What is wrong in saffronising education?

The short answer to the question ‘What is wrong with saffronising education?’ is ‘Nothing really… well… except that…’

Earlier this month at the inauguration of the South Asian Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, at the Deva Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya campus in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India’s Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu argued for a major overhaul of Macaulay. The education system he rightly observed is both dominant and harmful in India. It creates a feeling of inferiority in us, replaces our traditional education Language: The foreign curriculum of English, along with, gives us a colonial mindset, makes us ignorant of our heritage, and above all, separates us from the rich body of ideas and philosophies that formed our ancient civilization.

first one echo

In making this claim, Mr. Venkaiah Naidu joins a stellar list of public figures who have made a similar argument for decades. Rabindranath Tagore, a driving force of the national education movement in the early 1900s, created an innovative nationalist curriculum at Visva Bharati, the great university he founded. Eminent Indians like Amartya Sen, Satyajit Ray and Mahasweta Devi were educated there. Furthermore, KC Bhattacharya in his seminal lecture (October 1931), ‘Swaraj in Ideas’ also spoke of the enslavement of our mind by Western education, which produced a ‘shadow mind’ rather than a ‘real mind’. This had to be overcome. Abu-ur-Rashid Maulvi, earlier in 1888, Asian Quarterly Reviewargued for the separation of higher education in Punjab from the University of Calcutta as the university was exhibiting an ‘anglicisation trend’ which would lead to ‘nationalisation of the younger generation of Punjabis’. He hoped that the creation of the Panjab University would oppose such anglicization as literature and science would now be taught in ‘local and classical languages’. Therefore, arguing for the Indian education system has been an important part of public debate in India for more than a century. Shri Venkaiah Naidu was not the first. But he is in good company.

He is right when he holds the Macaulay system responsible for producing a sense of inferiority in us Indians. This is a common idea for other anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé Cesare and Frantz Fanon. They warn us to use Tagore’s term when we become ‘mentally crippled’, because we tend to imitate foreign ideas and adopt them without thinking. His case for ‘forgetting and eliminating’ the Macaulay system is also persuasive, as is the fear of ‘denationalisation’, an idea supported by T.B. Cunha when he argued against Portuguese colonialism. However, for us not to see Shri Venkaiah Naidu’s address as mere rhetoric, we will need to give a road map of how to end this Macaulay system, to make it more Indian. Honest saffronisation will primarily require honesty of intent as it will face many challenges and challenges along the way. Just give me some pointers.

an inclusive list

I start with the first challenge. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, whose knowledge of the depth and quality of Indian civilization is second to none (for which he was appointed Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford) recommended in chapter eight of his 1949 report. University Education Commission (he was the chairman), that religious education (this is called saffronisation) should be introduced in our universities. He suggested starting the class day with a few minutes of silent meditation and introducing students in the first year degree course to ‘the lives of great thinkers like Gautam Buddha, Confucius, Zoroastrians, Socrates, Jesus, Somkara, Ramanuja’. Madhav, Mohammad, Kabir, Nanak, Gandhi’. Here is Dr. Radhakrishnan’s own list. It is very inclusive and shows the openness of his inquisitive mind. By including the founders of major religions in his list, Radhakrishnan was reaffirming their value to Indian education. Will the saffronisation of Shri Venkaiah Naidu be equally open-minded?

various stories about

His inclusive list leads to the bigger question that saffronisation has to address. Call it the second challenge. It has to be decided what subjects and subjects should be included and which subjects should be excluded in such saffron education. For example, will Ekermanujan’s essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayana’ be included? If one really wants to overcome the amnesia of Macaulay education, as Sri Venkaiah Naidu has suggested, ‘feeling proud of one’s heritage’, Ramanujan’s essay has to be included. Ramanujan’s scholarship on folk tales of India, Dr. S. Like Radhakrishnan, few are alike. His essay celebrates the rich demonstrative and narrative practices of the living epic, the Ramayana. Will saffronisation accept this diversity of narratives? Would it smile at the thought, in which he describes, Sita advised Rama not to come to the forest, by asking if he had seen any performances where Sita did not accompany Rama? Is this kind of philosophical playfulness allowed, if not encouraged? How we answer this important question of inclusion will depend on how we position our views on India’s cultural diversity.

This leads to the third challenge. Whether the model of restoration and reconstruction of India’s ancient culture, which it saffronises, will be that of Dinanath Batra, who, in a lengthy letter to Smriti Irani, laid down when she was Minister of Human Resource Development (Education), or will it be Will that of DP Chattopadhyay’s Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture (PHISPC) which has already published several volumes of India’s intellectual achievements? The former is Vidya Bharati’s project of cultural assimilation, a thin but toxic agenda, while the latter is a genuine philosophical response to Macaulay, whom he read the PHISPC volumes, did not dare to write in his 1835 ‘Minute on Education’ Will be ‘, that ‘a shelf of a good European library was worth the whole vernacular literature of India and Arabia’.

on Indianization

So is the saffronisation side of Shri Venkaiah Naidu with Dinanath Batra or DP Chattopadhyay? If there is indeed an Indianisation of Sri Venkaiah Naidu by saffronisation, it would include India’s orthodox and heretical traditions, the Brahmanical school and their Buddhist and Jain challenges. This would include the great architectural practices of the Mughals as well as the Sufi and Bhakti movements. Indianization here will have many colors apart from saffron.

turn to science

Moving beyond the humanities and social sciences, into the STEM academic stream, i.e. science, technology, engineering and mathematics, what will Indianisation be like? Will it include the simple task of translating the world’s best science textbooks into various Indian languages, as they do in Japan, because scientific knowledge is universal? Or would it mean advocating for some crazy theories as propounded at the 106th Indian Science Congress in January 2019, where it was claimed that we in India were making test tube babies thousands of years ago and Albert Einstein called relativity Didn’t understand Indianization has to decide whether science is merely a western product or universal. Is Mr. Venkaiah Naidu suggesting that there is a distinct Indian science? After all this STEM proficiency in India, a product of Macaulay’s education system, has produced the Nadella and Pichai of the world. Or am I holding the wrong stem?

And, finally, the contradiction. Does saffronisation support the vice-chancellor’s decision to permanently set up a Central Industrial Security Force camp inside Visva Bharati, India’s only university that has established a nationalist curriculum? The Vice-Chancellor did this due to the protest of the students. The Government of India supported him. If his concept of saffronisation supports this decision, then sadly Macaulay has triumphed over Tagore. Macaulay may have designed the education system for India, but he was also the author of the Indian Penal Code. We condemn Macaulay on education, okay, but (sadly) enthusiastically embrace Macaulay on the Indian penal system.

Peter Ronald D’Souza is the DD Kosambi Visiting Professor at Goa University. Views expressed are personal