The trajectory of the Indian university, from its inception under colonial rule to its contemporary manifestation in the National Education Policy 2020, is characterised by a fundamental reliance on borrowed institutional models and an ongoing negotiation with entrenched systems of social exclusion. The very concept of the ‘Indian university’ was labelled as an “unnatural desire” contaminated by an “unfortunate weakness for imitation” by early critics like Rabindranath Tagore, who observed that grafting the institutional infrastructure, its buildings, its furniture, its regulations, and its syllabus onto an alien culture and history denied the historical forces required for the idea to achieve “organic sustenance”.

The colonial administration established India’s first universities in 1857, modelled after the University of London, to create a class of lower functionaries and offer instruction in European literature and science. This marked the rise of what academics call the “secular feudal complex of interests”. In Bengal, which saw the first universities in India, they existed to serve the bhadralok, where profits derived from land contracts funded urban bureaucratic careers, and caste privilege was masked as secular intellect. The system actively secured the dominance of Hindu upper castes and neglected existing indigenous, vernacular schooling systems, which historical reports showed had surprisingly diverse student demographics, sometimes enrolling children from marginalised castes like Chandal and Sunri. By tailoring education to win the confidence of the educated and influential classes of the people, the colonial framework institutionalised deep-seated caste and class apartheid in the name of merit.

This borrowed and deeply selective institutional structure provided the foundation for post-independence university planning, which, during the period of 1947–86, operated under the ideology of ‘welfare’. Policy documents, such as the Radhakrishnan Commission Report (1948–49), defined educational opportunity using abstract concepts of “talent” or “ability”, thereby legitimising historical privilege as “merit” and sidestepping structural caste and religious exclusions. The Commission even rooted its curriculum for citizenship in the varnashrama ideal, invoking the dvitiyam janma, traditionally reserved for the dvij (twice-born) upper castes, thus validating caste hierarchies through the metaphor of intellectual attainment. 

A prime example of how the welfare model perpetuated caste exclusion, as Debaditya Bhattacharya argues, lies in the formation of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), modelled after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). These institutions were explicitly designed to distinguish intellectual expertise from the productive labour traditionally reserved for lower castes. This structure cemented the aura of “castelessness” around meritocracy, exempting IITs from constitutional reservation mandates until 1973. The selection process, rooted in competitive mass entrance examinations, ensured that scientific and technological expertise was set apart from the “manpower mandate” through selective entry. This institutionalised upper-caste dominance, leading to the unfortunate, documented rise in suicides among marginalised students in these elite technical institutes, confirms the hostility of the meritocratic ecosystem.

This period of focusing on “welfare” failed to dismantle the colonial framework, leading policy to shift to the neoliberal ‘market’ (1986–2012), redefining education around “human resource development”. When the market model failed to provide reliable employment, the policy shifted again toward financial logic and risk management under the NEP 2020, signalling the age of the “Platform University”, which focuses on securing market legitimacy and placements, rather than producing critically thinking educated individuals. 

 The NEP argues that specialised knowledge is unreliable in a world risk society and that education must prepare workers of the future for jobs that may change or disappear. The implementation of multidisciplinary education at universities like Delhi University exemplifies this shift toward non-knowledge and propaganda serving as investable securities. The introduction of mandatory VAC in Delhi University’s curriculum demonstrates the fracturing of knowledge into ideologically charged and tradeable curricular derivatives that have little relation to established disciplinary traditions. The objective is to produce innovative skill combinations that might survive price fluctuations.

The definitive structural mechanism for this platformisation is the Academic Bank of Credit (ABC). The ABC transforms educational institutions into “banks for academic purposes”, mirroring commercial banks for financial purposes, offering services like credit verification, accumulation, and transfer. The platform enables ubiquitous access (any-time, anywhere, and any-level learning) and promotes mass digitisation, ensuring a network effect where the student is reduced to a “credit variable, unique but infinitely circulable”. 

The NEP legitimises this financial restructuring by invoking the myth of ancient Indian universities (Takshashila, Nalanda, Vallabhi, and Vikramshila), claiming that these “world-class institutions of ancient India” demonstrated the success of “vibrant multidisciplinary environments” and that India needs to “bring back this great Indian tradition”. However, a critical history of these ancient sites reveals that they were not true universities in the modern sense. For instance, Takshashila was primarily centred on brahminical education, where knowledge acquisition was confined to the upper dvija (twice-born) castes, with an explicit ban on shudra populations, and instruction was conducted individually within the acharya’s household, lacking the corporate character and worldly openness required of a university. Similarly, Nalanda functioned primarily as a sangharama (rain retreat) for the Buddhist sangha, not an autonomous centre for secular intellectual curiosity, focusing intensely on religious proselytism and monastic doctrine. The transformation of Nalanda into a learning center was accidental, and the mission of foreign visitors there was primarily religious evangelism to procure and translate sacred Buddhist texts, not to engage in disinterested research. The policy’s appeal to this mythological past serves as a political cover to justify the financialisation of the present, ensuring the university’s total surrender to the logic of the derivative asset. The pursuit of happiness studies for students further exemplifies this totalitarian ideological goal: the systematic destruction of the university’s critical “publicness” and the faculty’s capacity for critical private intellectuality, replacing genuine thought with an ideological “science of happiness”.

The platformised university, therefore, is the final stage of the original colonial borrowing, where the foundation is based on structural exclusions. The NEP 2020’s insistence on graded autonomy and the subsequent ranking of institutions (Type 1 Research Universities down to Type 3 colleges) further establishes a hierarchical system, where the great icons at the top receive the bulk of promised funding, ensuring that structural inequalities are perpetuated under the guise of pursuing excellence in an economy of scarcity. The ABC, acting as the university’s super-app or surveillant assemblage, ensures that the student remains a lonely, calculable asset in a system obsessed with rating and credit accumulation over intellectual engagement.

Read Also: NEP: Changing Norms for Teachers and Students

Image Credits: Daily Bruin

Sakshi Singh
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