipatory purpose.
For Bhattacharya, the catalyst for writing the book was the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020—a global education milestone that also put India's unsettled contradictions on display.
"I wanted to go back to a self-critique of the Indian university—not a liberal desire for elite universities or a nostalgic imagination of the university," Bhattacharya explained. "I wanted us to start from an acutely self-critical sense of what I term the fraught publicness of the Indian university, and to question: what confers upon it both its Indian-ness and universitarian identity?
The writer included that he was not concerned about complex fantasies of Nalanda and Takshashila. "I illustrate by way of historical archiving, they can't really be described as university concepts at all," he explained.
Myths of the past and the present
Bhattacharya's book leads us on a panoramic tour—from ancient Indian centers of knowledge to the colonial schools and institutions, to the contemporary public university. Along the way, he explores how education in India has always been implicated in issues of power, myth, and social inequality.
Tanika Sarkar appreciated the dual critique for demolishing two long-standing myths in the book: one, the idealisation of India's ancient universities as ipso facto splendid and inevitable; and two, the presumption that those models should inform contemporary institutions.
"He (Bhatta) dispels both of these assumptions with two pieces of myth-busting which are just marvelous," Sarkar said. She pointed out how the author uncovers the limits of the ancient centres of learning and how statistical information is usually used to misleadingly project advancements in Dalit and women empowerment.
Sarkar tracked the increasing power of the RSS, which has informed the NEP with its ideological prism.
"RSS made sophisticated plans and pedagogical strategies with great caution. NEP is partially, if not significantly, determined by its outlook," she cautioned, naming curricula filled with Hindutva ideologies, such as seeing the human form from an Ayurvedic perspective.
This blending of ideology and education is part of a broader, more troubling trend. "Religious nationalism today has a dual role to play: It ties neoliberal privatisation of higher education with a dominant ethnocentric significance." This union of market rationality and ideological control, Sarkar made the case, is remaking education into both politically and economically inflexible form.
Who is the university really for
Sawhney underscored the question of inclusiveness—or the absence thereof. Indian higher education, she averred, is filled with tension between promise and performance, particularly in the case of caste, religion, and actual equity.
She contended that "merit" remains looked at as something unadulterated and untainted, safe from any attempts to redistribute power or privilege. "All these turns toward inclusivity never succeeded in undercutting the belief that something unadulterated, something removed from worldly conditions–namely, merit–was perpetually at risk of being sullied."
However, the reference to the Kothari Commission (1964–1966), a focal point of Bhattacharya's study recognized social inequalities, it stopped short of proposing serious remedies.
Sawhney added that although the Commission advocated the eventual phasing out of tuition fees at all levels, it ended up citing scarce resources to justify the prioritisation of free schooling over free higher education. Essentially, it advocated the principle but compromised on free tuition only at the school level.
Far more disturbing was the way the Kothari Commission report defined excellence. "We have to accept that pursuing excellence demands a discriminatory policy. Equal resources for all, regardless of quality and capability, only encourages mediocrity," Sawhney read out the words of the report. "Unless it possesses a highly trained and motivated educated class, a democracy cannot thrive."
She then remembered BR Ambedkar's 1947 speech to the Maratha Mandir, in which he emphasized that real change for backward classes could only be achieved by access to elite, higher education. "The Brahmin Community is able to keep itself against all odds, against all oppositions, it is because strategic positions are occupied by Brahmins.". That being my opinion, I must say that Maratha Mandir would not be doing justice to the community if it devoted its energy to the simpler task of spreading Primary education or Secondary education. The Governments of most Provinces in India have been strategizing for the expansion of Primary education and a lot of people in India are experiencing a sense of satisfaction and even gratitude. I admit that this step towards the extension of Primary education gives me the cold shivers."
Fragmentation and interference
Debaditya Bhattacharya's book is strongly critical of the approach of the NEP for reform, which the author identifies as fragmentary. Whereas the policy suggests greater public spending and a doubling of the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), it, as part of its reform plan, suggests a reduction in the number of institutions, betrays a deeper contradiction.
"Higher education policy states that universities are supposed to prepare us for endless jobs of the future. Essentially, it gets out and legitimates the gig economy and states that higher education needs to actually work and signal us into the gig economy, into an economy of job loss. And the technical name that it uses for this education is 'multidisciplinarity'," Bhattacharya said. Multidisciplinary education is actually a euphemism for multiskilling a workforce that is heading for recession, says the author.
Though Hassan concurred with Bhattacharya's criticism of NEP 2020 and increasing ideological domination, she also stood in defense of India's public universities' achievements.
None of the South Asian nations have actually succeeded in creating this framework of higher education, the public university framework. The campuses today are much more heterogeneous and inclusive compared to those of a few decades back," Hasan explained, looking back at her four decades of teaching at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
She admitted that there is a crisis but contended that it doesn't result from a defective model per se, but from "persistent political interference, chronic underfunding, and the systematic erosion of institutional autonomy."
Since 2014—and increasingly since 2019—Hasan claimed political intervention in universities has only increased. While public universities are failing, private universities now control almost 60 per cent of higher education, prioritizing technical subjects over humanities and social sciences.
Hasan dismissed the notion that India has an excess of institutions offering higher education. "The fundamental challenge of higher education in India is that we just don't have enough quality and quantity," she maintained.
For her, closing the GER gap with Europe or America will demand a large increase in public university capacity—not only in terms of numbers, but also in terms of commitment to inclusive, high-quality learning.
