Is the university universalizable? A view from India

ABSTRACT With the increasing formalization of knowledge, the ‘university’ as a pedagogic model has been naturalized by and within the paradigm of ‘modern’ (higher) education system. While the institutionalization of education is intrinsically linked with Western modernity, what the model has done ever since is astonishing in terms of the scale of social change it has ‘engineered’ and its impact on the deculturation of pedagogic cultures that existed outside the ‘modern’ frameworks of knowledge. This paper rethinks and (re)complicates the structure of the university in the context of India and questions its universalizability, alongside the disjunctive and multiple vernacular iterations of (institutionalized) higher education that exist(ed) outside of the epistemic hegemony of (Western) modernity, purportedly always an ‘unfinished’ project in the non-West.