College: Pathways of Possibility

By Saikat Majumdar

What are the avenues of postsecondary educational experience available to the student in India today?

Can college education be tailored to one's specific talents and meaningful to the world at the same time?

Is there indeed such a thing as native intelligence? What is the ideal education to bring such intelligences to life?

What are the possible curricular relationships between the arts and the sciences; the qualitative and the quantitative, the theoretical and the experiential?

How deeply should a college education be rooted in a discipline? Should one cultivate one disciplinary strength or multiple ones?

What is more valued by employers - depth or range?

College provides accessible answers to these questions that will resonate with students with a wide range of life aspirations. It is an erudite and interesting guide to the possibilities contained in the rapidly changing realm of higher education today.

It is essential reading for current and future college students, their parents, educators and anybody interested in the rich potential in the terrain of post secondary education in post-millennial India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9789387146037

Saikat Majumdar

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. He is the author of a monograph, Prose of the World (2013) and five novels, including The Firebird/Play House (2015/2017), and The Remains of the Body (2024); and the co-editor of The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury, 2019).

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Acknowledgements

The Clerical

College Street in Calcutta is a real place, but it is also something of a myth. The cradle of the 19th-century Bengal Renaissance, it runs past the historic Presidency College (now University) and the University of Calcutta, along with a cluster of other institutions that came together to craft the personality of modern Bengal. The neighbourhood is home to the legendary ‘Indian Coffee House’, which has played the role of a smoke-filled salon to countless poetic and political revolutions. Its heart is occupied by a large stretch of grassy urban idyll, College Square, which has seen much Naxalite violence in its day and has played happy romping ground to some of Bengal’s most famous literary and cinematic characters.

But the most visible marker of College Street is the dense cluster of makeshift wooden stalls that fringe its pavements. These are similar to those found elsewhere in the city. Along with the eternal cacophony of political protest, the most persistent voices of the city belong to its army of hawkers and vendors, a great screaming and scheming, pleading and preying tribe. This is a city where T-shirts might come flying through the air and land on unsuspecting tourists quickly conned into haggling matches over things they never wanted. But instead of T-shirts or sunglasses or underground merchandise, the College Street stalls specialise in books. As you try to slide past them, the vendors beg and beckon and coax, and volumes are thrust at your face with great pleading cries. But while it has been like this for decades, the kinds of books you see here have changed drastically over the years. Even in the late-1990s, you would have faced Proust, Borges or Neruda, much the way counterfeit Polo T-shirts might be thrust at you elsewhere in the city. Depending on how you looked, stared and strolled (because the College Street booksellers are sharp, preying anthropologists) it could be more exotic stuff like Robert M Pirsig or Herbert Marcuse. The steady supply of foreign tourists in Calcutta and their habit of off-loading paperbacks by the kilo at second-hand bookshops always ensures the strangest volumes to show up at unlikely places.

Fast forward to the new millennium. Suddenly, all that comes flying at you at lightning speed are coaching manuals and test prep volumes promising to crack the codes for success in the modern world—entrance exams for engineering, medicine and management schools, or the prerequisites for entering American universities: the GRE, GMAT and SAT.

Few things record the drastic change in the self-fashioning of young India as the seismic shift in the book-scape of College Street. If you still possess remembrance of the past things such as Proust, these days you simply order them online. But even back in the days when we roamed around in these streets as high-school and college students, the College Street bookstalls carried deep and ominous hints that across the arc of Indian educational history, the literary-aesthetic and the competitive-professional have not been as indifferent to each other as one might think.

For while we, English literature students, bought our volumes of Keats and Byron in College Street, we also made pilgrimages there in search of books of a less poetic nature: bundles of University of Calcutta exam scripts, anthologised over several decades. This was because our entire undergraduate grades depended on how well we did in a series of three-hour examinations held over a couple of two-week periods during the three-year course. If your college wasn’t particular about attendance, you could be fishing in Alaska for the rest of the time, or for that matter, hold down a full-time job in Bombay.

The life-saving academic skill was the ability to second-guess the examiners. Would that question on Conrad’s prose style show up this year? What about the one on symbolism in Yeats? It was wise to discount the questions that had been set the previous year, as we were assured that the authorities did not like to repeat questions in successive years. So questions from odd-and even-numbered years did not mingle in the same question set. Since our English BA Part I was to be held in an odd-numbered year, I zealously prepared the answer to a question on the tragic structure of J M Synge’s Riders to the Sea that had first appeared, with the exact same wording in an odd-numbered year from British-ruled India.

Many college students in India today will still have no trouble recognising this picture. And if this mechanical approach seems particularly ironical with a subject like English literature, it is not much of a surprise given the history of the modern Indian university.

