Higher Education in the Indian Social Imaginary

IT IS NOW SOME 175 YEARS SINCE the British Indian government decided that the (minuscule) monies that it expended upon the provision of education for its colonial subjects would be spent only on dissemination of modern Western knowledge, rather than "Oriental" knowledges; and more than 150 years since the first universities were established to disseminate this knowledge at a higher level, in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay (now Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai).At the time that these decisions were made, and for a long time after, they were described in extraordinarily dramatic, even epochal, terms.The Pioneer, an English-owned newspaper published in Allahabad, wrote: "the experiment [of Western education] going on in India is one which, in the immensity of its scope, the gravity of the issues depending on it, and the conditions under which it has to be carried on, has had no parallel in the world's history." 1 Such effusions were not confined to the British.A contributor to the nationalist Modern Review scaled new rhetorical heights: "The English education of India!It is one of the most momentous events the world has ever seen and most difficult problems the human brain has ever faced.How to transport the learning, method, and spirit of Western Europe to Middle Eastern Asia, among a subject race . . .It is a more difficult achievement than the annihilation of time and space by modern science." 2 The sense of wide-eyed wonder that modern Western education once evoked, captured in the purple prose of these passages, has long since disappeared.Western knowledge and the institutions through which it is disseminated are now an everyday aspect of the Indian social landscape.There are many, many more such institutions: the number of universities or university-level institutions has increased, from 27 in 1950 to 564 in 2011; the number of colleges has grown from 578 to more than 31,000. 3 The last decade has seen two major government reports on education, the National Knowledge Commission Report to the Nation, 2006, which included a "Note on Higher Education," and the Report of the Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education of 2009, known as the Yash Pal Committee Report

Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Adult and Continuing Education Topics · African cultural and philosophical studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Psychology

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