New Delhi: Eminent historian Romila Thapar has expressed concern over what she described as the “decimation” of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and other leading centers of social sciences in the last decade, warning against attempts to impose a “singular majoritarian narrative” and dilute India’s pluralistic traditions.
Delivering the third Kapila Vatsyayan Memorial Lecture at the India International Centre on Tuesday, the 93-year-old scholar said that maintaining academic standards at JNU had become “extremely problematic” in recent years.
“Some of us who were involved in establishing JNU in the 1970s have been appalled by the decimation that it has undergone in the last 10 years. This is not confined to JNU alone, as other strong centers of the social sciences have also suffered,” she said.
Thapar alleged that the decline was driven by “substandard faculty, non-professionals dictating the curriculum and syllabi, attempts to rescind the earlier appointed professor emeritus, curtailing freedom to research and teach what academics regard as meaningful”.
Referring to the January 2020 mob attack on the JNU campus and the arrest of student leaders such as Umar Khalid, without naming him directly, Thapar said political control over education was silencing intellectual creativity. “There have been arrests of students for criticizing authority, and some of those arrested are in jail still without a trial, despite the last six years of being there,” she said.
She cautioned that “speech can be silenced, but thought cannot be stilled”, stressing that purposeful education requires the freedom to think.
Thapar also criticized the “current methods of history education”, arguing that history was being manipulated for political ends. She said the narrative being promoted was a “return to the discarded colonial theories”, falsely presented as decolonization, and often dismissed earlier scholarship as “Marxist”.
She singled out what she termed the “Hindutva version” of history, which upholds colonial constructs such as the superiority of the Aryan race and the Two-Nation Theory. “Can a society as diverse as India be reduced to having a single uniform heritage?” she asked.
Warning that “singular majoritarianism contradicts democracy”, she questioned whether India would still be able to nurture debate, diversity, and pluralism.
History, as taught and read, has to be reliable and accurate, which requires ensuring it is not manipulated for political or other reasons, Thapar said, calling for competent teachers who can encourage students to think critically.
She lamented the decline in the quality of basic education in state schools, saying that the ability to comprehend and question the society in which one lives was now “woefully scarce”.