ABSTRACT
This essay confirms that the entire history of post-independence educational policy in India has been unthinkingly commissioned by an allegiance to colonial economic modernity. Having borrowed the disciplinary apparatuses of intellectual inquiry from Western self-definitions of the ‘modern’, the Indian university is either fated to an insufficient search for global relevance or to jingoistic priority-claims around a fiction of the ‘indigenous’ past. While the former resonates in policy attempts to conscribe universities to a transnational order of capital, the latter reflects most corrosively in the rhetorical harvest of Hindutva. Nigam observes that a true “swaraj in ideas” cannot reproduce the modes of Western self-presentation in hollow conjurings of a mythical ‘norm’, but must involve an act of intense theoretical labour in understanding the needs of our present and determining our future on our own terms. These terms mandate intellectual alliances beyond normative frames of reference, and the decolonization of the university – both in terms of the content and language of knowledge production – might potentially be the stage for it.
