Shashi Tharoor, MP, has raised caution against attempts being made of late to employ liberal arts for insidious purposes such as by converting history into an instrument to legitimise a Hindutva-aligned version of the past.
He was delivering a keynote address on the ‘Future of higher education in India’ during a lecture series organised as part of the Kerala University Researchers’ Festival that is under way on the Karyavattom campus on Tuesday.
While exhorting the academic community to nurture graduates who are flexible in their thought process and are appreciative of new knowledge, Dr. Tharoor said he feared growing threats that had taken root in the sector.
Besides flagging attempts to alter history, he was also critical of alleged efforts to “transform political science into lessons on chauvinistic nationalism or even supposedly obsolete English literature into communicative global language skills for prospective call centre employees”. Such exercises, he said, would not culminate in an expansion of the intellect, but would constitute a travesty, Dr. Tharoor remarked.
Stressing on the need to preserve academic freedom in Kerala, the parliamentarian highlighted the challenges faced by academic institutions in certain places in northern India that had been witnessing attempts to “establish an exclusionary and linear world view, and also entrench narrow-minded chauvinistic dogma on our campuses”.
Former Agriculture Minister Mullakkara Retnakaran emphasised on the need to popularise knowledge to preserve them for posterity. An exclusionist stance that confined knowledge among a certain few would push such wisdom into oblivion, he said.
Former Kerala University Vice-Chancellor B. Ekbal, Head of the Department of Aquatic Biology and Fisheries Biju Kumar and Syndicate member A. Ajikumar also spoke.
