As my former colleague Catherine Bertini of the World Food Program once put it: “If someone told you that, with just twelve years of investment of about $1 billion a year, you could, across the developing world, increase economic growth, decrease infant mortality, increase agricultural yields, improve maternal health, improve children's health and nutrition, increase the numbers of children — girls and boys — in school, slow down population growth, increase the number of men and women who can read and write, decrease the spread of AIDS, add new people to the workforce and be able to improve their wages without pushing others out of the workforce — what would you say? Such a deal! What is it? How can I sign up?”
Sadly, the world is not yet rushing to “sign up” to the challenge of educating girls, who lag consistently behind boys in access to education throughout India, with the honorable exception of Kerala. Indeed, we have a long way to go: we boast one state, Bihar, which even enthroned an illiterate woman as chief minister — as if to showcase its abysmal figure of a 23 percent female literacy rate, one of the worst on the planet. But her seven daughters did indeed receive an education — so perhaps, after all, there are grounds for hope.
Certainly, there is no better answer. India must educate itself — achieve 100 percent literacy nationwide — if we are to fulfill the aspirations we have begun to dare to articulate and rise to the development challenges of the twenty-first century.
20. Reconstructing Nalanda
FOR THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT INDIAN EDUCATION, 2006 was a curious year. It began with the eruption of the hugely divisive reservation controversy (following a political decision to increase quotas for “backward classes” in India's top universities, regardless of merit) and ended with the impetus being given, inspired by President Abdul Kalam himself, to the endeavor of reconstructing the oldest and greatest of India's meritocratic universities, Nalanda.
Founded in 427 by Buddhist monks at the time of Kumaragupta I (415–455), Nalanda was an extraordinary center of learning for seven centuries. The name probably comes from a combination of nalam (lotus, the symbol of knowledge) and da, meaning “to give,” so Nalanda means “Giver of Knowledge.” And that is exactly what the university did, attracting prize students from all over India, as well as from China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Persia, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Turkey. At its peak, Nalanda played host to more than ten thousand students — not just Buddhists, but of various religious traditions — and its education, provided in its heyday by two thousand world-renowned professors, was completely free.
The Chinese scholar Hsuen-Tsiang (Xuanzang in today's Pinyin spelling), who visited India in 630 under the Guptas and stayed for some time at Nalanda, has left us a vivid description of the university. He wrote of “richly adorned towers” with observatories “lost in the vapors of the morning.” The university's architecture was remarkable, with nine-story buildings, eight separate compounds, ten temples, several meditation halls, a great library, and dozens of classrooms. Its setting, too, was full of beauty, dotted with lakes and parks. Most important, its finances were secure, since the monarch “has remitted the revenues of about one hundred villages for the endowment of the convent.” In addition, the villagers supplied food to the students, whose material needs were entirely met by the university so that they could concentrate on “the perfection of their studies.”
The accounts of foreign travelers portray a university throbbing with intellectual excitement, a center of learning devoted not only to the study of Buddhist texts but to Hindu philosophy, the Vedas, and theology in general; logic, grammar, and linguistics; the practice of medicine and the study of other sciences, notably mathematics and astronomy; and more down-to-earth subjects like politics, the art of war, and even handicrafts. Contemporary visitors speak of a system of education that went well beyond the oral recitation and rote learning normally practiced in monasteries. Nalanda's teachers practiced a variety of instructional methods: exposition was followed by debate and discussion, lectures featured lengthy question-and-answer sessions, and ideas were illuminated by extensive resort to parables and stories. Admission required a strict oral examination; literally so, since strangers were not permitted to enter unless they could satisfactorily answer a number of questions from the gate-keeper testifying to their basic level of educational attainment.
The university was an Indian invention. In Hindu tradition, education emerged from the gurukul, the teacher's home, where students went to acquire learning. The Buddhists, however, congregated in monasteries, which became centers of learning in their own right, supplanting the home of the teacher. Nalanda was not alone as a prominent Indian university. Kasi (Varanasi) and Kanchi were particularly renowned for their religious teaching, and Taksasila (Taxila in today's Pakistan) placed greater emphasis on secular studies; but Nalanda combined the religious and the secular, a Buddhist university offering a nonsectarian education to young men from near and far. These were the Oxfords and Harvards of their time, centuries before either of those universities was founded. Today our universities, barring an IIT here and a St. Stephen's there, are a long way short of world-class. Rebuilding Nalanda must be more than an exercise in constructive nostalgia. It must involve a new level of ambition, or it will be a futile exercise.
The Yale scholar Jeffrey Garten, writing in the New York Times, argued that “Nalanda represents much of what Asia could use today — a great global university that reaches deep into the region's underlying cultural heritage, restores many of the peaceful links among peoples and cultures that once existed, and gives Asia the kind of soft power of influence and attraction that it doesn't have now. The West has a long tradition of rediscovering its ancient Greek and Roman roots, and is much stronger for that. Asia could and should do the same, using the Nalanda project as a springboard but creating a modern, future-oriented context for a new university.”
Nalanda was destroyed three times by invaders, but rebuilt only twice. The first time was when the Huns under Mihirakula laid waste to the campus during the reign of Skandagupta (455–467), when Nalanda was only a few decades old. Skanda's successors Puragupta and Narasimhagupta promptly undertook the restoration of the university, improving it with the construction of even grander buildings and endowing it with enough resources so that the university could be self-sustaining in the longer term. The second destruction came a century and a half later, with an assault by the Gaudas in the early seventh century. This time the great Hindu king Harshavardhana (606–648) restored the Buddhist university, once again upgrading the buildings and facilities.
But nearly eight hundred years after its founding, Nalanda was destroyed a third time and burned by Turkish Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1197. This time there was to be no reconstruction: not only were there no equivalent of the Gupta kings or Harsha to rebuild it, but the university had already been decayed from within by the cancer of corruption on the part of its administrators and by declining enthusiasm for Buddhist-led learning. If we are to rebuild it eight hundred years later, we will need not just money but the will to excellence, not just a physical plant but a determined spirit. A great university is the finest advertisement for the society that sustains it. If we re-create Nalanda, it must be as a university worthy of the name — and we must be a society worthy of a twenty-first-century Nalanda.