Ritorno a Nalanda

By the seventh century Nalanda had ten thousand students, receiving instruction not only in Buddhist philosophy and religious practice, but also in a variety of secular subjects, including languages and literatures, astronomy and other sciences, architecture and sculpture, as well as medicine and public health.

After more than seven hundred years of successful teaching, Nalanda was destroyed in the 1190s by invading armies from West Asia, which also demolished the other universities in Bihar. The first attack, it is widely believed, was led by the ruthless Turkic conqueror Bakhtiyar Khilji, whose armies devastated many cities and settlements in North India. All the teachers and monks in Nalanda were killed and much of the campus was razed to the ground. Special care was taken to demolish the beautiful statues of Buddha and other Buddhist figures that were spread across the campus. The library—a nine-story building containing thousands of manuscripts—is reputed to have burned for three days. The destruction of Nalanda took place between the establishment of Oxford in 1167 and the founding of Cambridge in 1209.

The previous coalition government, with the National Congress Party as its dominant partner, initiated the revival of Nalanda University in collaboration with the government of Bihar and the East Asia Summit. When the national government lost the general elections in the spring of 2014, it was replaced by members of a very different political alignment, with a new prime minister, Narendra Modi, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)— a part of the powerful Hindutva movement, which is dedicated to promoting India’s Hindu traditions, with Modi himself supporting not only Hindutva but also the goals of private business.

The new government and its allies have been active in trying to impose their own views on many academic institutions, and Nalanda’s academic independence has been under considerable threat over the last year. Many of the statutes concerning the governance of Nalanda that were passed by the board (as it was authorized to do) have not been acted on or even presented by the government to the Visitor of the University—the president of India—for endorsement. (All such statutes require formal government approval before they become effective.) The government tried suddenly, without any consultation with the governing board, to make radical changes in the board’s membership—a move that did not work because the proposed changes violated provisions of the Nalanda University Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 2010.

There is great anxiety about the future of higher education in India. A combination of half-baked schemes, anti-intellectualism, institutional rot and privileging ideology over pedagogy is putting universities at risk. Now Amartya Sen has made his own experience at Nalanda into an occasion to turn the international spotlight on the growing political assault on higher education, publishing on this subject in the venerable New York Review of Books, which has always acted as if there were no intellectual life if not mediated by the eastern seaboard of the US. In India, the response to Sen’s warnings about education have been distasteful in the extreme, exemplifying the pathologies of our intellectual life. We should take his warnings seriously. But there is also a danger that Sen’s luminosity can blind us to the deeper forces that have brought us to this pass. Confining our gaze on one or two individuals, or the present moment, will lead to a misleading diagnosis.

Academics are good at deconstructing everyone’s privileges but their own. Contrary to arguments being made in India at the moment, there is nothing unprecedented in the interference of this government, even in scope and scale. Every single political transformation in India has led to more interference in universities. The first waves of linguistic politics in the 1960s licensed interference and destroyed the regional universities, making them dens of parochial politics. The big movements of the 1970s made many universities ungovernable.