Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Indian university education, which was primarily modelled on London University, as proposed in the treatises like “Wood’s Despatch” (1854) evolved with time; largely after independence in 1947. A detailed study of the treatises on Indian higher education, alongside the education commission reports, not only divulges a persistent effort to communicate a strong sense of “Indianness” through education, but it also reflects upon the need to locate the ever-changing dynamics of “Indianness” within the shifting paradigms of Indian education. Campus fiction, which rose into prominence in the West during the 1950s, as a distinct subgenre of fiction also witnessed a similar kind of “palimpsestic” growth in the Indian literary milieu over the years. Unlike other fictional forms, this particular subgenre tends to capture in detail the nuances concerning diverse aspects of academia. The select Indian campus novels in English, Prema Nandakumar’s “Atom and the Serpent” (1982) and Amitabha Bagchi’s “Above Average” (2007) are set in two campuses which are discrete from each other not only temporally, spatially, and culturally, but also in terms of academic norms. Drawing references from these works, the paper interrogates the concept of “multifocalization,” concerning the spatial diversities, centered on the single referent of the university campus. Taking this cue of the diachronic/synchronic shift in the spatial order of the campus, this paper locates the complex dynamics of the social responsibilities of Indian academia, so as to further corroborate my argument on the “problematization”/critique of “postcoloniality” and “Indianness.”