ABSTRACT
For the historian of science, as much as for the historian of education, it would be a matter of wonderment that towards the end of the twentieth century the community of scientists in India are as perplexed by the status of the university as an examining body, as were their forbears a century ago. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a burgeoning community of scientists in colonial India strived for the inclusion of research in the charter of university education. The source of inspiration, as elsewhere, was the German university. Almost a century after the processes that resulted in the formation of an elaborate academic research system had been inaugurated, the role of the university continues to be a subject of heated discussion. In fact, a currently raging polemic relates to a proposal for the establishment of a National Science University in India. The present chapter chronicles the evolution of the academic and the scientific research systems. The dualism, it is suggested, currently characterizing the institutions of the scientific and technological research system was structured by the requirements of a rapidly evolving knowledge form as much as by the imperatives of the modern post-colonial state.