***

Let’s swing to a different scene, in the city of Kota in the north-western state of Rajasthan.

This picture comes from an article on Quartz.com that went viral in India a couple of years ago. It was piece of recollection by Alankar Jain, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Jain recalls his teenage years that were devoted to the fevered dream of cracking the IIT entrance test that, for many, unlocked the passage to a platinum future. It’s really a long elegy for a life lost, in the pursuit of a career dream that once attained, turned out to be something of a dampener for him. The most intense years of this psychedelic dream-nightmare were spent in Kota, which has gathered the glum reputation of the national capital of private coaching to ace the IIT entrance tests.

In a dark and clammy rented room in Kota, Jain met a spine-chilling graffiti carved on the wall by a previous occupant:

‘I spent my worst years in this room. It’s your turn now.’

The essay—‘I sacrificed my health and teenage to study at the IITs—but was it worth it?’—is a bruised and poignant act of mourning. It mourns the disappearance of some of the most sensuous, warm and sunlit years of one’s life into the dungeons of IIT-exam coaching, the dark and breathless rooms where one toiled away for the tests, and the epidemic obsession with the IITs that in his life, translated into a tepid and unfulfilling career.

This is an extreme picture. As with all extreme pictures, it presents a version of the truth, but a distorted, paralysed, epileptic one with its jaws cracked in a grimace.

But let’s get real. If you are an ambitious high school student in India today, what are the odds that the general stream of education—that which gets you a B.A. or a B.Sc. degree—sparks your fire? It’s far likelier that for you as well as for your parents, success and fulfilment belong to professional education, most likely engineering or medicine. Art-science education in the general stream feels like a sad backup, good only for those not smart enough to be chosen for the professions right out of high school.

How did this happen? The Indian Institutes of Technology, the fabled IITs, are no doubt outstanding institutions—some of the founding pillars of Jawaharlal Nehru’s dream of a technologically literate and developed nation. But shouldn’t the best of the art-science colleges also have a similar claim? But no matter what their historic prestige or social capital, the prospect of reading for an honours degree in St Stephen’s in Delhi or Presidency in Calcutta does not quite come close to a seat in one of the coveted IITs. The alumni list of, say, St Stephen’s, or that of the much older Presidency reads like a Who’s Who of modern India. Their achievements are certainly in no way less impressive than the striking success attained by the IITians, as chronicled in the wonderful book of that name by Sandipan Deb, sometimes in a wide range of fields that had little relation to their respective engineering specialization. And yet, the comparative appeal of art-science and professional education is quite beyond dispute in India today.

It’s easy to say that professional education, especially in influential and lucrative fields like engineering, medicine, and law, will always win over education which is merely rooted in the disciplines and not linked to professions. Before we jump to that conclusion, let’s look around a bit. We can imagine a similar scenario in the United States. Getting into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the fabled MIT—is an incredibly cool affair, and yet, would anyone claim that it is way ahead of a seat at Princeton or Yale? Or even if you leave aside the major universities with their global research reputations, studying at the top-tier liberal arts colleges, such as Williams, Kenyon or Wellesley, are also pretty cool affairs, and I would say, hold out on their own against a shot at being at Caltech or MIT. The social capital of ‘posh’ private colleges has something to do with this, but then again, why does the social capital of being in what should have been similar colleges in India—be it St Stephen’s in Delhi or St Xavier’s in Bombay or Calcutta—fade fast before a place in IIT in suburban Kharagpur?

There are some culturally encoded reasons behind the Indian fascination with engineering, and especially with the IITs, and a host of reasons to do with the dream of personal and collective development in a postcolonial nation. I will return to some of these later in this book. But my immediate question explores the other side: why has basic art-science education fallen to this state of un-glamour and, dare I say, un-desirability in India?

Is it impossible to imagine education today without it being linked to a particular profession? Or does it have something to do with the state of our universities—something that is in turn rooted in their longer histories?

In this book, I spend some time trying to answer this question. But my real goal is to find some new avenues for art-science education in India today. On the way, here are the key questions: What is the best use of the three (or perhaps four) years of post-secondary education that links high school to professional life or advanced study? Is education the same as training for a particular career? Or should such training be preceded by a more expansive, fundamental education? Charles William Eliot, the legendary president of Harvard University, initiated this tradition in the 19th century, following which professional streams like law and medicine (though not engineering) in the US began to require the prior completion of a Bachelor’s degree. Does that make for better professionals? Does that enhanced quality, if any, justify the additional investment in time, energy and resources, especially in the Indian context?

Central to these issues is a question that is impossible to avoid: Is it possible for someone who has just completed high school to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives? Is it a good idea to use post-secondary education primarily as training for that (targeted) profession? Or is it possible to reclaim an expansive fundamental education