ABSTRACT
The European liberal university, in its present appropriation by an order of technocratic managerialism, has rightfully provoked widespread angst and alarm. Yet – as this chapter argues – much of this anxiety within progressive-liberal circles of the international academia is laced with a lament for the loss of the university’s national cultural mission, as envisioned in the Humboldtian instance. Khan goes on to contend that the case of India is distinctly more complex – in that its history of the European import of a ‘liberal humanist’ university has never quite confronted the question of ‘national culture’. It is this discursive project, long aborted by India’s colonial encounters with knowledge-institutions, that now seems to have been taken up by Hindutva forces. The deep ambiguities within a Nehruvian paradigm of ‘nation-building’ – skirting away the irrational excesses of a postcolonial unconscious in the ill-translated overtones of a secular-industrial polity – are currently exhumed in the fascist fantasies of an ‘invented’ national culture.
