Suddenly almost out of the blue, a clutch of private edupreneurs have negotiated forbidding and grudging licensing processes to establish several globally benchmarked liberal arts universities across the country. Dilip Thakore reports AFTER MANY YEARS IN exile on the periphery of national consciousness, a liberal arts education renaissance is sweeping the country. This is manifested not only in the large crowds thronging the multiplying number of literary festivals featuring promising new writers in all languages, especially English, but also in the promotion of a number of new genre American-style private universities with strong, and even predominant, liberal arts schools/faculties nationwide. Since independence the number of colleges and universities countrywide has increased from 500 and 20 in 1947 to 35,000 and 700 in 2013 with an impressive aggregate enrolment of 20 million undergrad and postgraduate students. Moreover the number of private universities has increased to 140, despite the government-run higher education supervisory and regulatory authorities being hostile to private initiatives in tertiary education. But in the first flush of freedom when massive heavy industry and nation-building projects were initiated to make good stagnation of free India’s economy which had averaged a growth rate of 1 percent per annum during almost 200 years of foreign rule, the national focus was on science and technology education. Ambitious and capital-intensive institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institutes of Technology, National Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management basked in the limelight of national attention while liberal arts education — mainly provided by Central and state government aided missionary colleges and universities — received short shrift. In the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that the overwhelming majority of private colleges and universities such as Manipal, Vellore Institute of Technology, Hindustan University, PSG Group among others, concentrated on providing utilitarian professional education (engineering, medicine, hotel and business management) programmes. Liberal arts education, especially the study of subjects such as English and Indian literature, history, geography and the social sciences, were relatively neglected. Until very recently liberal arts classes in higher education tended to be crowded with youth who had failed to pass the more rigorous and demanding entrance exams of engineering and medical colleges. “There hasn’t been neglect of liberal arts education in terms of recognition of degrees or establishment of programmes — the largest proportion of undergraduates are in the arts. The neglect has been in terms of failure to sustain the quality of liberal arts study programmes. In the 1950s and 60s, several internationally renowned scholars were enrolled in Indian universities for doctorates in Sanskrit, philosophy and history. However, over the years, these programmes lost their stature substantially. The sorry state of the universities of Allahabad, Mysore, Madras, and Baroda are good examples. Great scholars and scholarship had emanated from these universities which have suffered steep decline,” says Dr. A.R. Vasavi, senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, who was awarded the Infosys Prize for social sciences — sociology and anthropology — in 2013. According to Dr. Vasavi,…
