A question of culture

Late last month, the government of India tweaked the National Overseas Scholarships scheme for students from scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribe (ST) and landless agricultural labourer families. It excluded from its ambit the study of courses related to Indian culture, heritage, history or society in foreign universities.

The ostensible reason, according to the ministry of social justice and empowerment, is that India has a repository of “excellent universities and courses within the country on these subjects”. Resources would be “better spent”, it said, on gaining expertise in other fields in foreign universities. These “other fields” are science, technology and engineering.

Apart from the practical fact that the government was cutting it fine with this decision — applications for scholarships close on March 31 — the diktat is at once strange and revealing. For one, the sweeping excision of “Indian culture and heritage” etc, etc from the scholarship is puzzling. What, precisely, is “Indian” culture? The saffron parivar has a well-defined and unique view, of course, but not necessarily one with which many Indians would agree. Given the vibrant Persian, Chinese, Arab, African and European influences in every aspect of Indian life, including our cuisine and Bollywood, it would take a brave scholar to hazard a definition with any degree of exactitude.
 

The second problematic aspect is the ministry’s assertion that India has excellent universities and courses on the subject. There are some, to be sure.  But given the sustained downgrading of the humanities (if that’s what the government means by culture, heritage etc) in the academic curriculum from school upwards, serious academics are likely to contest the veracity of the statement on an India-wide scale. If anything, trends in this direction are deeply concerning for their inadequate academic rigour. Assertions of ancient India’s marvellous scientific prowess as demonstrated by the Sudarshan chakra (a nuclear missile) and the existence of Ganesh (early plastic surgery), that the Indus Valley was an “Aryan” civilisation (by manipulating a seal to suggest the presence of horses) or the discovery on the slimmest evidence of a “Saraswati valley civilisation” would not qualify for this description by any global academic measure.

Putting aside from these quibbles, let’s take the statement at face value. If India has such excellent academic institutions for such subjects, shouldn’t the government be extending scholarships for the study of these subjects within the country? Why should students from deprived backgrounds be excluded from partaking of these opportunities in India? Or to put it another way, why are these students being put at a disadvantage vis-à-vis those from privileged backgrounds who can afford to take up these courses in India? Equally, excluding scholars from such studies in foreign universities also privileges wealthy Indian students there. Seen from this perspective, this diktat can scarcely be construed as a move for social justice or empowerment.

It is probable that the ruling dispensation is anxious not to have youthful Indian ears sullied by divergent interpretations of literature or religion or historical events that do not conform to a saffronised template. It is the same narrow impulse that excises A K Ramanujan’s acute and absorbing study on the many kinds of Ramayana from university curricula; that encourages deranged men to throw eggs at a scholar as reputed as Wendy Doniger and certain kinds of academics to raise an online petition against Sheldon Pollock’s mentorship of the Murty Classical Library (Rohan Murty evocatively described them as members of the “peanut gallery”); or silences writers who amplify India’s many caste injustices. No surprise, then, that India adds a low rank in the Academic Freedom Index — on a par with Saudi Arabia and Libya — to its poor performance in global media freedom rankings.

But narrowing the scholarship to “technical” and “scientific” subjects also reflects limited thinking. Producing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates off a foreign or Indian assembly line doesn’t automatically transform a country’s technical prowess. The vaunted FAANGs are among the many global competitive corporations that are increasingly recognising the limitations of talent steeped in the STEM disciplines. It’s STEAM (the A being for Arts) that’s becoming all the rage, reflecting the dawning realisation that the study of the humanities encourages the kind of flexible intellectual thought that is critical to strategic thinking.

So by underwriting scholarships that exclude the study of “culture, heritage, history and society” in the many excellent international institutions staffed by renowned Indian scholars the government may fulfil a specific socio-political agenda. But in the long run, it is unlikely to promote the culture of critical thinking that is a nation’s true competitive advantage.