The Nalanda criteria

Hugh & Colleen Gantzer

Chandigarh and Nalanda have just been certified as World Heritage sites. Together, they span 16 centuries of our cultural history: From the world's first international  residential university to the world's first multi-state capital created by a 20th century genius. To us, however, even more important is the fact that the clubbing together of these two urban centres, very ancient and very modern, occurred this year. Time seems to have looped into itself like a Mobius strip to show us the way ahead. 

Superficially, Chandigarh and Nalanda have nothing in common.  In fact, the Paris-based UNESCO is unlikely to have seen any parallels between the two places. But we do. Nalanda, in its many centuries of being the leading residential university in the world, must have been as green and welcoming as Chandigarh is today. Chinese pilgrim-scholar, Hieun Tang, testifies to this.  It had a strikingly Chandigarh-like open environment of avenues, gardens, water bodies, cultural centres and planned civic services. Its architecture was futuristic. As one visitor described it: “Dragon projections and coloured eaves, the pearl-red pillars carved and ornamented, the richly adorned balustrades and roofs covered with tiles that reflect the light in a thousand ways.” All those magnificent embellishments have been destroyed by time and Nalanda is now an impressive array of ruins, but it is likely that Nalanda set standards that influenced the traditional religious architecture of South-East and East Asia. 

Even more important than its likely architectural influences, is the fact that Nalanda was run on Buddhist lines and Lord Buddha had said “Question everything, even my words”.  This was in marked contrast to our greatly revered guru-shishya system where the guru's word was law. This could explain how Nalanda, established in the 5th century AD, dominated the world educational scene from 427 to 1197, whereas our present universities, established less than two centuries ago, are facing existential problems today. Guided by the Buddhist-based ethos of decisions based on dissent and discussion, Nalanda had  evolved checks and balances that allowed it to respond to the changing mores of international society.  Its students were drawn from countries ranging from Persia and Turkey through Tibet, Korea, China and Japan to Indonesia.  In its eight colleges, it taught subjects as varied as mathematics, fine arts, astronomy, medicine, politics and the art of war.  Even in something so sensitive as Buddhism, the predominant Asian faith in those days,  Nalanda's faculty shunned orthodoxy.  Jeffery Garten of the Yale School of Management is quoted as saying: “It was open to many interpretations of that religion.”  The Dalai Lama asserted that Nalanda was the source of Tibetan Buddhism or Vajrayana.  It also taught the other variations of the Buddhist creed but there is no hint, of any agitations in the university in all the 700 years of its existence. 

This could not have happened by imposing a rigid uniformity.  Such authoritarianism goes against the spirit of enquiry, which is an essential ingredient of the ethos of all successful universities. All attempts to impose a sort of high-school discipline on university students is resisted and gives rise to student agitation. Javadekar knows this because, as he admitted, he was once a student agitator himself as a member of his party’s student wing. He finds himself beleaguered by earlier attempts to impose a rigid uniformity on higher education. The young people of today, whom we celebrate as our demographic dividend, are computer-savvy and have instant access to cutting-edge ideas and the fast-evolving patterns of social relationships. They resent any attempt to impose a paternalistic, holier-than-thou, Big Daddy, ethos on them.  People who have not experienced university life in any form, not even as a dhaba-owner on the campus, cannot imagine the heady sense of freedom that life on a campus gives. That, in spite of the fact that Indian campuses are far more restrictive than those of European or American universities. Having said that, however, the work-load of students in those overseas universities is enormous leaving very little time for student politics and agitations. This resembles the regimen in Nalanda.  Students were not allowed to leave class till the instruction was over although they were allowed to drink water from sources close by. It had a nine-storey library, with over nine million manuscripts. Considerable emphasis was placed on research and the regular submissions of projects and assignments to show individual application of mind. Such questing for knowledge was encouraged by Nalanda's faculty-student ratio: one is to five. Speaking to students and faculty in the IIT Delhi, earlier this month, Javadekar said: “Most students said they wanted to be faculty. I am happy to hear that.” After all, good faculty members play a key role in developing the next generation of students. Contrary to current trends, in Nalanda they did not para-drop its university head.  It was presided over by an acclaimed scholar elected by members of the faculty.  Admission to the university, too, was strictly by merit. Exams were conducted by trained gatekeepers who rejected those who did not pass their rigid examination. In all likelihood this was a verbal test, most probably a debate or discussion. Such discourse-based education demands dissent. Its teachers lived with their pupils and imparted their knowledge by intimate tutorials of the sort given by the faculty in the best old colleges today.

In Nalanda, students were often asked to defend their theses by debate: a system replicated by some European universities, many centuries later, in the Tripos ceremony. In other words, Nalanda's ancient cultural heritage did not emphasise conformity but creativity, inquisitiveness and out-of-the-box thinking. In his first reported remarks after taking over, the HRD Minister had stated that he was a product of a student agitation, thus clearly signalling that he does not consider such activities as anti-national or seditious. He was of the view that we lack innovativeness, have to make our education more innovative and increase inquisitiveness among students. This was the Nalanda way, and that is our authentic ancient cultural heritage. It was not the learn-by-rote, unquestioning acceptance of the teacher's word as if he was a never-to-be-questioned, semi-divine, being. It was such a questioning, argumentative, tradition that produced unorthodox savants such as Aryabhatta, who theorised that the eclipse of the moon was caused by the shadow of the earth, as far back as the 5th century AD. 

Prakash Javadekar has a formidable task ahead of him if he has to go back to that glowing past and regain the shattered faith of the young people of our demographic dividend.  We need to rediscover the Nalanda Criteria. 

The writers are Musoorie-based travel writers