The enormous significance of the Nehruvian vision for higher education in India is now coming home to us, as India earns its niche in the 21st-century world. With all its many shortcomings and failures, it still remains true that at the higher level of teaching and research in almost all branches, be it natural sciences, medicine, social sciences or literature, Indian universities have enabled their students to find placement in the best of institutions anywhere in the world. Yet, there is still a very long way to go.

Having taught history for 44 years at Delhi University’s Hindu College (where incidentally Kapil Sibal was briefly my younger department colleague some 40 years ago) and JNU, I can perhaps claim a little intimacy with some of the problems that inhabit higher education. Chief among these is not financial constraints: it is the problem of resistance to experimentation oneself, coupled with an even greater reluctance to let one’s students engage in it. In other words, the chief problem is intellectual inertia. Thus, despite everything, teaching and research in India has not produced one overarching concept or theory, or one invention that has led to a paradigm shift in virtually any branch of knowledge — or, for that matter, in governing humanity’s daily life. Our systems are too hidebound for that. G. Parthasarathi, JNU’s founding Vice-Chancellor, didn’t share this narrowness; his vision, to allow its students and faculty precious space for freedom and intellectual adventure, still survives in patches, and is what has earned it such high respect.

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