As many friends look for options for their kids, the lack of quality educational institutions for liberal arts has been a common complaint and many of them looked at the new organizations that focus on liberal arts as a better option than the existing universities. Despite being someone who did not really need to look into these issues deeply for any personal reasons, I began to think on these issues and they really are serious issues not just about the future of a bunch of kids whose parents may or may not be able to afford a private college’s fees.
When I finished 10th, I asked my school if there was a possibility of taking geography along with physics, chem and maths. I doubt if my teachers spent too much time thinking about it considering the no came in about a minute. Each time I watch a scientist walk on the edge of a volcano or rappels down a mine, I blame my teachers and parents for not letting that be one of my career options (even though I am still not sure if it is a required combination; or if I would indeed have become a geologist). I now look back on those days as either the beginning of the end of making arts courses accessible or respectable. By then, taking arts courses was equivalent to acknowledging you are an idiot who cannot handle science courses, with commerce being the via media. Classs Sections were silos with no over laps. By the time my nephew was choosing courses 20 years later, nothing had changed. He flirted with the idea of taking commerce but science it still was if you wanted many more options later since a science student can still sacrifice some points and move to an arts course while the reverse is not possible.
But alongside these issue, I have also noticed that India has been lagging behind in many areas related to the arts. First that comes to mind is research. The last two years have exemplified why our historical research is badly funded and always controversial. I have been buying and reading the BBC History Magazine for about 7 years now. The articles are clearly interpretations of findings written for laypersons and often there are several interpretations but they are all clearly linked to hard evidence. The podcast of the magazine even puts out debates but nobody is at each other’s throat claiming their self respect has been attacked. There is always acknowledgement that with more scientific techniques and tools coming up, some of these interpretations may/would change. Nobody seems to take that as an affront either. The writers in these magazines are all well respected researchers whose technical papers are also referenced and available for anybody who wants to read them. There clearly are specified rules and codes for how research is conducted and conclusions reached. And these seem universally accepted.
As some Indians seem to embark on revising history going back 3500 years, it is part amusing and part horrifying to see and hear their arguments. Just two days ago, someone had written a piece on some of the myths that have been passed on as history in India. One of the issues covered was where there was a Rani Padmini who walked into fire to avoid being taken by the invaders her husband was losing the war to. The author says there are no annals of Rajput or Sultanate origin that refers to this person or the act. That should be simple enough to check. If there is a reference available, it should be given to the writer and an apology extracted. But the internet is full of people blasting the guy for purveying falsehoods. People are even asking for proof that the issue is not covered in any annals. The only reference is someone saying such a story exists which has not been corroborated through a second source.
The heads of most of the research bodies seem to have stopped doing any research years ago and some of them do not have any international standing. While you may ask why we need international recognition, you do have to accept that if our research does not match the standards set for accepting a piece of evidence as important, we stand the chance of becoming as ridiculous as the education system in say Pakistan where they are throwing away their genetic lineage to claim an Arab lineage that does not exist. The indian Aryan dilemma is pretty similar, in my opinion. Any body with two functional eyes who has spent even 2 days in 2 cities a 1000 km apart can see that all of us do not come from the same gene pool. There may be some overlaps but we are definitely not one people historically. So short of being able to prove that Mankind originated in India, we all came in waves from Africa and genetic mapping seems to show that the “Aryans” were not the first to arrive. Whether they came invading, migrating, or in kinship, is still being arrived at. Why historians believe the Indian self-respect lies in being able to prove that Aryans where here by date x rather than y, is beyond me. A piece from China indicated that until mid 50s Chinese schools taught the pupils that they were a separate race/species not originating from Africa. Over the years testing RNAs for bits from the Mitochondrial Eve, has forced them to now acknowledge that they too have descended from that one woman whose progeny alone survived and populated the earth. We are yet not there fully.
Instead of Indians focusing more on what the evidence shows have it seems been focussing on finding evidence and discarding evidence into ensure conclusions that have been reached first work, . Anybody undertaking serious historical research in such climate ( which I now think existed in the academic circles way before the lay men got into it in the past few years) is hardly likely to do any ground breaking research for the fear of being ostracized or penalized. Not surprisingly there is more research on India is being done in foreign universities than here and within India, lay persons claim to be historians.
China in the past 10 years has apparently set up 700 museums. The figure for India is unsurprisingly zero. A visit to the Mysore Palace in mid 2014 underlined to me how we in reality do not care for our heritage at all. When I followed it up with a visit to the Chicago Museum and the British Museum, the stark difference on how the artefacts in each museum is managed, curated, restored and displayed was there to see. The National Museum in New Delhi is probably the best managed one in India and it is not even a patch on some of the private museums overseas. The fact that rich families donate a whole wing to those museums or set up their own museums that are well managed cannot compare with how we let what existed fall to ruins. A trip to Ellora had me in tears seeing how many statues have been vandalised and had just heads removed (presumably for easy smuggling out of the country). The swords in Mysore, never saw polish in over a decade and I was told the train on the dining table at Gwalior is also completely tarnished as against my memory of it gleaming in 1976 when I visited it. When someone mentioned fighting for provenance for some artefacts, my reaction was get it, but leave the piece in British Museum, it will be better taken care of. If the rich in India supported existing universities and museums, I assume many of the kids interested in history and qualified in it, would find worthy jobs that enriches the society instead of the more commercial jobs at call centers, making calls to collect payments.
The same is true for research in philosophy, politics, political science and anthropology and so on. We have stopped investing in them, made the students redundant and then blame the West for misinterpreting everything. When you compare the level of debates on controversial subjects there and here, you can see the difference. It is not to say that they don’t hide the embarrassing parts of their history but they are still visibly making efforts to keep the records and allow the debate to continue. The level of integration of science and liberal arts and how new tools in any field are adopted and adapted to others to enrich them all, is definitely missing here. We are now bringing up a generation that cannot distinguish between science and science fiction and our liberal arts education is as much to blame for that as the mad rush for engineering.
If we as a nation want to be proud of our past, we need to understand it, accept it and encourage learning from it. Encouraging students interested in liberal arts, providing them with the best tools and education and following it up with avenues of careers in these fields is as important if not more than sitting back and complaining about the existing system.