ABSTRACT
This chapter posits that the history of India’s romance with the ‘liberal’ university model (of European provenance) is structured by a mutant ‘secular-feudal’ consensus. A close look at successive bodies of legislative discourse, from the university’s colonial moment of ‘origin’ to its post-independence inscription in policy-parlance, confirms the route charted by the largely non-metropolitan public infrastructures of higher education until now. In this, the author takes for analysis the events and conditions that led to the establishment of Patna University (in 1917) against larger debates on social access or demographic reach. What results is a historical chronicle of the liberal-urban university’s mischievous encounters with the materiality of caste and the social limits of intellectual labour. The postcolonial policy on education, beginning from the Radhakrishnan Commission Report of 1948–49 to the presently debated third National Policy on Education (2016), further demonstrates the continuing legacy of the ‘liberal university’ in independent India. The essay returns, in its final section, to the provisions of the Central Universities Act of 2009, and what it forebodes for the state of democracy and the quest for justice in Indian higher education.
