With universities constantly under the scanner, two books on what ails our campuses and why students are so angry

A modern university can flourish only under a modernising government within a society that supports modernisation. In contrast, what the British Raj did, and what most of our own governments continued to do, was to try to build modern universities within an overwhelmingly traditionalist society.

The effort was countercultural: till recently, our universities have been state-sanctioned and state-supported engines to modernise Indian society. The year 2014 marks the revenge of that part of traditional Indian society which is infuriated by modernity and wants to aggressively perhaps reverse whatever national modernisation has taken place.

For that purpose, anti-modernisers employ marauding bands of hired goons for physical attacks, and use nods, winks and none-too-veiled threats to try to intimidate the average person.

Then, apparatchiks are appointed to top positions — whether as culture secretaries, heads of institutions like the Film and Television Institute of India and Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and Vice-Chancellors of our universities. The rot has now spread so far as to affect not only the appointment of faculty but even the selection of students.

The attacks of anti-modernisers range from the reduction of budgets for higher education, to the criminalisation of debate and creativity, and the increasing bureaucratisation of higher education. Book bans, curbs on seminars, and the imposition of intervening structures of surveillance through which everyday academic work must be produced, continuously bleed the energy of our universities.

Propaganda centres

Will the attacks of the modernisers succeed? Perhaps so, fear the 18 outstanding authors whose essays are included in The Idea of a University, edited by Apoorvanand.

But these authors are also cautiously hopeful that the whole of Indian society, having had at least some of the real benefits of modernisation, will not want to decline into the merely imaginary benefits of a past dreamed up by those propagating Hindutva. Our public universities are in the process of being converted into party propaganda centres — as in Iran and North Korea. The assaults have not been confined to universities, but have been directed against all modernising institutions, ranging from the media to the judiciary.

However, assaults on other institutions are much less damaging to the country — because it is universities that curate and communicate the best of the past, as well as develop in young minds the abilities which create a nation’s future. This involves not merely giving young people the skills required by national and global capital but, much more importantly, the nurturing of values, discernment, nuance, creativity, citizenship, a sense of perspective, and a love for lifelong learning.

Students not only put their skills and abilities at the service of companies and governments, they also launched important national initiatives.

In the 1960s, students dropped out of St. Stephen’s College (Delhi) and Presidency College (Calcutta) to join the extra-parliamentary struggles to support the landless labourers. In Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, students created massive anti-Hindi and anti-price rise agitations that challenged policies and toppled governments.

In the 1980s, students led or collaborated with regional movements in Assam and Punjab. Students provided cadres for the Jayaprakash Narayan-led movement in 1974–75 for decentralisation, honest government, and a more just society.

However, it is also true that Indian student politics has often been partisan and factional.

In the 1980s, Sanjay Gandhi’s mobilisation of educated and ambitious but frustrated youth into the Youth Congress produced student groups more interested in rising to power through unprincipled means than agitating for a better and more just society.

All that was a generation or more ago. So when Gaurav Pathania encountered the intense movement for Telangana’s statehood, he felt impelled to research it, resulting in The University as a Site of Resistance, the very first detailed account of the Telangana Student Movement in English.

The Telangana stir

The outcome of a year of fieldwork in Hyderabad by an outsider (a north Indian), it is an examination of the contribution of an institution (Osmania University) to the movement. The book explores the everyday life of activists on campus: how did activists deal with the issues and problems of the Telangana movement? Why are cultural identities the basis of Indian politics? How did the demand for Telangana statehood succeed?

The book argues that the Telangana movement is a new cultural or social movement, not merely a political one. Social movements require material and cultural resources to be able to raise consciousness and to represent it. What student activists gained from joining an institution of higher education was access to cultural capital, and specifically to cultural resources unique to their own identity.

By looking at the struggle for Telangana in the light of university activism not only in the whole of India but also around the world, Pathania’s book provides a perceptive, thorough and thought-provoking analysis that effectively complements Apoorvanand’s bouquet of essays.

The Idea of a University; Edited by Apoorvanand, Context, Westland, ₹699.

The University as a Site of Resistance; Gaurav Pathania, Oxford University Press, ₹895.