The secular university in India and the discursive limits of liberalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through the process of colonization, the university has become the standard model for higher education in modern India. However, the normative status of the university and its emergence has come at the cost of deculturation of the vernacular pedagogic cultures that existed outside modern frameworks of knowledge. This is very pertinent in the case of India, where the whole paradigm of higher education has been derived from the Western model of universities, without due recognition of whether this was fit for purpose within the Indian context. Reflecting on the recent protests over the recruitment of a Muslim teacher in the Faculty of Sanskrit Vidya Dharam Vijnan at Banaras Hindu University (India), this paper examines the pitfalls in importing a ‘traditional’ discipline into the ‘modern’ university. It points to how both camps – the conservative and the liberal – foreclose the possibility of imagining ‘Dharam Vijnan’ from outside the axiomatics of the ‘modern’ university.